February 16, 2007
Dragging Lincoln Into Iraq II Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 12:50 PM EST In his post earlier today, Fred Allen notes that Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska) erroneously quoted Abraham Lincoln as having said, “Congressmen who willfully take action during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs, and should be arrested, exiled or hanged.” As Fred explains, Lincoln said no such thing. Ignoring for a moment the patently offensive quality of Young’s gaffe—he is suggesting that critics of President George Bush’s Iraq policy are undermining troop morale and should be treated as “saboteurs,” a notion that is as obnoxious to the principle of free speech as it is dangerous to democratic process—it’s worth noting that Lincoln was himself a staunch antiwar congressman. As a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Lincoln introduced a resolution on December 22, 1847, demanding that President James Polk furnish Congress with “all the facts which go to establish whether the particular spot of soil on which the blood of our citizens was so shed, was, or was not, our own soil.” The resolution, which went nowhere, followed the standard Whig line that the Polk administration had lied to Congress and the nation about the location of the skirmish that justified America’s war with Mexico. Weeks later, on January 3, Lincoln voted with 84 other Whig congressmen for a resolution declaring that the war had been “unnecessarily and unconstitutionally begun by the President of the United States.” (Of course, as President, Lincoln did order the banishment of antiwar Rep. Clement Vallandigham to Canada on charges that Vallandigham’s speeches against the war effort constituted “expressed or implied” treason. Lincoln seems by then to have forgotten his earlier wartime political record. It’s not generally remembered as his best or smartest move.) If it “damages morale” and “undermines the military” to ask, as Democrats (and a clear majority of Americans) are currently doing, why the Iraq war was necessary in the first place, and whether the administration’s strategy is fundamentally flawed, then surely Lincoln’s resolution and vote, which called into question the cause and legality of the Mexican-American war, did the same. By Don Young’s estimation, Lincoln should have been shot, exiled, or hanged. Good thing Don Young wasn’t around in 1848.
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