Wars Look Different in Retrospect
By William Tucker

Three years into an unpopular war, the President seemed drowned in a cacophony of criticism. Many people charged that his own pigheadedness had started the war, and that now he was equally stubborn in not ending it. A loud contingent argued we should quit and come home.

 

Facing re-election, he found himself confronting a military man, one of his former generals, who had turned pacifist. The Democratic opposition had never given up on the idea that this was the wrong war at the wrong place in the wrong time—a fratricidal struggle the President had started in pursuit of a hopeless ideal.

 

Nevertheless, Abraham Lincoln persevered.

 

Wars always look different in retrospect. Partly this is because the victors write the outcome. But partly it is because only in hindsight do we weave the conflict into a seamless event. The doubt and turmoil that once surrounded it are forgotten.

 

World War II is our model—the whole country united in an effort to stop Hitler. Yet few remember that we sat out the war in Europe for more than two years while Poland was invaded, while France, Belgium and Holland fell, and while Czechoslovakia became almost a forgotten event. Hitler had turned on Stalin and invaded Russia during the summer of 1941, marching all the way to Stalingrad, before we finally entered the conflict in December 1941—when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

 

Throughout the run-up, the Midwest was a citadel of isolationism. “America First,” an anti-war organization started in 1940 at Yale Law School, had 650 chapters with 800,000 members, mostly around Chicago. Future President Gerald Ford, future Peace Corps director Sargent Shriver, future Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, writers Sinclair Lewis, E.E. Cummings, and Gore Vidal, Presidential daughter Alice Roosevelt Longsworth, and Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas were all members. Colonel Robert McCormick’s virulently anti-British Chicago Tribune was its chief organ and Charles A. Lindberg its spokesman. As late as 1970, Lindberg was still insisting we “lost World War II” after being pushed into it by Jews and the British.

 

The Civil War had been even more contentious. From the day Fort Sumter fell, Lincoln, in addition to losing the South, had a considerable portion of the North aligned against him. Even anti-slavery firebrand William Lloyd Garrison did not want to go to war. Having long urged that the North secede from the South, he was content to be cut adrift from the slave states. Many Northern intellectuals followed suit. Campaigning against slavery was one thing, but fighting against it quite another.

 

Lincoln was viewed as such a bumpkin—filled with irrelevant stories and dumb jokes—that few critics could believe he was running his own administration. As Doris Kearns Goodwin documents in Team of Rivals, William Seward, the polished upstate New York Secretary of State, had a far more loyal following and was generally regarded as the power behind the throne. Only within the cabinet was Lincoln’s impeccable judgment and consummate leadership recognized.

 

Throughout the war, public opinion remained deeply divided. Even those who supported Lincoln criticized his wartime decisions. He was considered a neophyte in military affairs. Northern Democrats constantly blamed Lincoln for starting the conflict and called for a peaceful resolution. In 1864 they united around George B. McClellan, the former commander of the Union Army, who ran on a pacifist platform. With hundreds of thousands already dead, McClellan promised the war-weary nation an honorable compromise with the South.

 

Throughout the conflict, the government blatantly violated civil liberties. Seward once bragged that he could “ring a little bell and arrest any citizen.” “Copperheads”—Northern opponents of the war—were routinely imprisoned. Clement Vallandigham, a former Ohio congressman, was arrested after denouncing “King Lincoln” at an anti-war rally and was jailed in Boston. As the newspapers clamored for the release of “Valiant Val,” Lincoln resolved the dilemma by turning him loose on the Tennessee border so he could join the Confederacy.

 

As we now enter the fourth year of a seemingly endless Iraqi conflict of which the public has grown weary, it might be good to remember that no war in our history has ever engaged the undivided support of the nation. If anything, last week’s sparsely attended anti-war rallies suggest that, while the opposition may be loud, it is not very deep.

 

President Bush’s ratings may be at an all-time low, but that’s what leadership is about. If an election were held tomorrow, I suspect the vast majority of Americans would follow his counsel and “stay the course.”

 

 

William Tucker is a weekly columnist for The American Enterprise Online.