[Peace-discuss] Lincoln revised

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Illustrating the principle that the poets often get there first, the modern 
discussion of Lincoln includes the publication of Gore Vidal's revisionist novel 
"Lincoln" in 1984.  The following is from Jeff Riggenbach, "Why American History 
Is Not What They Say: An Introduction to Revisionism."  --CGE]


...The 1804 duel with Hamilton is perhaps the most famous event in Burr’s life. 
  The second most famous is probably his arrest and trial, four years later, on 
charges of treason.  As Burr tells Charlie the latter story, it reminds him 
(unsurprisingly) of  Jefferson’s hypocrisy and lust for power.  According to 
Burr, Jefferson tried to suspend habeas corpus so he could continue to hold two 
of Burr’s alleged associates in a military prison and “beyond the reach of the 
Constitution.”  In his defense, Jefferson argued that “[o]n great occasions, 
every good officer must be ready to risk himself in going beyond the strict line 
of law, when the public preservation requires it.”  His political opponents, 
Jefferson acknowledged, “will try to make something of the infringement of 
liberty by the military arrest and deportation of citizens, but if it does not 
go beyond such offenders as Swartwout, Bollman, Burr, Blennerhassett, etc., they 
will be supported by the public approbation.”  Burr’s summary of Jefferson’s 
view is succinct and unsparing.  “In other words,” he tells Charlie, “if public 
opinion is not unduly aroused one may safely set aside the Constitution and 
illegally arrest one’s enemies.” [102]

In the next novel in Vidal’s series, Lincoln, another president employs the same 
tactics, and justifies his actions in a very similar way.  It is now more than 
fifty years after Jefferson’s abortive attempt to suspend habeas corpus. 
Abraham Lincoln is making war against the Southern states that seceded from the 
Union at the beginning of his first term in the White House.  In his attempt to 
ensure that Maryland does not join those seceded states, he imposes martial law, 
orders the arrest of “anyone who takes up arms – or incites others to take up 
arms, against the Federal government,” and orders further that those arrested be 
held “indefinitely without ever charging them with any offense.”  His 
justification is reminiscent of the one Burr attributes to Jefferson, who spoke 
of  “the public preservation.”  “[T]he most ancient of all our human 
characteristics is survival,” Lincoln tells his Secretary of State, William H. 
Seward.  “In order that this Union survive, I have found it necessary to suspend 
the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus, but only in the military zone.”  As 
Lincoln sees it, he is merely exercising what he calls the “inherent powers” of 
the presidency when he takes actions of this kind.  And, as he tells Seward, “An 
inherent power […] is just as much a power as one that has been spelled out.” 
[103]

Lincoln is not narrated in the first person as Burr is.  Rather it is narrated 
in the third person – not an “omniscient” third person, but one whose point of 
view hops around among a short list of important characters: Lincoln’s 
secretary, John Hay; Secretary of State Seward; Treasury Secretary Salmon P. 
Chase; First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln; and David Herold, the pharmacist’s clerk 
and Southern sympathizer who was later convicted of conspiring successfully with 
John Wilkes Booth and others to assassinate Lincoln early in his second term in 
office.

The Lincoln thus presented might well be expected to resemble the proverbial 
elephant as observed by several different blind men.  But in fact Vidal’s 
Lincoln is much more coherent than that, for his observers are not blind.  They 
differ widely in their opinions and interpretations of what they see, but what 
they see is identifiably the same man.  Harold Bloom looks at Vidal’s Lincoln 
and sees “[a] minority President, elected with less than 40 percent of the total 
vote.”

     Though his election committed him only to barring the extension of slavery 
to the new states, and though he was a moderate Republican and not an 
Abolitionist, Lincoln was violently feared by most of the South.  Vidal’s 
opening irony, never stated but effectively implied, is that the South beheld 
the true Lincoln long before Lincoln’s own cabinet […] The South feared an 
American Cromwell, and in Vidal’s vision, the South actually helped produce an 
American Bismarck. [104]

Vidal’s Lincoln, says Donald E. Pease, is “interested mostly in 
self-aggrandizement,” though his interest in sex was sufficient in his younger 
years that he “contracted syphilis from a prostitute and communicated this 
disease to his wife and children.” [105]   To Fred Kaplan, Vidal’s Lincoln is “a 
pragmatic and manipulative politician with one overriding vision: to save the 
Union and by saving it to transform it into a modern, industrialized, national 
state so powerfully and tightly coherent that nothing can tear it apart again.” 
[106]

This mania for “saving the Union” cannot be overestimated as a central factor in 
the motivations and behavior of Vidal’s Lincoln.  As Bloom notes, Vidal’s 
Lincoln is “a respecter of neither the states, nor the Congress, nor the Court, 
nor the parties, nor even the Constitution itself.” [107]   Pease makes the same 
point when he writes that “Vidal’s Lincoln is a political heretic who believes 
in none of the political instruments supportive of union (the Congress, the 
Courts, the Constitution) except insofar as they can supplement his will to 
absolute executive power.” [108]

Vidal’s Lincoln is also no Great Emancipator.  Vidal’s Lincoln, as Pease points 
out, “believes the emancipation of slaves entails their exportation to the West 
Indies or Liberia.” [109]   For, as Kaplan notes, though he is “[o]pposed to 
slavery, Lincoln does not believe slavery an issue worth fighting about.” [110] 
   Vidal’s Lincoln tells the assembled delegates of the Southern Peace 
Conference that met with him shortly after his election that “I will do what I 
can to give assurance and reassurance to the Southern states that we mean them 
no harm.  It is true that I was elected to prevent the extension of slavery to 
the new territories of the Union.  But what is now the status quo in the 
Southern states is beyond my power – or desire – ever to alter.”  “I have never 
been an abolitionist,” he tells his Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton. To a 
delegation of black freemen that comes to meet him at the White House, Vidal’s 
Lincoln declares that “your race is suffering, in my judgment, the greatest 
wrong inflicted on any people.  But even when you cease to be slaves you are 
still a long way from being placed on an equality with the white race.”  His 
secretary, John Hay, sitting in on the meeting, reflects that the president “was 
unshaken in his belief that the colored race was inferior to the white.”

     The fact that Lincoln had always found it difficult to accept any sort of 
natural equality between the races stemmed, Hay thought, from his own experience 
as a man born with no advantage of any kind, who had then gone to the top of the 
world.  Lincoln had no great sympathy for those who felt that external 
circumstances had held them back.

Early in his second term, Vidal’s Lincoln informs Congressman Elihu Washburne 
(R-Illinois) of his intention to “reimburse the slave-owners” for their freed 
slaves.  This, he tells Washburne, “will […] be a quick way of getting money 
into the South for reconstruction.”  In addition to the money he’ll need for 
that plan, he adds, “we’ll need money to colonize as many Negroes as we can in 
Central America.”  Washburne is somewhat astonished that the president still 
favors such a plan.  “When you get hold of an idea,” he says to Lincoln, “you 
don’t ever let it go, do you?”  Lincoln replies: “Not until I find a better one. 
  Can you imagine what life in the South will be like if the Negroes stay?” [111]

Vidal’s Lincoln is firm in his belief that slave-owners should be compensated 
for their loss and that the freed slaves should be deported.  He is also firm in 
his belief that both these issues are merely tangential to the war raging 
between the United States and the Confederate States.  Late in 1861, when the 
rogue Union general John C. Frémont declares martial law in Missouri (a border 
state) and announces that he will “confiscate the property of all secessionists, 
including their slaves, who were to be freed,” Vidal’s Lincoln declares “with 
anguish, to Seward, ‘This is a war for a great national idea, the Union, and now 
Frémont has tried to drag the Negro into it!’”  As Vidal sees it, this 
understanding of the war was not only Lincoln’s, but also that of other 
prominent Americans of the time.  Early in 1863, for example, not long after the 
president has delivered his annual message to Congress, Vidal’s John Hay finds 
himself in conversation with the lawyer, diplomat, and newspaperman Charles 
Eames (1812-1867), who assures him that “what the war is about” is “the 
principle that the Union cannot be dissolved, ever.”  Later that year, when 
Union forces under General George G. Meade finally won a decisive victory over 
Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, Meade 
telegraphed the White House, according to Vidal’s account, that he now looked 
“to the army for greater efforts to drive from our soil every vestige of the 
presence of the invader.”  Vidal’s Lincoln does not like Meade’s choice of 
words.  “Of course, Pennsylvania is our soil,” he tells Hay.  “But so is 
Virginia.  So are the Carolinas.  So is Texas. They are forever our soil.  That 
is what the war is about and these damned fools cannot grasp it; or will not 
grasp it.  The whole country is our soil.  I cannot fathom such men.” [112]

Fully in keeping with this understanding of what the war is all about is 
Lincoln’s view of how reconstruction should be handled once the war is won.  The 
Radical Republicans take the formation of the Confederate States of America at 
face value: “the states in rebellion were out of the Union and should be treated 
as an enemy nation’s conquered provinces.”

     But Lincoln’s line was unwavering.  The Union was absolutely indivisible. 
No state could ever leave it; therefore no state had ever left it.  Certain 
rebellious elements had seen fit to make war against the central government, but 
when those elements were put down all would be as it was and the Southern states 
would send representatives to Congress, exactly as they had done in the past. [113]

But, of course, after the war, nothing was as it was before the war.  Not only 
had 600,000 Americans lost their lives in the conflict, but another 400,000 were 
wounded, many of whom were crippled for life.  Altogether, nearly 1,000,000 
Americans were casualties of the war, out of a total population of a little more 
than 31,000,000.  If three percent of the current U.S. population were to be 
killed or wounded in a war, we would be looking at nearly 9,000,000 casualties. 
  There was also extensive property damage, particularly in the South – damage 
so extensive it would be many decades before anything resembling a full economic 
recovery could be said to have taken place there.  Perhaps most important of 
all, in Vidal’s version of the years 1861-1865, a series of precedents was laid 
down by the Lincoln administration which, in the years ahead, would justify the 
steady erosion of individual liberty in the United States.

For Vidal’s Lincoln does not limit his assault on the Constitution to the 
suspension of habeas corpus.  He tells Seward not long after his first 
inauguration, “Yesterday, at three in the afternoon, I ordered every U.S. 
marshal in the country to seize the original of every telegram that has been 
sent and a copy of every telegram that has been received in the last twelve 
months.”  Seward wonders aloud about “[t]he legal basis for this seizure,” and 
Lincoln answers, “The broader powers inherent in the Constitution.”  Vidal’s 
Lincoln censors the press, locking up editors who oppose his policies.  Vidal’s 
Baron Gerolt, the Prussian minister to Washington, tells Seward that his own 
boss, Otto von Bismarck, “very much admires the way that you arrest editors but 
he dares not do the same in Prussia because he says that, unlike you, he is 
devoted to freedom of speech.”  That Vidal’s Lincoln is not in fact devoted to 
freedom of speech is made evident by his action against the former Ohio 
Congressman Clement Vallandigham, who “held that Lincoln’s war measures were 
illegal and unConstitutional [sic] and so far worse than the defection of the 
Southern States.”  Vidal’s Lincoln has Vallandigham arrested and forcibly exiled 
to the Confederacy.  Vidal’s Lincoln threatens to place New York City under 
martial law to suppress opposition to the nation’s first military conscription 
law.  Vidal’s Seward reflects in 1864 that there is now “a single-minded 
dictator in the White House, a Lord Protector of the Union by whose will alone 
the war had been prosecuted” and that “Lincoln had been able to make himself 
absolute dictator without ever letting anyone suspect that he was anything more 
than a joking, timid backwoods lawyer.”  Charlie Schuyler, the narrator of Burr, 
reappears briefly in a couple of scenes in Lincoln, and, in the novel’s closing 
pages, observes to John Hay that Bismarck “has now done the same thing to 
Germany that you tell us Mr. Lincoln did to our country.” [114]

http://lewrockwell.com/riggenbach/riggenbach3-2.html