I was listening to Rush Limbaugh the other day, and he was making comparisons between George W. Bush and Abraham Lincoln.
Listening to Rush Limbaugh is a guilty pleasure of mine. He’s much more interesting and nuanced than liberals give him credit for, and a master entertainer to boot. What you get when you listen to Limbaugh is a string of very thoughtful points, including a number of tidbits you don’t read about in the mainstream media, followed by a completely wacky and unsupported conclusion. You’ll hear the man say with a straight face that two plus two plus two plus two equals… four hundred and nine.
So here’s the gist of what Limbaugh was saying. Historians routinely rank Abraham Lincoln as one of our greatest presidents, even though he took many more gross liberties with the Constitution than George W. Bush. Limbaugh’s conclusion: Bush is a great president too.
My conclusion: maybe Abraham Lincoln wasn’t such a great president either. Consider some of the things ol’ Honest Abe and his administration did during his time in office:
- He appointed generals and war planners so ineffectual they make Donald Rumsfeld look like frickin’ Sun Tzu.
- When he did finally find generals worth a damn (Grant and Sherman), he let those generals engage in a bloody campaign that directly targeted Confederate civilians (Sherman’s March to the Sea).
- He suspended the writ of habeas corpus, which allowed him to arrest thousands of U.S. citizens (including plenty of journalists) and hold them without cause or trial. When a U.S. Circuit Court overturned Lincoln on this, he simply ignored their ruling.
- He won re-election in 1864 through a variety of questionable tactics, including having Union troops redeployed to states to pressure and intimidate voters.
- He never had a particularly high opinion of blacks, starting from indifference to the plight of slavery and eventually concluding that freed slaves should be shipped back to Africa.
- He fought for quite a while to preserve slavery in border states and only turned to emancipating slaves as a last-ditch strategy for weakening the Confederacy. (As for Lincoln’s views on the morality of the subject, keep in mind that he was not a Christian; in fact, Lincoln wrote a small book explicitly rejecting the veracity of the Bible.)
- He kept border states like Maryland loyal to the Union by first promising not to end slavery there, then by hauling away political leaders without trial.
- He responded to a Sioux Indian rebellion (sparked by refusal of the United States to abide by signed treaties) by not only sending troops out to stomp the insurrection, but by abolishing the Indian reservation there, canceling all treaties with the Sioux, and putting a $25 bounty on their scalps.
Certainly desperate times call for desperate measures, and there’s a certain amount of rule-skirting that’s right and proper when engaging in a noble mission like the abolition of slavery. But could a more effective president have done a better job accomplishing this? We’ll never know.
One wonders whether a more diplomatic and strategically adept president might have accomplished the preservation of the Union and the abolition of slavery without totally fucking over the country in the process. One wonders if the South might have voluntarily done away with the institution of slavery at some point anyway, or if they might have been coerced into it through a better application of economic and diplomatic pressure. The Union’s blockade of the Confederacy’s ports did a fantastic job of strangling the economy of the South, and with a minimal loss of life. How long could the Confederacy have lasted under such pressure alone before they started to cave? Could a wily dealmaker of a president have enticed the southern states back into the Union one by one, and thus avoided the deaths of over half a million soldiers?
I’m not a historian, so I can’t answer those questions. But it seems pretty obvious to me that Lincoln’s strategies didn’t work very well. The Union he fought so hard to preserve remains deeply fractured to this day. And the slaves he liberated saw another hundred years of oppression, violence, and disenfranchisement before achieving anything like equality in this country.
The relevance of these questions to the situation our current president has gotten us into is obvious. The expunging of a cruel dictator in Baghdad and the establishment of a participatory democracy in the Middle East are noble goals too. But are they worth tens or even hundreds of thousands of lives? Could a smarter and more flexible and less dogmatic president have done a better job of it? Was diplomatic and international pressure a better tool to use than brute force? How long will we be suffering from Bush’s mistakes?