What Would Lincoln Do? What Lincoln Did

It appears that to many liberals these days the only good Republican is a dead Republican. At least that is the impression I get from Robert Kuttner‘s ill-informed and even silly exercise in the old political game, “What would Lincoln [FDR, JFK, MLK, etc.] do?”

Most of Kuttner’s piece is simply the old, familiar anti-Bush claptrap dressed up in Civil War garb.

Lincoln’s priority, always, was to preserve the Union and to reduce the sectional and ideological bitterness….

By contrast, Bush’s entire presidency is about eking out narrow victories, not about building national consensus. Even when he prevails, Bush wins by manipulation and stealth. His legacy is deepened division and bitterness. [Ed: Of course, Lincoln’s legacy was the bloodiest war in American history, but never mind.]….

Lincoln gained incomparably in wisdom over four years. Does anyone think George W. Bush is wiser now than in 2001? [Ed: Yes]….

Can you imagine Bush including in his inner Cabinet such Republicans as John McCain, who opposes Bush on torture of prisoners, or Chuck Hagel, who challenges the Iraq war, or Lincoln Chafee, who resists stacking the courts with ultra-right-wingers? [Ed: Yes, actually I can.] Not to mention Democrats, a group Lincoln also included among his top appointees [Ed: What is Norman Mineta? A potted plant? (Don’t answer that.)].

Kuttner’s article is a gloss on a new book by Doris Kearns Goodwin on Lincoln and his cabinet, Team of Rivals (or perhaps I should say, a new book that purports to be by Doris Kearns Goodwin). I haven’t read Goodwin’s book, and probably won’t, and so I have no comment about how much of the silliness here is Kuttner’s and how much is Goodwin’s (or her research assistants’). I should thank whoever is responsible, however, for providing some good laughs.

Here’s a representative howler:

Goodwin’s unusual title, ”Team of Rivals,” refers to the fact that Lincoln deliberately included in his Cabinet the prominent leaders of different factions of his party who had opposed him for the 1860 nomination. Some, like his treasury secretary, Salmon Chase, a fierce abolitionist, wanted Lincoln to proceed much more aggressively.

Salmon Chase had been and was many things, but “fierce abolitionist” is definitely not one of them. He came out of the Free Soil Party, a movement that grew up in Ohio, Illinois, and the midwest dedicated to limiting the expansion of slavery, but this “anti-slavery” position was definitely not abolitionist. Indeed, it was motivated in large part by a racist desire to keep blacks, slave or free, out of their territories; it was also anti-slavery in large part out of a desire not to compete with slaveholders and slave labor. Chase was from Ohio, and here is a decent, short description of the Ohio Free Soilers from an online encyclopedia of Ohio history:

The Free-Soilers opposed slavery’s expansion into any new territories or states. They generally believed that the government could not end slavery where it already existed but that it could restrict slavery in new areas. The Free Soilers’ principal reason for opposing slavery’s expansion was a fear of competition with Southern slaveholders. Northerners who aspired to own land in the West feared that they would not be able to compete economically with slave labor, thus the party’s call for free labor. Many abolitionists joined the Free-Soil Party, but the majority of this party’s members were not abolitionists. Many Free-Soilers were racists. These white people believed that African Americans were inferior, and the whites had no desire to provide African Americans with equal political, economic, and social rights as whites. If the government placed African Americans on an equal footing with whites, whites would also face competition from the newly freed slaves.

The fundamental distinction between anti-slavery and abolition is obviously lost on Kuttner.

Here’s one more good one:

Despite civil insurrection, Lincoln resisted broad intrusions on democratic rights. Bush runs roughshod over liberties.

Perhaps Kuttner considers the repeated suspension of habeas corpus, in defiance of court orders, and arresting and banishing opposition political leaders to be of no real consequence. Here’s a brief discussion:

… on Sept. 24, 1862, after fresh military disasters, with a gloomy prospect for the administration in the upcoming elections, with an unpopular conscription looming and doubt about the public’s reception of the Emancipation Proclamation (preliminary issue Sept. 22), the President suspended habeas corpus again, this time over the entire North. The new directive specifically cited the resistance to the draft. It had been urged privately well before that, by several governors, especially Morton of Indiana who was plagued by disloyal militias and secessionist newspaper editors….

The Supreme Court continued to give the administration its way as long as the war was in doubt. Clement Vallandingham, the ex-congressman and notorious copperhead from Ohio, had been nominated for governor of that state by the Democratic party in 1863. Union Gen. Burnside had him arrested and set out to court-martial him. Vallandingham sought a writ of habeas corpus from federal court, but ultimately the Supreme Court refused his plea, claiming that the Judiciary Act did not give the Court jurisdiction in appeals from military tribunals. Lincoln eventually commuted Vallandingham’s sentence and banished him to the Confederacy.

By the time Vallandingham had been arrested and banished, Lincoln’s defiance of the courts was well established. In the first weeks of the war the military had arrested one John Merryman, a pro-Southern Maryland officer. He sued, and his case, Ex Parte Merryman, was heard by the Chief Justice of the United States, Roger Taney, on circuit. It’s worth reading Taney’s opinion, but for now these glosses on it will do. Here’s from Wikipedia:

Taney went by the lawbooks, and understandably raged against Lincoln spontaneously and unconstitutionally granting himself easily abused powers. Taney showed beyond the shadow of a doubt that Lincoln’s actions were entirely contrary to written law. The real question, which Taney also addressed, was whether or not it was practically permissible for a President to take such actions. He argued that it was not, angrily observing that none of the Kings of England exercised such power, and that therefore in this respect Lincoln was proving more monarchical and despotic than any actual English monarch. [Ed: Taney had not yet had the benefit of Sen. Kennedy‘s argument that George Bush is acting like King George.] He closed his argumentation with the following fiery language (Merryman):

These great and fundamental laws, which congress itself could not suspend, have been disregarded and suspended, like the writ of habeas corpus, by a military order, supported by force of arms. Such is the case now before me, and I can only say that if the authority which the constitution has confided to the judiciary department and judicial officers, may thus, upon any pretext or under any circumstances, be usurped by the military power, at its discretion, the people of the United States are no longer living under a government of laws, but every citizen holds life, liberty and property at the will and pleasure of the army officer in whose military district he may happen to be found.

Lincoln, citing Andrew Jackson before him, simply disregarded the ruling.

And here:

[Taney] ruled that Merryman should be set free, denounced the notion of arbitrary military arrest and defended civil liberties, and pointed out that only Congress had the right to suspend the writ of habeas corpus. And he admitted he could do nothing to enforce his ruling in the face of a military force “too strong for me to overcome.”

Taney made no statements of sympathy for Merryman’s cause or his principles. His eyes were on Lincoln, and he said the president’s course showed he lacked “a proper respect for the high office he fills …. He certainly does not faithfully execute the laws if he takes upon himself the legislative power, by suspending the writ of habeas corpus, and the judicial power also, by arresting and imprisoning a person without due process of law.”

It was Lincoln’s theory of the war that the Southern states had never left the Union. That did not prevent him from admitting the western counties of Virginia as a new state when he needed additional electoral votes for the election of 1864, notwithstanding Article IV, Section III:

New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new States shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.

Now I don’t much care for “What would Lincoln do” and its variants, or for ahistorical, anachronistic comparisons, but since Kuttner has started this game let’s stick with it for a minute. If one were so inclined, some comparisons to Bush do come to mind. Here‘s the suggestive beginning of one discussion:

Even as his armies pushed deep into Virginia, Abraham Lincoln faced his greatest challenge in 1864. Many northerners had tired of war. Democrats began denouncing Grant as a “butcher.” “Patriotism is played out,” declared one newspaper. “Each hour is but sinking us deeper into bankruptcy and desolation.” Thus while Lee’s armies teetered on the verge of destruction, the Confederate cause saw its last, bright hope flicker in the fall of 1864. Southerners considered their northern sympathizers to be “large and strong enough, if left to operate constitutionally, to paralyze the war and majority party.”

Lincoln, in short, was the first but not the last Republican president to change war aims in the middle of a war (saving the Union/finding WMD to expanding freedom/expanding freedom), to be elected in his first term with a minority of the popular vote (39%), to sacrifice certain traditional civil liberties and deference to the judicial branch to the war effort, and to persevere with an increasingly unpopular war against vocal Democratic opposition that wanted peace at just about any price.

UPDATE

For another, and very well done, extended look at Lincoln as commander in chief, read this excellent post by Scott Johnson on Power Line.

UPDATE II [26 Dec.]

Scott Johnson has returned to Lincoln — and he also blasts Kuttner — here. Read his excerpt from one of Lincoln’s remarkable letters.

UPDATE III [26 Dec.]

See here for more, much more. (HatTip to InstaPundit)