[Peace-discuss] Lincoln revised

[John W.]

On Sat, May 23, 2009 at 9:15 PM, LAURIE SOLOMON <LAURIE at advancenet.net>wrote:

I - for one - fail to see what is so damn important about who gets where
> first.  Does it really make a difference if poets or novelists or
> journalists or historians or etc. get there first.  All that really matters
> is that someone gets there.


It didn't seem to make much difference to the Europeans that the Native
Americans had gotten here first.  But Carl is an aesthete, so merely
"getting there" is not enough.  One must get there with style and grace.




> -----Original Message-----
> From: peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net
> [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of C. G.
> Estabrook
> Sent: Friday, May 22, 2009 1:03 AM
> To: Peace-discuss
> Subject: [Peace-discuss] Lincoln revised
>
> [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
>
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