The Peace Democrats and the Party of Lincoln

Mobilizing the nation in defense of America and our ideals is the #1 issue of our times. This conviction was the basis for the following essay, documenting lectures by Professor Gerald Matacotta that I wrote for the latest issue of Queens Village Eagle, invoking Lincoln and the Civil War as an appropriate parallel narrative for our times. It will be sent along with a memo from Professor Matacotta, from America’s oldest Republican Club, to the GOP presidential candidates to utilize a unique historical perspective in their campaigns and debates.
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The Peace Democrats and the Party of Lincoln

The War on Terror, or to be more precise, the war against Islamofascism is a war of bullets and a war of ideas. As Phillip Sica says in the Presidents Message on page 3, “Al Qaeda and its sympathizers are the ideological successors to the most dangerous tyrannies of the 20th century, Nazi fascism and Soviet communism.” We are winning the war militarily in Iraq and Afghanistan, but losing the war of ideas on the home front, where American strength and principles are being eroded in Congress on a daily basis. In resolution after resolution, proposal after proposal and speech after speech, the Pelosi-Reid Congress and Democratic presidential candidates have shown their determination to abandon Iraq and surrender to the jihadist enemies who are killing Iraqis and Americans in order to spread their medieval vision of Islam to the world.

In 2002, Congress voted unanimously for the authorization to use military force in Iraq. Senator John Kerry and other congressional Democrats made impassioned speeches supporting authorization. The battle to topple Saddam Hussein took three weeks but the War in Iraq turned out to be a longer, harder struggle than imagined. The next few years saw the increasing influence of anti-war extremist groups infiltrating the Democratic Party, which nudged them to change direction on the war, purge their ranks of pro-war voices, such as Joe Lieberman’s, and to resolve to swiftly end the war, withdraw the troops and even to oppose the successful troop surge, in order to accommodate their burgeoning sources of funds. The executive director of the radical peace group MoveOn.org revealed their financial control over the Democrats, boasting, "Now it's our party. We bought it, we own it, and we're going to take it back." Showing allegiance to MoveOn, over their country’s military forces, Democratic candidates failed to distance themselves from the vile MoveOn ad smearing General David Petraeus as a traitor.

These are the “Peace” Democrats of today, cut from the same cloth as the Copperheads, the traitorous Northern Democrats, who sympathized with the South during the Civil War. At the last club meeting we were treated to a stirring address on “Lincoln and the Copperheads” by History Professor Gerald Matacotta, a speech that President Sica said must be documented and sent to the candidates. The Professor warned that history is repeating itself as the Democratic Party succumbs to the vocal influence of radical anti-war groups, and Copperhead traitors in Congress emerge. To win the War in Iraq, we need to go back to the time of Lincoln and revive the founding principles of our nation.

The events of the Civil War run parallel with the War in Iraq starting with the short lived optimism after the easy capture of Baghdad. Originally seen as a rebellion by Confederate insurgents that would be easily put down by Federal armies, Northerners were distressed to find that the war was going to be a much longer, and bloodier struggle than they imagined, after the devastating defeat of the North in the first Battle of Bull Run. After continuous bitter defeats over the next few years, Union victory seemed impossible and two separate nations appeared to be the likely outcome. An unpopular war and an even more unpopular President were reflected by such quotes from editorials in the New York Times: “Of what use are all these terrible sacrifices? Shall we have nothing but defeat to show for all our valor?”* The Copperheads, or Peace Democrats, came out like venomous snakes to strike the nation without warning. They sought to compromise with the South to end the war. Some declared the war was illegal and un-winnable. Ohio Congressman Clement Vallandigham, an outspoken Copperhead, sought peace at any cost even advocating dialogue with Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States, to end the madness of “thirty millions butchering each other.” Even after the turning point at the battle of Antietam in 1862 and victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg the following year, the Peace Democrats declared the war a failure and demanded immediate efforts to bring the troops home without the restoration of the United States.

After Lincoln was elected to his second term in 1864, the Union armies victorious, and the healing process began, the Democrats were defeated at the polls for the next 50 years, failing to get a presidential candidate elected until Woodrow Wilson. The Peace Democrats of today are in the same precarious position. They are aware that if we win in Iraq, they will lose power perhaps for decades to come. Democrat House Majority Whip James Clyburn confessed that a positive report from General Petraeus “would be a real big problem for us.” Entrenched in a ‘peace at any cost’ platform due to dependence on financial support from anti-war groups, they have put partisan politics over the best interests of their country. Investing their political careers in our military defeat in Iraq, they have surrendered to the terrorists and broadcast the collapse of American strength and principles to the free world.

According to Professor Matacotta history holds all the answers to this shameful state of affairs. First we need to rise above partisan politics. Democratic candidate Stephen Douglas opposed Lincoln in the presidential election of 1860, but he became Lincoln’s greatest ally after the Civil War broke out. Famed as a brilliant orator from the Lincoln Douglas debates, he now campaigned vociferously to rally the northern Democrats to the Union cause. Urging the Democrats to forget about politics, he explained why country must be placed over party, delivering the message: “There can be no neutrals in this war, only patriots – or traitors.” Our country is now in a war and can no longer be divided into two political parties, Democrat or Republican, or imaginary red or blue states. We are either patriots or traitors.

Next, all Americans, not only our troops need to make sacrifices. Lincoln expressed the need to sacrifice lives not only on the battlefield in order to save the nation, but also to suspend our civil liberties in time of war. The traitorous Vallandigham was arrested along with anti-war legislators and pro-Confederate editors, and newspapers that gave away military secrets were seized. Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus empowering military authorities to arrest civilians suspected of giving aid and comfort to the enemy, without specifying charges. To some the Patriot Act and the detention of prisoners at Guantanamo are unlawful, but in Lincoln’s time as in America today, these extraordinary measures would cease with the conclusion of the war and a “more perfect union” would be restored. There will be no constitution or freedom if we lose the War on Terror.

Finally we have to drive home the principles we are fighting for. After the three-day Battle of Gettysburg, casualties on both sides numbered almost 50,000. Lincoln came to Gettysburg Cemetery and honored those who died on the battlefield, that they did not die in vain. He proclaimed the “new birth of freedom” they fought and died for, in the stirring words of the Gettysburg Address. Now Anbar Province in Iraq is the scene of a military victory and the expulsion of al Qaeda. It is a victory for freedom and democracy for the citizens of Iraq and the free world. The death of thousands of Iraqis and American soldiers has not been in vain. Neither was the tragic murder of Sheikh Abu Risha, a courageous tribal sheikh who sided with American forces in order to run al Qaeda out of Anbar. Although we can never repay the loss, “It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced” as Lincoln stated at Gettysburg. The unfinished work is the “new birth of freedom” and democracy in the midst of tyranny in the Middle East, which we must continue to build.

* Steven M. Gillon, 10 Days That Unexpectedly Changed America (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006), p. 80