David Bromwich on two books on Lincoln

[rivkat]

His review in the Oct. 19 NYRB has, I assure you, no relevance to recent events:

    [Lincoln's] speech in Congress on the [Mexican] war ... revealed a passion against injustice that defied the commoner loyalties of nationalism; it showed a different side from the tactical mastery that would characterize his politics through most of the 1850s. Here, he spoke unmistakably about the sort of republic he thought the United States ought not to become. He believed that President Polk, through false reports and rumors, had dragged the country into a war of choice; that it had been provoked and begun by Americans, with the popular panic and bloodthirstiness of a powerful nation hunting a smaller nation it knew it could conquer; that the President and the war party had employed every stratagem of sophistical and lawless argument to justify a corrupt policy.

    The heart of this speech of January 12, 1848, is a series of questions about the causes of the war. Lincoln asks the President to answer

fully, fairly, and candidly. Let him answer with facts, and not with arguments. Let him remember he sits where Washington sat, and so remembering, let him answer, as Washington would answer. ... And if, so answering, he can show that the soil was ours, where the first blood of the war was shed--that it was not within an inhabited country, or, if within such, that the inhabitants had submitted themselves to the civil authority of Texas, or of the United States, and that the same is true df the site of Fort Brown, then I am with him for his justification. ...
    But if he can not, or will not do this--if on any pretence, or no pretence, he shall refuse or omit it, then I shall be fully convinced, of what I more than suspect already, that he is deeply conscious of being in the wrong ... [t]hat originally having some strong motive--what, I will not stop now to give my opinion concerning--to involve the two countries in a war, and trusting to escape scrutiny, by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory ... he plunged into it, and has swept, on and on, till, disappointed in his calculation of the ease with which Mexico might be subdued, he now finds himself, he knows not where.

Bromwich goes on to suggest that Lincoln's political thought "warned his country against a change of character from republic to empire."  For more on using Lincoln to make claims about current politics, Mark Graber has an interesting post.

Incidentally, one of the books Bromwich is reviewing (given that it's the NYRB, I feel an urge to put in scare quotes) is Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals, which I will perhaps read.  Anyone read it?

Comments

[liviapenn.livejournal.com]

And fifty years later, Mark Twain said, about the Spanish-American war...

How our hearts burned with indignation against the atrocious Spaniards. . . But when the smoke was over, the dead buried and the cost of the war came back to the people in an increase in the price of commodities and rent--that is, when we sobered up from our patriotic spree--it suddenly dawned on us that the cause of the Spanish-American war was the price of sugar. . . . that the lives, blood, and money of the American people were used to protect the interests of American capitalists.