Another deeply ironical historical analogy is also apt — to Abraham Lincoln’s response to demands that he temporize and compromise in order to avoid civil war. Although Mr. Obama has missed no opportunity to compare himself to Lincoln — declaring his candidacy in Springfield, Ill., where Lincoln delivered his “House Divided” speech, swearing his Oath of Office on the bible Lincoln used, referring to Lincoln as his “idol” [CBS News, 17 Jan. 2009], etc. — his response to the Iranian threat is exactly the opposite of Lincoln’s to the crisis of the Union in the months leading up to war.
Unlike Prime Minister Chamberlain in 1938 or President Obama today, President Lincoln believed that war-avoiding compromising now — such as the Crittenden Compromise, which purported to protect slavery where it existed and allow it to expand across a southern tier of territories, a measure supported even by some of Lincoln’s close associates — would have been “just a deferral,” as Ferguson put it, and would have led to a more perilous position for the Union in the future.
In a “private and confidential” letter to Republican Congressman William Kellogg on Dec. 11, 1860, for example, Lincoln wrote: “Entertain no proposition for a compromise in regard to the extension of slavery. The instant you do, they have us under again; all our labor is lost, and sooner or later must be done over…. The tug has to come & better now than later.”
“The tug,” of course, did come soon, to the tune of 600,000 casualties. Whether that was “better” than what might have come later is, as Mr. Ferguson writes here, a matter of “conjecture,” as is the matter of motive. Lincoln certainly seems to have hated slavery with a passion Obama has not demonstrated against Islamic extremism. What is not conjecture, however, is that in his manner of confronting an evil empire Barack Obama is no Abraham Lincoln.
