Everything old is new again.
I’m reading Doris Kearn Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln,” and there’s one passage that I find particularly remarkable. Goodwin writes about Lincoln’s sole term in congress, with coincided with the tail end of the Mexican-American war (or “the U.S. Intervention,” as it’s known in Mexico):
Lincoln voted with his Whig brethren on a resolution introduced by Massachusetts congressman George Ashmun, which stated that the war had been “unnecessarily and unconstitutionally” initiated by the president.
The following week, on January 12, 1848, Lincoln defended his spot resolutions and his vote on the Ashmun resolution in a major speech. He claimed that he would happily reverse his vote if the president could prove that first blood was shed on American soil; but since he “can not, or will not do this,” he suspected that the entire matter was, “from beginning to end, the sheerest deception.” Having provoked both countries into war, Lincoln charged, the president had hoped “to escape scrutiny, by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory…that serpent’s eye, that charms to destroy.” [...] Lincoln employed the bizarre simile of the president’s confused mind “running hither and thither, like some tortured creature, on a burning surface, finding no position, on which it can settle down, and be at ease.”
This maiden effort was not the tone of reasoned debate that later characterized Lincoln’s public statements. Nor did it obey his often-expressed belief that a leader should endeavor to transform, yet heed, public opinion. Compelling as Lincoln’s criticisms might have been, they fell flat a t a time when the majority of Americans were delighted with the outcome of the war. The Democratic Illinois State Register charged that Lincoln had disgraced his district with his “Treasonable assault upon President Polk,” claimed that “henceforth” he would be known as “Benedict Arnold,” and predicted that he would enjoy only a single term. Lincoln sought to clarify his position, arguing that although he had challenged the instigation of the war, he had never voted against supplies for the soldiers. To accept Polk’s position without question, he claimed, was to “allow the President to invade neighboring nation…whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary.”
It’s fun to think that we’re writing the first draft of history. But, really, it seems we’re just falling into old, established patterns, repeating the same mistakes that we made 150 years ago.
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