John Avlon

Lincoln and the Fight for Peace

J. L. Askew

Avlon’s work is not historical method, but hero worship. It joins a chorus of publications going back more than a hundred-fifty years idolizing the sixteenth president. Abraham Lincoln occupies a unique place in the nation’s history and deserves critical study. Although his memory is steeped in myth and legend, the factual record is there for those who look.
I grew up admiring Lincoln and even acquired Carl Sandburg’s laudatory four volume set, “The War Years”. Later when researching an ancestor’s service in the Civil War, I began intensive reading in primary sources, the U.S. “Official Records”, diaries, and memoirs. Then I saw the war up close, unlike what I’d learned in school, an invasion of the South, not for noble aims but for holding empire. 
Half through the introduction, Avlon gives his view on what happened: “a small band of slave-owning extremists was able to hijack American politics, divide the country, and start the Civil War.” The author then adds dishonesty to his editorializing, “Southern politicians never dared to put the decision to break apart the Union to a popular vote . . . because they likely would have lost”. Three pages later, Avlon repeats the fallacy, claiming secessionists relied on “closed partisan conventions, refusing to put the question to a popular vote.” He should know the “popular vote” did not exist until the turn of the century. In truth the Southern states did exactly what they had done at the country’s founding, choosing delegates, and holding conventions, but this time voting to leave the Union rather than joining it. There was no difference in the process, only the outcome.
The problem was Lincoln “insisted that there was no right to secession in the Constitution, and, therefore, his oath required taking action.” His predecessor, James Buchanan, felt differently, not willing to wage war on free countrymen. But as the sixteenth president said in his second inaugural address, “And the war came,” like he had no part in it.
This is not history, nor even a character study; rather the book is a paean, celebrating Lincoln’s rise in the heavenlies as “prophet of reconciliation”.
Lincoln believed he was in touch with God, writing to a supporter, “Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them.” “It is a truth which I thought needed to be told.” This is Lincoln, divining God’s will, and revealing it to ordinary man.
At the Hampton Roads peace conference, Lincoln had iron-clad demands, countenancing no cessation of war without unconditional surrender. This is the books thesis, that the sixteenth president was a visionary, discovering that reducing an enemy to utter defeat, followed by generous terms, would lead to a just and lasting peace. But this has happened only once: the Marshall Plan following WWII. More recent wars (Korean, Vietnam) ended in stalemate, an armistice followed by decades free of conflict. 
The book’s claim that Lincoln was a deific peacemaker is an excess. He singularly called up state militias for the invasion of the South, prompting some historians to call the conflict “Lincoln’s War.” 
The sixteenth president was a shrewd lawyer, a consummate politician, the finest writer to hold the office, and a great man, but he was not the Jesus figure portrayed by his followers.

Lincoln and the Fight for Peace

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