Writing history.

In your April 17 issue, a loyal American complained that your review of DiLorenzo's book, The Real Lincoln, failed to meet your normally high standards because it was biased toward the Southern view of the war; it portrayed Lincoln as a racist who wanted to ship blacks to other countries; and it overlooked the fact that America would have broken into pieces without Lincoln's decision to go to war. But his letter lacks objectivity. He said that the "official name" for the war by those who fought in it was the War of Rebellion.

He also said that a neutral term for the conflict was the "Civil War." It is a neutral term, but it isn't accurate; a civil war is, by definition, a war between two factions to control one government; of the federal government, the Confederacy sought, not control, but only nunc dimittis--to depart in peace. Congress recognized that, noting that the "War Between the States," the term used in The Real Lincoln, is both neutral and accurate.

Two-thirds of Confederate soldiers never owned a slave. Did they go to war so that other men could keep the slaves they wrongly held? No, Southerners fought for other strongly held ideals. One was the belief that a contract must be honored. Four years after King George III acknowledged the independence, South Carolina and others were called on to create the federal government. Obtaining the proviso that that government was denied any power not granted by the Constitution, they created the government. As James Buchanan noted, the Constitution did not grant a power to prevent secession, whose principal value was the threat and not the act.

Also, Lincoln might have preserved the Union by keeping his oath to support the Constitution. Whatever Lincoln's motive, whether Whig consolidation, as DiLorenzo charges, or merely ego (seeking a place in history as "the man who ended slavery"), he put his country at terrible risk by seeking to stop secession through war. He succeeded only by shredding the Constitution. And, Roosevelt's unconstitutional 20th-century liberalism would have been impossible without that prior shredding.

On the other hand, had Lincoln failed, with secession no longer in limbo, the American republics may have peeled off, one by one, North as well as South, into a few dozen Balkan republics.

It must be said that Lincoln was by far our worst president.

JIM WARE

Baton Rouge, Louisiana