What can we learn from history?

Bruce Thornton’s essay, Reflection on 1862, is a thought-provoking and well-written article.

Unfortunately, historical perspective seems to be lacking in much of the critical coverage of the war on terror; rather, we seem to be fed a lot of hysterical perspective. Thornton shows that was also true for Lincoln and the US Civil War.

History comforts us with these reminders that the behaviors that so annoy both the supporters and the critics of the current conflict are typical of a society at war, especially a democracy in which the military is subjected to control and audit by civilian power. Thus it has always been, ever since the Athenian people executed eight victorious admirals for failing to collect the dead after the sea-battle at Arginusae in 406 BC. So what we are going through now is what we should expect, particularly in a mid-term election year (as was 1862), when the party out of power is eager for victory, and the party in power is eager for reelection. But history also reveals something novel about our own predicament –– the unrealistic expectations of a therapeutic culture that refuses to accept the tragic limitations of human action and that prizes psychic and material comfort over everything else.

I was not previously aware of the viciousness of the attacks leveled on Lincoln:

And this complaining was attended by cruel personal attacks that make the puerile Bush-bashing by Howard Dean and moveon.org seem complimentary in contrast. One of the favorite insults for Lincoln was “the original gorilla,” an allusion to speculations at the time about the Darwinian missing link. Lincoln’s striking ugliness was a constant source of amusement for his political enemies and even his political kin. The New York Times’ Paris correspondent suggested an embargo on portraits of the president in order to preserve European support for the Union: Lincoln looked like “a man condemned to the gallows,” and some French shopkeepers were selling his portrait as that of a notorious guillotined serial killer. Keep such pictures at home, the reporter advised, for “such a face is enough to ruin the best of causes.”

Read the whole thing.