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INTRODUCTION
Americans have been surprised and confused about the growth of their government because they have been watching the wrong facts. They have been obsessed with the introverted view of government and did not see the exterior factors that stimulate government most powerfully.
The impact of war on government is evident throughout American history. Each war enlarged the capacity of the government to do things. Thereafter the enlarged capacity of the government turned out to be too useful to be given up (emphasis in original).(1)
It is a given axiom of warfare, whether such warfare is prosecuted in the clash of physical weapons or merely in the clash of opposing worldviews, that one cannot be an effective soldier without fully understanding the mindset and strategies of his enemy. The main purpose of this book, therefore, is to unveil the so-called “war powers” of the President of the United States — the very heart and soul of the bureaucratic machinery operating today in Washington, D.C. — and explain how "an ignorant, boorish, third-rate, backwoods lawyer”(2) came to invoke these powers in the mid-Nineteenth Century to nearly single-handedly dismantle a Union of sovereign States which had endured for a mere seventy-two years. If the reader retains nothing else, let this one fact remain permanently impressed upon his mind — the “separation of powers,” believed so necessary by the framers of the Constitution for the United States of America to “guarantee a Republican Form of Government,”(3) ended on 15 April 1861 when the sixteenth President, Abraham Lincoln, called forth 75,000 troops to make war on the seceded States of the South. At that time, the former confederated Union of sovereign States, which had been held together by mutual friendship and trust, gave way to a consolidated Nation wherein the States were subjugated to a centralized Government at the point of a bloody bayonet. Today, nearly one hundred and forty years later, the Union established by our forefathers in the Constitution has yet to be restored.
Endnotes
1. E.E. Schattschneider, Two Hundred Million Americans in Search of a Government (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969), page 610.
2. New York World, 19 June 1864.
3. U.S. Constitution, Article IV, Section 4.
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