Presidents, Good and Bad – on Foundations of Freedom Thursday: Today on Foundations of Freedom Thursday we address more listener questions- Many people are challenging the character of Abraham Lincoln. What do we say about this? Next we get favorite and least favorite presidents from David, Tim and Rick. All this and more on Foundations of Freedom Thursday.

Air Date: 3/2/2023

On-air Personalities: David Barton, Tim Barton and Rick Green

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Transcription:

Rick Green
Welcome to the intersection of faith in the culture WallBuilders Live, where we talk about today’s hottest topics on policy, faith and the culture, always from a biblical, historical and constitutional perspective. My name is Rick Green. I’m America’s constitution coach and a former state legislator. I’m here with David Barton. He is America’s premier historian, and the founder of WallBuilders. And Tim Barton’s, with us, he’s a national speaker, and pastor, and President of WallBuilders. Most importantly, we’re glad you are with us and you are going to love today’s program, it’s going to be very exciting. But before we get to that, I want to encourage you to visit our websites WallBuilders.com and WallBuildersLive.com. At that WallBuildersLive.com website, there is a ton of information, including archives of the program from previous weeks, if you missed those, you can grab them right now at our website and get caught up some great interviews and there’re some great presentations, lots of good information to equip and inspire you to be a good citizen and help us restore America’s constitution. And one of the best ways you can do that is click on the contribute button there at WallBuildersLive.com . And make that one time or monthly donation. It’s how this program works. We’re a listener supported program. So thank you, all of you, out there from all across the nation, so many different places that folks contribute and help us do this. Thank you for doing that. And for those of you that haven’t done that yet, and have been thinking about it, now is the perfect time. We would sure appreciate it. All right, David, let’s dive into those questions for our foundations of freedom. The 1st ones actually, is going to be a long question. Not going to be able to read all of the email, lots of great stuff in here. So thank you to Jared out of… have you guys been to Toomsboro? Toomsboro, Georgia? Not sure what part of Georgia that’s in,but Jared, thank you for sending in your question. Here’s what he said: Dear David, Tim and Rick, I can’t begin to tell you what an incredible impact your program has made upon my life, increasing my confidence by giving me knowledge, keeping me informed on important things in our nation, and just a super encouragement when things seem so incredibly bad. God has used y’all to give me hope and understanding when I needed it most. God bless you all, and the wonderful work you’re doing. Guys, this feels like a good news Friday. I think I started with the wrong question for now. This is a good news Friday on a foundations of freedom Thursday. Anyway, he’s got a question about Lincoln. He said My question with regards to President Lincoln- I’ve had to reconsider things I’ve heard in the past about the war between the states, what it was fought over, based largely on the information WallBuilders has provided. I’m still processing some of that. But President Lincoln has been spoken up by David and Tim as an honorable man worthy of respect and admiration. He asked about some books like The Real Lincoln, by a guy named Thomas DiLorenzo, and how that documents some horrible things and some jailing of opponents and various questions. And so he wants to know, he actually didn’t think we would read this on the air. He said, I know you might not read this on the air, but I just want to mention to Rick, that I think you have the greatest job in the world. Well, hey, Jared, on that I absolutely agree with you. No question about it. I get to sit and learn and ask these guys questions all the time. And guess what? They got to do the hard work. I just get to ask the questions. They got to actually answer it. And yes, I get to travel all over the place and encourage people. So thank you for your encouraging word. Absolutely. Jared, appreciate you sending it in. And here’s the heart of his question, guys, he talks about this book by this DiLorenzo. And he said, Would you be willing to give your opinion of the book? Did Professor DiLorenzo miss something important? Or is the book accurate? And he talks about like Lincoln’s supposedly tampering with elections, other unconstitutional behavior? He said, If it is accurate, why is Lincoln revered without question? I truly appreciate knowing what the three of you think of this book, if you’ve read it. So good question guys. I do get sometimes out on the road, some people look at me a little funny and say, you know, why do you guys talk so positively about Lincoln? Why don’t you quote Lincoln in a positive way? Wasn’t he terrible? And I honestly have not seen a lot of the the evidence that Jared is talking about. So I’m really curious what you guys think on this?

David Barton
Yeah, this is one that does come up a whole lot.

Tim Barton
Arguably, it’s probably being taught all over the US now. Because it is yet another attempt to tear down someone who really did honorable things. And I mean, Dad, I know you’re getting into this, and unfold a lot more. But you know, guys, one things we talked about all the time is that just because we look at someone and say they’re honorable doesn’t mean they didn’t have bad moments, right? It doesn’t mean they didn’t do something sinful or wicked at some point in their life. It’s really recognizing that God used them in a special way to do something significant and they should be honored for that positive contribution. It’s no different than so many of the heroes we look at from the Bible. There’s not a single hero we look at in the Bible, apart from Jesus. There’s not a single hero we look at it didn’t have major character flaws. If you go to Hebrews chapter 11. And you look at the faith hall of fame, there are major flaws for most people in the faith hall of fame. When you start going chronologically in Hebrews 11, right as it goes through the Bible on some of these heroes, when you get to Noah, and Noah obviously had amazing faith, and he built the ark. It was awesome. But after he built the ark and the ark lands on Mount Ararat, he gets off, he becomes a farmer, he plants a vineyard and he passes out drunk naked. You go to guys like Abraham who had an amazing faith, God told him to pack his bags and go and he did. He arguably didn’t even know where he was going but he still obeyed God. It’s incredible faith. And yet, every time he got somewhere where there was a leader, a king, Abraham became very fearful. He was a coward and a liar at times, that he would say, well, this is just my sister, and he would offer literally his wife, to some other leader to protect himself. That as a coward of a man, that he’s a liar in the midst of it. You can go to Moses, who we know is a murderer, you can go to Rahab was a prostitute, you… I mean, like, literally, you go through Hebrews 11. This is a list of flawed, flawed characters in this amazing story of God moving and God’s redemption. And here’s the point, is that just because we were saying someone should be honored or celebrated, doesn’t mean they didn’t have drama or bad things in their life. Because even though, I think Lincoln was pretty honorable, in most… in many regards as a president. Well, if you look even before his presidency, right? When you look after he left home, and he becomes a self proclaimed atheist, and he starts having kind of this sexual philandery, and all these issues, and… He had a lot of major problems in his life, and then God starts to get a hold of his life, again. He comes back a little bit more toward God. There’s a lot to this story. And it’s to say that Lincoln is honorable is not to say that he didn’t have bad moments in his life, but it’s recognizing the positive contribution he made. And oftentimes, even in the midst of the complexity and the nuance that a lot of times what we hear is only part of the story. And there’s so often way more to the story, which is where we try to dig in deep and find out what the truth actually is.

David Barton
When you look back at American presidents, probably the two presidents that have had the most books written about them would be George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln. And overwhelmingly, the high percentage, probably 97-98-99% of those books are favorable toward those individuals. As Tim pointed out, everybody’s got flaws, you can find flaws everywhere. But to say that those guys are inherently bad, that would be like, here’s the example- of all the hundreds of books written about George Washington, this would be someone taking the 1796 piece written by Thomas Paine about George Washington. And if you read Thomas Paine’s piece about George Washington, Washington, is dishonest, he’s a crook, he’s a murderer, he’s… You know, Thomas Paine goes on and on about how bad Washington is. What? He is the only dude that said that. But if I want to cite his book, I can tell you how bad Washington is, from one book. So when you get into Lincoln it’s much the same thing, specifically, when you look at Lincoln, what happens is you’ve got hundreds of books, there’s scholarly biographies, there’s all these… There’s a bunch of Pulitzer Prize winning historians who wrote about Lincoln, that’s Carl Sandburg and Ida Tarbell and Gary Wills and Meryl Peterson and Don Fehrenbach and all these folks who wrote about Lincoln and Pulitzer Prize winning biographies. And out of all the hundreds, there are three, that really, well it’s more than three, but there’s three primary ones that take the other side. One of them is the book just mentioned. Thomas DiLorenzo in 2002, did a book called The Real Lincoln. Then there was The Real Lincoln done by Charles Minor in 1901. And there was Herndon’s Lincoln done by William Herndon in 1888. Those are the three go-to books, that if you want Lincoln to be really, really, really bad, you read those three books, and that’s where… I mean everything, he’s an atheist, he’s a homosexual, he’s a dictator, he’s a tyrant, he jailed people without… There’s all these claims in there, or you got the other hundreds and hundreds of books were nobody else was able to find that stuff. Now, you know, to be quite frankly, yeah, Lincoln did jail people without a trial. And anybody who reads the Constitution, it says, that if you’re in rebellion against the government, you can jail people without the right of habeas corpus. Oh, so he was following the Constitution? Well, granted, there’s a lot of people on the other side in the Civil War, who didn’t like the fact he followed the Constitution, but they called themselves rebels. That was the name they gave themselves. They were in rebellion to the Constitution of the garment. And under the Constitution, he has the right to do that.

Tim Barton
And also, Dad, to add a little context, this is also part of what the claim is, for some of the people being held, the January 6 defendants, right where they say they were trying to overthrow the constitution. So we have to… because the, right, part of the due process is that you have the right to a speedy trial, right? There’s a lot of things that are being compromised for these American citizens, and it’s because they’re saying well, they were trying to overthrow the government, and if you overthrow government, if you’re in rebellion to the government, then you can and suspend the rights of habeas corpus. You can suspend part of the due process rights, which actually is what the Constitution says. Where we would disagree is that, what we are looking at by and large with the January 6 defendants, they were not trying to overthrow the federal government. Now, there of course could be some crazy people there who, who maybe that was their thought, but that was not the vast majority of people that were there on January 6. This again, this is not defending what they did. Everybody who was breaking windows at the Capitol, everybody who was being violent, everybody who was doing those things. They should go to jail. They should be arrested for breaking the law. But there’s an overstatement of what happened on January 6, in comparison to reality. But this is where it’s different. When you’re in the middle of a civil war. That is a bit different than what happened on January 6.

David Barton
And remember, the Bible says that one side sounds good until you hear the other, Proverbs 18:17. So if you listen to DiLorenzo, if you listen to Herndon and by the way, Herndon was Lincoln’s law partner, back before Lincoln became president back when he was a state legislator, and both of them were atheist at the time. There’s no question they were both atheists at the time. And what happened was, after Lincoln died, Herndon came out with all this terrible stuff about Lincoln. And we actually own a letter from Lincoln’s pastor who wrote Herndon and said, shame on you, you know better than that. You know, that Lincoln that all these things. I mean, he literally takes Herndon down. And Herndon apparently didn’t like the fact that, here’s Herndon as an atheist, Lincoln used to be an atheist. And now Lincoln’s become a Christian? He’s let this pastor mentor him. That’s not good. I don’t like that. So you have a Herndon, who does not like what Lincoln has become, who writes about how terrible he is. And again, the pastor takes him on and just points out all these factual errors throughout. And we actually have that original letter from the Pastor, James Smith. So you have things like that going on and by the way, Lincoln with election tampering? That goes back to the election of 1864, when the Democrats for the first time in American history, set up a mail-in ballot program, and it was a fraudulent program. They went out to the guys in the field. It started out in New York. They went to the New York troops in the field and said, Hey, have a mail-in ballot, and we’ll take care of it for you. And they had an assembly line of people who had signed the names of soldiers who would vote…

Rick Green
Wait, wait, wait, wait, what year was this David? This was 2020 or 20….

David Barton
Yeah right? 1864 and that’s when you have your…

Rick Green
Nothing new under the sun.

David Barton
Yeah, nothing new under the sun. And they had election fraud trials at the time. And of course, Lincoln didn’t let them get away with cheating. So that means he’s the bad guy because he wouldn’t let him cheat. Is that what election tampering means? That you have to actually make… and these guys, they confess, and they were convicted, they had officer signing, they had guys sign an officer’s name said, yeah, this guy’s on my battalion. And he voted for the Democrat, which was McClellan in 1964. So go back and get the rest of the story. And it’s a whole different thing. So generally, I think Lincoln is a very honorable person. I think he had a situation nobody in this world wants. I don’t know that anyone could have navigated the difficulties he had and come out anywhere close to the results he got. I don’t know, you could have kept the United States together, give what… And I don’t think any one of those writers could have done what Lincoln did to bring it through and make us a nation at the end. So that’s my overview of that.

Tim Barton
And to add to that, and I’m not making a comparison, saying these two individuals are directly alike, but right? It’s not a lot different than looking at Donald Trump and recognizing that this is a very flawed individual, but still recognizing that God used him in great ways. And, again, I’m not making Trump Lincoln or Lincoln Trump, because I think they were very different people in significant ways. But it’s still looking… if you look at what Trump accomplished with so many of his policies, and so many of the positive things that happened under President Trump, there, there is a reason to look back and go, we should be very grateful to God for allowing President Trump to have won that election for the things that happened because of President Trump. Now, this is also different that I don’t know that I would say President Trump is a very honorable man, I don’t really know him well enough to make that statement. And based on some of the surrounding evidence, I definitely have some skepticism in areas. However, we can still appreciate what God did through him while he was president. And this is where for, for many people with Lincoln, they can appreciate that God used Lincoln to maybe help bring it into slavery in America because they can only view him as a dictator as a tyrant, as an oppressor, etc, etc. And this is where we do want to make sure that we have a little better perspective. And as was already mentioned earlier, even in the question were part of the perspective has maybe changed, just based off what we said and as, Rick you were reading that question, my initial thought was, I hope it didn’t change based on what we said, but based on the fact we were able to present some evidence like when you look at the documents, the declaration of secession, when these states had seceded, the southern states, when they put out their declaration of causes and explained why they were seceding, and every state that put out a secession, or that seceded that put out a declaration of causes, their explanation for why they were seceding was to protect the institution of slavery. Now doesn’t mean everybody in the South was pro slavery. And there were many great leaders in the South who weren’t pro slavery, but ended up fighting on the Confederate side, because they acknowledged that there’s going to be a war they could not fight against their state where their brothers and their family and their friends were. So this is not to say everybody, that Confederacy was pro slavery, and everybody Confederacy was evil. But from a political perspective, the political leaders of the South did make clear in their own political documents, even the Confederate Constitution, when they said that you can’t pass a law to end slavery in any of the Confederate States, and you can’t be a Confederate state, if you do not have slavery and allow slavery in your state. Slavery was a very big deal for the political leaders in the Confederacy. And this is where what we want to do is just show what the truth is and try to research and discover the truth and not just listen to what some professor says or what some book author wrote. We want to go back to original sources and document to see what’s actually true.

Rick Green
Good stuff, guys. Man, I tell you this is a question that a lot of people have brought up or pondered, or at least hit this topic. So Jared, thank you, man. And by the way, while you guys were talking, I looked up Toomsboro, Georgia. I’ve been to Eatonton I’ve been to Macon. I’ve been to Milledgeville. Never been to Toomsboro that I know of, but it’s right in the middle of all of those. So Jared, God bless you man, keep spreading the word. Thanks for being a constitution coach. Appreciate your kind words. And yes, I did read that part of your letter about you’d like to be my apprentice and take over so you can hang out with the Bartons. I highly recommend it. So it’s yours, in 50 years, it’s all yours. 50 years, though, got to wait that long. We’ll be right back with another question from our audience right here on WallBuilders.

Tim Barton
Hey, this is Tim Barton with WallBuilders. And as you’ve had the opportunity to listen to WallBuilders Live, you’ve probably heard the wealth of information about our nation, about our spiritual heritage, about the religious liberties about all the things that makes America exceptional. And you might be thinking as incredible as this information is, I wish there was a way that I could get one of the WallBuilders guys to come to my area, and share with my group, whether it be a church, whether it be a Christian school, or public school, or some political event or activity. If you’re interested in having a WallBuilders speaker come to your area, you can get on our website www.WallBuilders.com . And there’s a tab for scheduling. And if you’ll click on that tab, you’ll notice there’s a list of information from speakers bios, to events that are already going on. And there’s a section where you can request an event. To bring this information about who we are, where we came from all religious liberties and freedoms. Go to the WallBuilders website and bring a speaker to your area.

Rick Green
We’re back here at WallBuilders. Thanks for staying with us on this foundations of freedom Thursday. Be sure to send your questions in to [email protected] Next question’s a short one, but it’s going to be fun: Who are your least favorite and favorite US presidents, and why? Okay, folks, we’re going to be extending the program three hours, today, uh and… Alright, guys, see how fast you could rattle these off!

David Barton
I want to jump on this one. I’m… I hate to say this, but I’m really excited about this. I… We’re in the… probably in two to three months people can buy a new book we hope will be out, the American story, Volume Two, but in that we’re going…

Tim Barton
Let me interject and say it’s probably going to be this fall maybe longer. I think we’ll be wrapping up things in two, three months. I don’t think it’ll be printed in two or three months. So just disclaimer right there. Nonetheless, Dad, back to you.

Rick Green
Y’all are just like my son and me. It’s like, oh, we’re going to have the campus will be completely built and ready in three weeks, you know. And Trey’s like, uh but yeah, 3 years? 30 years, Dad? Maybe we ought to think about… anyway go ahead guys, sorry.

David Barton
So this next volume when it comes out, really kind of covers the first seven Presidents. So it goes Washington through Jackson. And I thought I knew these guys. I’ve read so many biographies on them, so many of their letters and writings. But I have learned something significantly new about all of them. And I have a new least favorite president now. So my least favorite president replaces Woodrow Wilson, which is… that’s hard to replace Woodrow Wilson. So my least favorite president now is Andrew Jackson. And I have to say Andrew Jackson, he did so many amazingly good things for America. He’s one of the greatest military leaders. He’s up there with Washington. If it hadn’t been for him, I’m not sure we get through the War of 1812. We might have been whipped that war. He was just an amazing soldier. He was a terrible political leader. And so as a president, I mean, if you could keep him in the military, he was so good. But… and people, there’s things they won’t like, and that’s fine. But I had never realized that he’s the guy who invented the really early versions of high tech, Twitter and high tech, Facebook and all these things came from from Jackson. Andrew Jackson kind of did the first version of media censorship. He moved the media outreach inside the White House. I mean, he literally unlike any other president, he put the media people in his White House, and they did messaging out of the White House. So rather than have the reporters report the news, we’re going to tell you how to print the news. And so what we see now with all this high tech censorship. Let me just give you an example. So back, if you look at George Washington’s original cabinet, there’s five folks in that cabinet. You have the Secretary of War, the Secretary of State, etc. That’s cabinet. Really important places. When you come to Andrew Jackson, guess what Andrew Jackson did with his cabinet. He made the US postmaster a cabinet level position. And his us postmaster was one of his political campaign directors, had been involved… And what they did out of the White House, in campaign stuff, literally, if they… And understand this is from the Postmaster General. If there are newspapers that have bad stuff to say about Jackson, they made sure that they got delivered really late way after it was over. And the things that newspapers had good things to say about Jackson, they deliver those properly and on time. So out of the White House, you now have the postmaster in the cabinet level position? And he’s deciding what stories go to the people? Literally, he let his postmasters choose what was delivered to the people. And if you were in a southern state, and here came some abolition material, as postmaster, you could decide not to deliver abolition material in the South. Doesn’t matter that it went through the mail, you could decide what news the south needs and what news they don’t need. So I had never realized that Jackson moved the campaign machine inside the White House, and out of what was called his kitchen cabinet. These guys did amazing… they bought newspapers, they bought Washington, DC newspapers, and just put out propaganda from the administration through those newspapers, and then was picked up all over the nation reporting, here’s what Washington DC says and etc. So I’ve got to say, I had never realized that what we’re going through now in the last 8 to 10 years of media censorship, was really started by Andrew Jackson. He moved the Democratic campaign machine inside the White House. He’s my new least favorite president. And again, I respect him greatly for so many things he did and did, right. But as a president, this partisanship we have, and the kind of stuff we have, just really, really bad. So, Tim, I nearly took all your time, but I… that’s my new least favorite president. And I’ve just found out so much more about the Presidents going back and getting deep into their lives. There’s a lot of stuff that applies for today.

Rick Green
I’m just surprised to learn that reincarnation is real and Mark Zuckerberg is the new Andrew Jackson of our day, and he didn’t even have to be elected president of the country, just you know, President of Facebook or whatever his title was there. Anyway. Sorry, Tim, go ahead, man.

Tim Barton
And to clarify, that would be the new Andrew Jackson with no military prowess or victories. Because I feel like all of us could take Zuckerberg in a fight anytime, right? I feel like that’s not a problem.

Rick Green
He’s actually really gotten into jujitsu, I saw, but yeah, go ahead.

Tim Barton
Well, and like I feel like Andrew Jackson is not the guy you want to fool with, right? Like, as bad as you might have been, he’ll gladly get into a duel with you, at least as the reports go. You know, I don’t know how you can talk about the worst presidents and not include someone like a Woodrow Wilson, which of course, is a name that anybody that’s paid attention to how bad Democrats can be, Woodrow Wilson’s name is high on the list, and not the least of which because you have the racial issues, the segregation, the rebirth of the Klan, you have the kind of stronghold of progressivism as he’s laying a foundation for that, you have… the income tax, I mean, you can go through the list of where this guy messed things up. And Dad, as we’ve talked a lot, as you’ve been doing research on Andrew Jackson, you know… As we look guys like Woodrow Wilson, acknowledging how bad they were, they were not… Woodrow Wilson was the first one to really steer America in a entirely new direction. And it seems like Andrew Jackson was the guy that did that. I just have not done the research you’ve done yet. And when we start working on editing that book together, I’m sure I will learn a lot more that will move Andrew Jackson much higher up on my list. Obviously, we know he violated so many Indian treaties, although, many native tribes violated a lot of treaties as well. He did so many relocation acts, etc. But Woodrow Wilson has got to be up high on that list for me.

David Barton
We didn’t get to the good guys, so we’ll have to do that on a different program. But we sure got our bad guys down.

Tim Barton
Guys, actually, let me add one amendment, I totally forgot that we can include this person, I’m going to put Joe Biden maybe at the top of my list, I still don’t know how bad…

Rick Green
Is that best or worst presidents? Which lists the best or worst?

Tim Barton
Oh, that’s good clarification. This is maybe worse than Woodrow Wilson. Actually, I’m pretty sure he is worse than Woodrow Wilson. I’m not sure if he’s worse yet than Jackson, Dad, as you might allude to, nonetheless, I mean, just a, a rebirth of Woodrow Wilson and so many these progressive policies that have been so destructive for America. So it’s yet to see how bad he will be but certainly he’s got to be on that list too.

Rick Green
Well, folks, this is going to be a program you’re going to enjoy. I’m not going to tell you a date because you just got to listen to WallBuilders every day of the week, and then at some point in the next few weeks we’ll surprise you with an entire program on the best and worst presidents because, guess what, I didn’t even get to give you a worst let alone the best, but I’m anxious to know a little bit more about the best as well as the worst which we did. We did do a top five best I don’t know what was the guy’s year or two ago and and that was fun. So imagine if we do best and worst all in one program so gotta stay tuned for that folks. Watch the website. Make sure you’re on the email list. Listen to the program wherever you’re listening on podcast or on Bott Radio or one of the other network programs, but we appreciate you listening. You’ve been listening to WallBuilders.