[Peace-discuss] Lincoln revised

[Morton K. Brussel]

As a wealthy southerner, and problematic historian, it is hard to have  
any assurance in what Vidal writes, especially with his "historical"  
fiction. Is it historical, with records for proof, or is it his  
febrile imagination? So I'm not sure what the value is in quoting  
this, except to put Lincoln in the worst possible light.

--mkb

On May 22, 2009, at 1:03 AM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:

> [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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