A new perspective on Lincoln that illuminates: Boss Lincoln: The Partisan Life of Abraham Lincoln by Matthew Pinsker review by Richard Carwardine (Literary Review). Maybe I just did not know that much about Lincoln as the party man before his election. It does not explain Lincoln, nothing ever will. It just shines a light on a spot.
I have not read as much about Napoleon III and had to wonder why a new biography was needed, but the review The People’s Emperor: The Unlikely Rise and Spectacular Fall of Napoleon III by Edward Shawcross (Literary Review) makes a good case for not spitting at his name.
Though behind a paywall, Edward N. Luttwak's review of The Arab Bureau by Eamonn Gearon (Times Literary Supplement) makes a great case for why history is important, even more than the hard sciences:
The question arises: whence did all this modernity come? Even today, one does not associate Oxbridge – where almost all Arab Bureau staff were educated – with the ultra-modern, but it is a paradoxical truth that there was something exceedingly modern at the core of pre-1914 classical studies: the new, hyper-systematic Roman historiography invented in German universities under the leadership of Theodor Mommsen. (German became a required language to study the classics because of it.) Its purpose was to replace reliance on the narrative historians, with their limited fields of vision, time-limited coverage and personal biases, so similar to the inherent limitations of agent reports (even the great Tacitus unfairly condemned Domitian’s sensible withdrawal from unproductive Scotland, newly conquered by his son-in-law Agricola, with his perdomita Britannia et statim omissa), with the systematic collection of Roman inscriptions throughout the empire by successive generations of student volunteers. Equally systematically, these were collated to allow the extraction of “hard data”, from which the actual dates of wars and other events, and the politically revealing career paths of Roman officers and officials, could be extracted, turning Roman historiography into a scientific endeavour centred on epigraphy. The Roman history almost everyone in the Bureau had necessarily learned at some stage of their education was thus an excellent preparation for their intelligence work.
The first chapter of this book, which explains why the Arab Bureau’s masters were ultimately able to use its intelligence to drive out the Ottoman power and expand the British Empire, has startlingly modern implications. It recalls the Ottoman reaction to the first expressions of Arab nationalism: the public execution in Damascus, on May 6, 1916, of seven prominent Arab intellectuals and public figures, accompanied the same morning by the execution of fourteen poets, journalists and political activists in Beirut. The condemned were forced to walk to the gallows wearing placards specifying their supposed crimes. In both cities, the Turks failed to obtain the desired reaction – the crowds were horrified by their cruelty. Now that there is a Turkish president who relies on the Ottoman nostalgia of Turkish TV serials in offering his leadership to the Levant, he is discovering that very different memories persist.
With the Fourth of July past, Donald J. Trump's best efforts to turn the day into an image of his jaundiced, misanthropic self, I have been leery of adding to the disgust. I would rather not cater to those who want to indulge in their masturbatory fantasies, regardless of their actual politics. We have not attained the goals sets out in the Declaration of Independence. I doubt it will ever be possible. There will always be those denied their equal part in American liberty, life, and pursuit of happiness.
“The American Revolution Was Hardly an Anti-Colonial Movement”: UCLA Historian Robin D. G. Kelley (Democracy Now! )
And for a lot of Black people, both enslaved and free Black people during the American Revolution, they saw the declaration as doing multiple things. It wasn’t about American nationalism. It wasn’t about American independence. What it was about was a referendum on the definition of the human. It was also a justification for rebellion, right? And then, the third thing is that they saw it as a kind of lever to argue against the conceits of liberty — that is to say, that the claims that, you know, all people have a right to liberty, no matter who it was intended for, they could use that language against their slave owners, against those who ruled the colonies, and against those who ruled the new republic. And so, in some ways, they were making a case that their claims of freedom were far more universal than the provincial claims of the colonists fighting for freedom against British colonial rule, you know.
And ultimately, the American Revolution was hardly an anti-colonial movement, because in many ways it was a struggle to take control of this empire, this expanding West. I think one of the most important parts of the — or, the argument for independence was a resistance to the British Proclamation of 1763 that said that colonists cannot move beyond the Appalachian Mountains. And in the end, they were pushing against British limitations on expansion. In other words, they wanted more empire for themselves. And in the end, what we get is a nation that is pro-slavery, ultimately, or divided on the question of slavery, in which the proceeds and benefits of American capitalism would generate or flow to the — to those who are settler colonial — settler colonists, as opposed to Britain or the crown.
Happy Fucking Birthday, by Christopher Hooks (Harper's)
But the bicentennial took place at a time when the moment of maximum danger for the republic seemed to have passed. Today, that moment may not have yet arrived: the prospects for the next few years, and the years after those, look pretty bleak. But reading about the bicentennial, I nonetheless wondered whether the amnesia button might be pressed once again—whether we could expect another explosion of warm and fuzzy feelings—and what it might mean for the nation. Privately I wondered whether I, too, would be susceptible, and whether I could connect with any remnant of the old faith that I had first picked up from children’s books, my parents, and the honorable masters of the Austin Independent School District, or if it would all feel, well, childish.
The Expert as Tourist: Beverly Gage takes a road trip through historic sites from 1776 to today, discovering optimism for our political future along the way. (Los Angeles Review of Books)
Gage’s trips around the US left her hopeful. “I came away from my travels,” she writes, “heartened about the state of our country.” Even in the places that recall the most painful parts of the past, she suggests, “there’s a quiet hope that next time we’ll do it better.” At the very least, she writes, traveling the country and learning about history “makes it harder to say that things today are worse than ever.” “For better or worse, public interest in history tends to peak at moments like ours, full of political debate, anxiety, and division,” Gage writes early on in the book—and there’s a sense that this book is a response to that interest, as well as a corrective to the current politically divisive climate. Her closing discussion of Connecticut, specifically New Haven (a city close to my own heart), implicitly reminds readers to look around them for the historical past, as her introduction reminded us that we are all historical subjects, made by history. Gage notes that she was surprised by how “intensely local” the history that she found was—that the great conflicts of a nation are played out on a local scale—and she praises the many citizen initiatives she saw.
Making Sense of the Fourth of July (Jul 97,Vol:48 Issue:4) (American Heritage) provides a history of the Declaration of Independence.
Five years later, in senate debates over the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Indiana’s John Pettit pronounced his widely quoted statement that the supposed “self-evident truth” of man’s equal creation was in fact “a self-evident lie.” Ohio’s senator Benjamin Franklin Wade, an outspoken opponent of slavery known for his vituperative style and intense patriotism, rose to reply. Perhaps Wade’s first and middle names gave him a special bond with the Declaration and its creators. The “great declaration cost our forefathers too dear,” he said, to be so “lightly thrown away by their children.” Without its inspiring principles the Americans could not have won their independence; for the revolutionary generation the “great truths” in that “immortal instrument,” the Declaration of Independence, were “worth the sacrifice of all else on earth, even life itself.” How, then, were men equal? Not, surely, in physical power or intellect. The “good old Declaration” said “that all men are equal, and have inalienable rights; that is, [they are] equal in point of right; that no man has a right to trample on another.” Where those rights were wrested from men through force or fraud, justice demanded that they be “restored without delay.”
Abraham Lincoln, a little-known forty-four-year-old lawyer in Springfield, Illinois, who had served one term in Congress before being turned our of office, read these debates, was aroused as by nothing before, and began to pick up the dropped threads of his political career. Like Wade, Lincoln idealized the men of the American Revolution, who were for him “a forest of giant oaks,” “a fortress of strength,” “iron men.” He also shared the deep concern of his contemporaries as the “silent artillery of time” removed them and the “ living history ” they embodied from this world.
Before the 1850s, however, Lincoln seems to have had relatively little interest in the Declaration of Independence. Then, suddenly, that document and its assertion that all men were created equal became his “ancient faith,” the “father of all moral principles,” an “axiom” of free society. He was provoked by the attacks of men such as Pettit and Calhoun. And he made the arguments of those who defended the Declaration his own, much as Jefferson had done with Mason’s text, reworking the ideas from speech to speech, pushing their logic, and eventually, at Gettysburg in 1863, arriving at a simple statement of pro-found eloquence. In time his understanding of the Declaration of Independence would become that of the nation.
Jefferson and the Declaration (Winter 2020, Volume 64, Issue 1) (American Heritage)
The national idea is timeless and transcendent, an ongoing collaboration across the generations. The historian’s role is to protect us against facile appropriations of the past to serve present purposes, to challenge the assumption that the founders’ “original intentions” — whether they are supposed to be “liberal” or “conservative” — can be fully known and should be authoritative guides to future action.
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The libertarian assumption of a never-ending struggle between the individual, with his “natural” (property) rights, and society, exercising its voracious (property-consuming) power through the state, was alien to Jefferson. Jefferson instead saw the progressive development of society as the necessary precondition for the emergence of the modern individual in full enjoyment of his rights; by eliminating the despotic rule of privileged classes, a republican government would secure national unity and facilitate individual “pursuits of happiness” that in turn would promote the community’s prosperity and well-being.
From Augustine to Jefferson, the idea of separating church and state has deep religious and secular roots (The Conversation).
In his fifth century work “City of God,” St. Augustine advanced the model of two entities, one spiritual and the other temporal or earthly, each with separate authority and functions. Augustine went so far as to use an image of two walled cities separated from each other as a means to protect the purity of the church.
During the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, both Martin Luther and John Calvin distinguished spiritual from earthly authority and called for a division of labor between the two. Luther distinguished “two kingdoms” – a spiritual kingdom and a temporal kingdom that had separate authority.
Similarly, Calvin wrote that “Christ’s spiritual Kingdom and the civil jurisdiction are things completely distinct” and, as such, “must always be considered separately” because of the great “difference and unlikeness … between ecclesiastical and civil power.”
No government can be Christian. The Papal States ruined the Roman Catholic Church. Let government into the pulpit and it is religion that suffers.
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