Eric Foner is DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University. Our Lincoln, an edited volume, will be published in the autumn.
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Vol. 25 No. 20 · 23 October 2003
pages 12-14 | 2744 words
Divinely Ordained
Eric Foner
- Lincoln by Richard Carwardine
Longman, 352 pp, £16.99, May 2003, ISBN 0 582 03279 2
- Lincoln's Constitution by Daniel Farber
Chicago, 240 pp, £20.50, May 2003, ISBN 0 226 23793 1
History never repeats itself, but there are uncanny resemblances between policies of the Bush Administration since 11 September and the way the Government under Abraham Lincoln responded to the crisis of the Civil War in the 1860s. Both Presidents assumed powers that went well beyond what the Constitution seems to allow. In both cases, thousands of people suspected of assisting the enemy were arrested and held without charge, and military tribunals were established to circumvent civilian courts. Both Lincoln and Bush met frequently with evangelical ministers, trying to ensure their active support for government policies. Leading members of both Administrations described the military conflict as an epic struggle between good and evil, inspired by the country’s divinely ordained mission to spread freedom and democracy throughout the world. The Bush Administration’s cavalier disregard for civil liberties has directed attention to the permissible limits on the rule of law in wartime. The same issue has become central to recent accounts of the Presidency of Abraham Lincoln.
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Letters
Vol. 25 No. 23 · 4 December 2003
From Thomas Smith
In comparing the attitudes of Abraham Lincoln to civil liberties during wartime with those of the Bush Administration, Eric Foner overlooks the fact that the United States is not currently at war in the sense that it was during the 1860s (LRB, 23 October). Lincoln led a US that was fighting for its own survival. In contrast, current Islamist terrorism does not itself represent a serious threat to the US polity; there is no prospect of an Islamist regime in Washington. The current threat to the Constitutional order of the US comes from the Administration's own actions.
Overseas adventures such as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq do not usually, and need not, lead to widespread suspension of civil liberties at home. By declaring an open-ended 'war on terror', Bush pulled off the semantic trick of making it possible to justify permanent repressive administrative measures and legislation by disguising these as the requirements of a 'wartime' emergency. At the same time he endorsed the perpetrators' own crazy perceptions that they were leading a religious 'war'. There is no reason for the rest of us to accept either al-Qaida's or the US Administration's self-serving and inflammatory misdefinitions of what is going on.
By the standards of other countries in the mid-19th century, Lincoln's regime appears to have been quite liberal, despite the serious threat that it faced. In contrast, the Bush Administration is a striking example of how repressive policies can be justified by exaggerating threats. Many other regimes, facing violent insurgencies, more dangerous to them than al-Qaida is to the US, are encouraged to persist with their human rights violations when they see the US casually erasing the values that it so frequently trumpets.
Thomas Smith
Basle
From Peter Connolly
What should matter most is that Lincoln, born among racist Jacksonian Democrats on the Kentucky frontier, nonetheless became an opponent of slavery; that he was elected President on an anti-slavery platform which inspired the secession of seven Southern states; that he refused to compromise with those states or the four states that subsequently joined them; that he waged implacable war on what was then called the Slave Power; that he issued the Emancipation Proclamation and refused to retreat from it even when it appeared the war might be lost and he would not be re-elected in 1864; that he enlisted black soldiers, pushed through Congress the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery in 1865, and towards the end of his life was moving towards supporting black suffrage.
Peter Connolly
Washington DC
