February 16, 2007
Dragging Lincoln Into Iraq III Posted by Fredric Smoler at 02:00 PM EST Fred Allen posts, with understandable asperity and admirable terseness, on Rep. Don Young of Alaska, who has recited on the floor of the House a fabricated Lincoln quote, one claiming that congressmen who damage morale in wartime should be arrested, exiled or hanged. Lincoln did not say this. But Lincoln did in effect exile a Congressman, Democrat Clement Vallandigham of Ohio, who had given an antiwar speech saying that the Civil War was being fought to liberate blacks and enslave whites. This does seem at least roughly comparable to saying that the Iraq war has been fought only to fatten profits for corporate America, aid Israeli racist aggression against the Palestinians, and establish American world empire, and for no better motives, which is the sort of thing people say all the time. Defending the treatment of Vallandigham, Lincoln wrote to another congressman, the Democrat Erastus Corning, that “long experience has shown that armies can not be maintained unless desertion shall be punished by the severe penalty of death. The case requires, and the law and the Constitution sanction, this punishment—Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of a wiley agitator who induces him to desert?” But the story is a little complicated: Lincoln did not approve in advance Vallandigham’s arrest by General Ambrose Burnside (the man who presided over the slaughter of the Army of the Potomac at Fredericksburg), regretted that the arrest had occurred, and when he had Vallandigham sent through Confederate lines in Tennessee was in fact tempering a court martial verdict that had ordered Vallandigham imprisoned for the duration of the war. He did not exile Vallandigham in the normal sense of the word, because Lincoln did not recognize the sovereignty of the Confederacy, so Lincoln in effect had Vallandigham sent from one portion of U.S. territory to another. When Vallandigham later came back into Union-controlled territory from Canada, Lincoln left the man unmolested, and Vallandigham was allowed to engage in political activity with perfect impunity. On the other hand, the letter to Corning suggests that Lincoln at least had some grave reservations about antiwar figures encouraging desertion. Now I can readily imagine people in the antiwar movement encouraging desertion—after all, this happened during Vietnam, and I would be amazed if it hasn’t happened during the Iraq War. So I can imagine Lincoln taking much tougher measures than practiced by either Lyndon Johnson or George Bush—because he did.
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