[Peace-discuss] Lincoln revised

[C. G. Estabrook]

"Wealthy southerner"?  You're implying he's a racist and hence anti-Lincoln?

In fact he was born in NY (West Point) and reared in DC (and Phillips Exeter).

His portrait of Lincoln was controversial when it appeared but not dismissed as 
uninformed.

This description is taken from a survey of revisionist history -- i.e., American 
history that abandoned the Cold War propaganda positions.

You praise Eric Foner's views. "Foner's book [Reconstruction: America's 
Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (1988)] represents the mature and settled 
Revisionist perspective," according to historian Michael Perman.  --CGE


Morton K. Brussel wrote:
> 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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