He argues that Lincoln's views on race exhibited forms of bigotry that are commonly overlooked today, such as belief in white racial superiority, against miscegenation, and even against black men being jurors.

He considers Lincoln to have opened the way to later instances of government involvement in the American economy, for example Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, of which DiLorenzo strongly disapproves.

"[2] Reviewing for The Independent Review, Richard M. Gamble noted that DiLorenzo's book "manages to raise fresh and morally probing questions" and that it "exposes Lincoln's embarrassing views on race, his ambition for economic nationalism, his rewriting of the history of the founding of the nation, his cavalier violation of constitutional limits on the presidency, and his willingness to wage a barbaric total war to achieve his ends".

But, Gamble notes that The Real Lincoln "is seriously compromised by careless errors of fact, misuse of sources, and faulty documentation," which taken all together "constitute a near-fatal threat to DiLorenzo's credibility as a historian.

16–17); Lincoln was not a member of the Illinois state legislature in 1857 (p. 18); the commerce clause was not an "amendment,"; Thaddeus Stevens was a Pennsylvania representative, not a senator (p. 140); and Fort Sumter was not a customs house (p. 242)."

Additionally: "In chapter 3, DiLorenzo claims that in a letter to Salmon P. Chase, Lincoln "admitted that the original [Emancipation] proclamation had no legal justification, except as a war measure" (p. 37).

[4] Ken Masugi of the Claremont Institute wrote in National Review that "DiLorenzo frequently distorts the meaning of the primary sources he cites, Lincoln most of all.

Compare the nuances and qualifications in what Lincoln actually said: "If as the friends of colonization hope, the present and coming generations of our countrymen shall by any means, succeed in freeing our land from the dangerous presence of slavery; and, at the same time, in restoring a captive people to their long-lost father-land, with bright prospects for the future; and this too, so gradually, that neither races nor individuals shall have suffered by the change, it will indeed be a glorious consummation."

But DiLorenzo also praises and idealizes the pre-1861 structure of the United States, as a confederation of virtually independent entities – each of which had a recognized right of secession of which it could make use, or threaten to use, at any time.

In short - the reason why the US, alone of all slave-holding nations, needed to go through a terrible civil war in order to end slavery is that the system of entrenched States' Rights made it impossible to do it any other way.