Musharraf's reading of Lincoln

The nation, November 8, 2007

By Eric Foner

Every generation and every political movement, it seems, reinvents Abraham Lincoln in its own image. But rarely has he been invoked so cynically as on November 4, when President-General Pervez Musharraf quoted extensively from Lincoln to justify the suspension of the Pakistani Constitution and the imposition of martial law. Musharraf declared that during the Civil War, Lincoln “broke laws, he violated the Constitution, he usurped arbitrary power, he trampled individual liberties.” He quoted from an 1864 letter to Albert Hodges, in which Lincoln declared that “measures, otherwise unconstitutional, might become lawful, by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the Constitution, through the preservation of the nation.” Musharraf failed to note that in this letter, Lincoln was not defending the abrogation of democracy or the suppression of civil liberties but his decision to emancipate the slaves.

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