by Gore Vidal
The headline of The New York Times story:
A FILTERED PORTRAIT OF LINCOLN COMES TO THE SMALL SCREEN.
Filtered is meant to indicate some sort of bias. A second headline was set up in type reminiscent of the National Enquirer:
THE PRODUCERS OF THE MINISERIES.
ADAPTED IT FROM GORE VIDAL’S NOVEL,
A WORK ALREADY FAULTED BY HISTORIANS.
That was the best—and pretty good, too—that the Times could do to scare off viewers. The publicist’s story was dim. There was no mention of those historians who had praised Lincoln. The caption writer found many things “troubling”; none of any consequence, except Lincoln’s attitude toward blacks.
* * *
The publicist tells us that “Lincoln hardly made” a shady bargain with Salmon P. Chase “to win his support for his 1864 reelection campaign, by offering him in return the job of chief justice.” I don’t recollect the phrase shady bargain in either book or drama. But if the publicist does not understand Lincoln’s devious game with Chase then he doesn’t understand politics in general or Lincoln in particular. Although Lincoln had ended Chase’s dream of being the Republican nominee that year, Chase could still have made trouble. Chase was also one of the few men in public life whom Lincoln genuinely disliked. In the summer of 1864, Chase, who had resigned as Lincoln’s secretary of the treasury, was making overtures to the Democratic party: “This…might mean much,” he wrote, “if the Democrats would only cut loose from slavery and go for freedom….If they would do that, I would cheerfully go for any man they might nominate.”*2 Aware of Chase’s conniving, Lincoln confided to his secretary, John Hay, “What Chase ought to do is to help his successor through his installation…; go home without making any fight and wait for a good thing hereafter, such as a vacancy on the Supreme Bench or some such matter.”*3
Lincoln played a lovely game with Chase; he even got him to stump Indiana and Ohio for him. He hinted to Chase’s friends that Chase was under serious consideration for the chief justiceship, which my publicist-critic thinks impossible because the chief justice was still alive. Unknown to the caption writer, the chief justice, Roger B. Taney, was eighty-seven years old that summer and poorly. The new president was bound to make the appointment. So there was a lot of maneuvering, by the dark of the moon, on Lincoln’s part to put Chase, in his daughter’s phrase, “on the shelf.” In exchange for not rocking the boat (supporting McClellan, say) Chase became chief justice after Taney’s death, which was after the election. Was Chase chosen because he was the best man for the job? No, he was not. Politics is bargains and their shadiness depends entirely on which side of the street you happen to be standing.
The publicist’s confusions about Lincoln and slavery and what I am supposed to have written are simply hortatory. He seems to think that I think that Lincoln was “desperately seeking a way to renege on Emancipation while at the same time spearheading the Thirteenth Amendment that abolished slavery.” This is OK for The New York Times but not for a responsible paper. Neither I nor the dramatizers ever suggested that he wanted to renege, desperately or not, on Emancipation. It will also come as news to any Lincoln scholars that the saint “spearheaded” the Thirteenth Amendment. He favored it. The spear-carriers were abolitionists, Radical Republicans. But Lincoln and the blacks is the crux of all this nonsense, and I shall address the question in due course.
* * *
From the tone of Professor Richard N. Current’s letter I fear that I may have hurt his feelings. In a covering letter to the editors of The New York Review of Books, he refers to my “personal attack” on him. As Current is as unknown to me as Lincoln was to him in his book The Lincoln Nobody Knows, I could hardly have been personal. I thought my tone in the last exchange sweetly reasonable if necessarily disciplinary. I am sorry he finds “hysterical” my “diatribe.” What I was obliged to do in his case was to take, one by one, his flat assertions that such-and-such as written by me (often it wasn’t) was untrue; and so great does he feel his emeritus weight that that was that.
Finally, about halfway through I gave up answering him. Now he is at it again. He tells us that I have “pretended” to be a scholar-squirrel; I give the impression (false it would seem) that I have visited libraries and looked at old newspapers, etc. Now, in the case of Lincoln, I have relied heavily on the diaries of John Hay and Salmon P. Chase since I observe Lincoln from the viewpoint of each. Current seems to think that I could not possibly have read these diaries despite internal evidence to the contrary. As for old newspapers, I used a reporter’s shorthand version of the Gettysburg Address, which differs somewhat from the official text. But, by and large, I have always relied heavily on the work of scholars in my reflections on American history and, in a way, I have become their ideal reader because I have no professional ax to grind, no tenure to seek, no prizes or fellowships to win.
How does a scholar differ from a scholar-squirrel? The squirrel is a careerist who mindlessly gathers little facts for professional reasons. I don’t in the least mind this sort of welfare for the “educated” middle class. They must live, too. But when they start working in concert to revise history to suit new political necessities, I reach for my ancient Winchester.
Current tells us that “[Vidal] implied that he was a greater Lincoln authority than Stephen B. Oates or any other academic historian except David Herbert Donald.” As I pointed out in the last exchange, it was Newsweek that found me to be (in reference to Lincoln’s alleged syphilis) a better historian than Mr. Oates, whom I have never read. I do not “imply” (Current has a guardhouse lawyer’s way with weasel-words) that I am a better historian than anyone. This is the sort of thing that obsesses academic careerists. Scholar-squirrels spend their lives trying to be noted and listed and graded and seeded because such rankings determine their careers. Those of us engaged in literature and, perhaps, in history as well don’t think in such terms. We also don’t go on Pulitzer Prize committees to give a friend a prize which, in due course, when he is on the committee, he will give us for our squirrelings.
Current feels that I “grossly distort” Lincoln by showing him “as ignorant of economics, disregardful of the Constitution, and unconcerned with the rights of blacks.” Even a casual reading of Lincoln shows that I spend quite a lot of time demonstrating the President’s concern with the rights of blacks, and where and how they should be exercised. Disregardful of the Constitution? No other president until recent years has shown so perfect a disregard for that document in the guise of “military necessity.” The chief justice himself thought the president so disregardful that he hurled the Constitution at his head. Lincoln just ducked; and the corpus of one Mr. Merryman of Baltimore was not delivered up for trial, as the chief justice had ordered. I should like Current to demonstrate (elsewhere, please) Lincoln’s mastery of economics. Meanwhile, I highly recommend Lincoln’s Preparation for Greatness by Paul Simon (yes, the Illinois senator),*4 where he records Lincoln’s activities in the state House of Representatives. During four terms, Lincoln and eight other school-of-Clay legislators, known as “the long Nine,” nearly bankrupted the state with a “Big Improvements” bill that took Illinois forty-five years to pay off. The story about Lincoln’s confusions over who signed the greenbacks occurs in Sandburg; and is public domain.*5 I’m sorry if Current finds my last “screed” somewhat “maundering” but there are a limited number of ways of saying “false” without actually using the word.
* * *
Current, lord of language, wants Lincoln to be Will Rogers, all folksy and homey. But Lincoln’s own language resounds with what Current calls “Briticisms.” Lincoln’s prose was drenched in Shakespeare. Of course, H.L. Mencken was not the first to try to separate American English from English. But in our country, he has been the prime instigator. Finally, prose is all a matter of ear. A word like screed, for instance, is now used only by the semiliterate when they want to sound highfaluti
n, usually in the course of a powerful letter to the editor.
We shall go no further into the word hooker other than to observe that a word, in different contexts, picks up additional meanings. A copperhead is a snake is a traitor is a Democrat, depending on the year the word is used and the user. One authority gives a New York origin for hooker. In Washington, in the Civil War, General Hooker’s name added new resonance. Another authority says the word comes from the verb to hook, as the whores in London hooked arms with potential customers as a means of introduction.
Current affects not to understand what I mean by “agreed-upon facts” as the stuff of history. He would like the reader to think that I invent something and get someone to agree to it. The point to my long disquisition on The New York Times is to show that one cannot trust any primary source. If the Times says that I said Thoreau wrote something that Henry Adams actually wrote, my “error” becomes a fact because the Times is a primary source for scholar-squirrels—scholars, too. To take at face value any newspaper story is to be dangerously innocent. But one can’t challenge everything that has ever been printed. So, through weariness and ignorance, there is a general consensus, which then becomes what I call an “agreed-upon” fact. We all decide not to worry it. Yet in two standard biographies of John Hay, though the writers agree upon the year of his birth, each gives a different natal month. I have also found that whenever I do make a mistake in writing about history, it is usually because I have followed an acknowledged authority who turns out wrong.
On Emancipation and the exemption of certain areas for political reasons: Lincoln maintained slavery in the slave states within the Union and freed those in the Confederacy. Current is more than usually confused here. He thinks Lincoln maintained slavery in “liberated” or “restored” sections of Louisiana because the Union controlled these counties and no political necessity was involved. Like so many hagiographers, Current refuses to face the fact that before Lincoln became a saint he was a superb politician. He did nothing without political calculation. He was also a master of telling different people different things, causing no end of trouble for later worshipers who can’t deal with all the contradictions. Emancipation was as much a political as a military necessity for Lincoln. For instance, when Lincoln appointed the proslavery Edward Stanly governor of occupied North Carolina, it was with the understanding that Lincoln would not interfere with slavery in the states. When the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, according to one professor of history,
Stanly went to Washington intending to resign. After several talks with Lincoln, however, Stanly was satisfied. He returned to his job, but first he called at the office of James C. Welling, editor of the National Intelligencer. Welling wrote in his diary: “Mr. Stanly said that the President had stated to him that the proclamation had become a civil necessity to prevent the Radicals from openly embarrassing the government in the conduct of the war.”
So Lincoln speaks with forked tongue in this passage from Richard N. Current’s The Lincoln Nobody Knows.*6 Personally, I’d not have let this agreed-upon fact sail so easily by. Wouldn’t Stanly lie to Welling, to explain his behavior? Or might Welling have misunderstood what Stanly said Lincoln said? Or, unthinkable thought, could Lincoln have lied to Stanly? Current accepts too readily a story highly discreditable to the Great Emancipator he would now have us worship in all his seamless integrity.
* * *
Here comes Grant again. One thing about Current, he knows not defeat. I “asserted that Ulysses S. Grant ‘had gone into the saddlery business, where he had attractively failed.’ ” The “assertion” in the novel was John Hay’s, in an idle moment, about a man he knew nothing much of in 1862. Triumphantly, Current now writes, “The point is that Grant had never gone into the saddlery, harness, or leather-goods business and therefore could not have failed at it. He was only an employee.” This is the sort of thing that gives mindless pedantry a bad name. Even in Current’s super American English, it is possible to fail at a job by being fired or being carried if your father owns the place. “At thirty-seven Grant had to go back [home] and admit that he was still a failure: the boy who could not bargain for a horse had become a man who could not bring in a crop of potatoes or collect a batch of bills. It was humiliating.”*7 After a year as a clerk, under the managership of his younger brother, Grant was saved by the war and, as he himself wrote, “I never went into our leather store after the meeting” (where he got his command), “to put up a package or do other business.”
But note the Current technique throughout this supremely unimportant business. He zeroes in on an idle remark by someone who knows nothing about Grant other than his failure in civilian life, most recently in leather goods. The man who said it is a character living in history not looking back on it. Current seems to think that I should supply the indifferent Hay with the full and absolute knowledge of Grant’s affairs that a scholar-squirrel could find out but a contemporary stranger could hardly have known. Owing to Current’s uneasy grasp of any kind of English he seems to think that to fail at a business means you must own the business and go broke. That’s one meaning. But you can also fail by losing your job or by being tolerated as a hopeless employee by your family. Current wonders why I don’t answer more of his charges. They are almost all of them as specious as this.
One of the signs of obsession is an inability to tell the difference between what matters and what does not. The obsessed gives everything the same weight. Current juggles words this way and that to try to “prove” what is often pointless and unprovable. There is an issue here but he can’t focus on it. The issue is Lincoln and the blacks. The United States was then and is now a profoundly racist society that pretends not to be and so requires the likes of Current to disguise the American reality from the people, while menacing the society’s critics, most successfully, it should be noted, within the academy where the squirrels predominate. I shall indulge Current on two minor points and then get to what matters.
Lincoln’s bowels. This occupies a few lines in my book. It is necessary to mention the subject because one of Booth’s conspirators tried to poison Lincoln’s laxative, which was made up at Thompson’s drugstore; whether or not prescription clerk David Herold actually poisoned the medicine is not agreed upon.*8 Current thinks that constipation is a central theme to the book, the Emancipator as Martin Luther. Herndon tells us: “Mr. Lincoln had an evacuation, a passage, about once a week, ate blue mass. Were you to read his early speeches thoroughly and well, you could see his, then, coarse nature, his materialism, etc.” That’s all. Since Herndon shared an office with Lincoln for seventeen years there is no reason for this subject not to have been mentioned. After all, many of Lincoln’s famed funny stories concerned the outhouse. Current should read them. Also, Current might have given some thought to the sentence after constipation—Lincoln’s early “coarse nature, his materialism”; this is provocative.
But Current is now prey to obsession: “Vidal would have us believe that every time Lincoln defecated he reported it to Herndon.” I would not have anyone believe such a thing since Herndon in my book makes no mention of Lincoln’s bowels, a subject of interest only to the putative poisoners. I fear Current is now sailing right round the bend. He claims that I said on NBC’s Today show (he seems to be watching rather too much TV) that Lincoln definitely gave Mary Todd syphilis and that she had died of paresis that had affected the brain. He quotes me as saying that one is not “under oath” on television so that one can presumably tell lies. When I say I’m not under oath, I mean that I’m free to speculate on matters that cannot be proven. I would not write that Lincoln gave his wife syphilis, but I can certainly, in conversation, give an opinion. Since my book stops in 1865 and Mary Todd didn’t die until 1882, I never tried to “prove” the subject. But years ago a doctor friend in Chicago told me that an autopsy had been performed on Mrs. Lincoln (but only on the head, an odd procedure even then) and that the brain was found to have physically
deteriorated, ruling out mere neurosis, the usual explanation for her behavior. I didn’t write about this and have never followed it up. If Current can tear himself away from the Larry King show, he might have a go at it.
As for Lincoln’s syphilis, I use the words Herndon himself used: “About the year 1835–36 Mr. Lincoln went to Beardstown and during a devilish passion had connection with a girl and caught the disease [syphilis]. Lincoln told me this….About the year 1836–37 Lincoln moved to Springfield….At this time I suppose that the disease hung to him and, not wishing to trust our physicians, he wrote a note to Doctor Drake.” Since there is no reason for Herndon to lie about this, I suppose we should all agree upon it as a fact. But since no saint has ever had syphilis, Herndon is a liar and so the consensus finds against him. I don’t much admire this sort of thing. Current, historian and master of the American language, now reveals another facet to a protean nature that nobody knows: Current, diagnostician:
If Vidal had the slightest concern for truth, he could easily have learned from such a reference as The Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy that Mrs. Lincoln’s symptoms and those of a paretic do not correspond.
This is a brave leap in the dark and, once again, Current, the Mr. Magoo of the History Department, lands on his face. From the Merck Manual:
General paresis or demential paralytica generally affects patients in their 40s and 50s. The onset is usually insidious and manifested by behavior changes. It also may be present with convulsions or epileptic attacks and there may be aphasia or a transient hemiparesis. Changes in the patient include irritability, difficulty in concentration, memory deterioration, and defective judgment. Headaches and insomnia are associated with fatigue and lethargy. The patient’s appearance becomes shabby, unkempt, and dirty; emotional instability leads to frequent weeping and temper tantrums; neurasthenia, depression, and delusions of grandeur with lack of insight may be present.