History Offers Many Lessons

History offers many lessons, some awkward
First off, I don’t intend to upset anyone, although I’m certain to.
Second, I don’t intend to make direct comparisons or linkages, although I’m certain some readers will draw that conclusion.
Third, this is not intended to serve as a defense of anything George Bush has done, although it probably will be interpreted as just that.
Over much of the past three years, I’ve spent time backfilling some of what I hadn’t learned in school about our nation’s history. I started by reading several books on the Colonial period, the Revolutionary War and the late 1700s, as the nation was being created.
It was a fascinating look into the past and an enlightening lesson in history which 18 years of schooling barely even touched.
Now I am spending a couple of years similarly learning about the Civil War, with similar revelations. At present, I am reading the exhaustively researched and painstakingly written, three-volume, 2,836-page narrative compiled by author Shelby Foote, “The Civil War.”
I was ignorant of Colonial America; I have been equally uninformed about the Civil War. It is both humbling and alarming to understand the degree of failure of our education system when it comes to teaching history, and it is getting worse with the passing of precious years.
Early in Volume I of Foote’s work, President Abraham Lincoln was confronted with challenges that have never again presented themselves - and a few that have.
One in particular has some relevance to modern affairs. It involves the Patriot Act that has been such an incendiary weapon in President George W. Bush’s prosecution of his self-proclaimed global war on terrorism. Many of the circumstance of Bush’s war, still undeclared by Congress, have parallels to Lincoln’s war, which also was waged in its early stages without a formal declaration of Congress.
In the early months, Lincoln waged his war by calling militiamen to arms and substantially increasing the ranks of men serving in the Army and Navy, all without congressional sanction.
But he went far beyond those unilateral actions. Foote writes of 1861:
“Lincoln took unto himself powers far beyond any ever claimed by a Chief Executive. In late April, for security reasons, he authorized simultaneous raids on every telegraph office in the northern states, seizing the originals and copies of all telegrams sent or received during the past year. As a result of this and other measures, sometimes on no stronger evidence that the suspicions of an informer nursing a grudge, men were taken from their homes in the dead of night, thrown in dungeons and held without explanation or communication with the outside world. Writs of habeas corpus were denied, including those issued by the Supreme Court of the United States. . . .
“Congress bowed its head and agreed. Though Americans grew pale in prison cells without knowing the charges under which they had been snatched from their homes or places of employment, there were guilty men among the innocent, and a dungeon was as good a place as any for a patriot to serve his country through a time of strain.”
Lincoln, of course, is measured as among the two finest presidents ever to serve this country.
His unchecked actions in 1861, as Foote notes, were unprecedented and most likely unconstitutional. Yet they didn’t diminish his greatness.
Modern critics of Bush’s war on terrorism might easily excuse Lincoln’s excesses, with justification, while assaulting today’s Patriot Act.
But they cannot argue that the provisions of the Patriot Act, painted by Bush critics as an unprecedented infringement on privacy, is without precedent.
The only difference between Lincoln’s act and Bush’s act is that Lincoln’s was far-more egregious and reaching, and it was done without congressional consent.
I’m willing to bet most critics are ignorant of that and will not welcome this little lesson in history.