by Gore Vidal
This exactly describes Mrs. Lincoln’s behavior as reported by contemporaries and by such sympathetic biographers as Ruth Painter Randall and the Turners.*9 I am in Current’s debt for leading me to this smoking, as it were, gun. But where, I wonder, is the autopsy report? Could Robert Lincoln have destroyed all copies? Has Walter Reed collected it in its great presidential net?
* * *
Current admits to changing his mind about Lincoln in the course of many years of squirreling. But although he no longer holds to his views on Lincoln and the blacks as presented in The Lincoln Nobody Knows (a book, he’ll be relieved to know, I never took very seriously, largely because of the megalomaniacal title in which he has inserted himself), he does find, as do I, disconcerting the way that Lincoln lovers (no hater would be allowed tenure anywhere in bravery’s home) keep changing the image to conform to new policies. When the civil rights movement took off in the sixties, uppity blacks toyed with the notion that Lincoln was a honkie (Julius Lester, in Look Out, Whitey!, etc.). Immediately the agreed-upon facts of earlier times (colonize the freed slaves, reimburse the slave owners, etc.) had to be papered over and a new set of agreed-upon facts were hurried into place, so that LaWanda Cox could deliver a new verdict: “There is no mistaking the fact that by 1865 Lincoln’s concern for the future of the freed people was directed to their condition and rights at home, rather than abroad.”*10
This is the new line, and I have no particular quarrel with it. But certain hagiographers are now pretending that Lincoln was never serious about colonization, which is a falsification of the record. In Lincoln’s second annual message to Congress (December 1, 1862) he said: “I cannot make it better known than it is, that I strongly favor colonization.” Certainly for the first two years of his administration Lincoln was mad on the subject. Gradually, he seems to have let the notion go because of the logistical impossibility of shipping out three or four million people who were less than enthusiastic about a long sea voyage to the respective wilds of Haiti, Panama, Liberia.
Current says that he “did not…state it as my opinion…that Lincoln remained a colonizationist.” That was wise, because no one knows. I don’t give my personal view either though I did note (but did not write) that usually when Lincoln started in on the necessity of reimbursing the slave owners, colonization was seldom far behind: the two seemed twinned in his head. The revisionists now admired by Current maintain that the only evidence that Lincoln at the end was still pondering colonization is Ben Butler’s testimony that the president mentioned it to him some time after February 3, 1865. I found most intriguing Mark E. Neely, Jr.’s case that Lincoln could not have talked to Butler at the time that Butler says he did, because Butler had written Secretary of War Stanton a letter assuring him that he had stayed in New York until March 23, in conformance with War Department policy that forbade officers from visiting the capital without permission.*11 This is a scholarly not squirrelly finding. But if one is to factor out Butler as a crucial witness because he is a liar, why believe the letter to Stanton? If Dan Sickles and other general officers slipped into town without permission, why not the irrepressible Butler? My point is that when one decides a source is apt to be untrue (Herndon, Butler, The New York Times), how does one choose what to believe—if anything—from the discredited source?
I understand the politics behind the current (no pun) revisionists but I think they rather overdo it. One dizzy squirrel claims that after 1862, Lincoln discarded the idea of colonization with indecent haste. Yet July 1, 1864, John Hay writes, “I am glad the President has sloughed off that idea of colonization.”*12 For obvious reasons, the revisionists never quote the next sentence. “I have always thought it a hideous & barbarous humbug & the thievery of Pomeroy and Kock have about converted him to the same belief.” This sounds a lot more tentative than the revisionists would like us to believe. Perhaps they will now have to establish that Hay is untrustworthy.
In any event, when the black separatist movement starts up in the next decade, new revisionists will supersede the present lot, and Butler’s probity will be rehabilitated and Lincoln the colonizer reestablished.
* * *
On the dust jacket, between the title Lincoln and my name there is a one-inch-high caveat: A Novel. I tell the story of Lincoln’s presidency from the imagined points of view of his wife, of E. B. Washburne, John Hay, Salmon P. Chase, and, marginally, David Herold, one of the conspirators. I never enter Lincoln’s mind and, unlike the historian or biographer, I do not make magisterial judgments or quibble with others in the field. The five points of view were dictated, in the case of Hay and Chase, because they kept diaries, skimpily I fear, and many of their letters are available. What I aimed to achieve was balance. Hay admired Lincoln, Chase hated him, Mary Todd loved him, and so on. Each sees him in a different way, under different circumstances.
I am also reflecting upon the nature of fact as observed in fiction, and, indeed, fiction in fact. That is why the scholar-squirrels fascinate me much more than the scholars because they are like barometers, ever responsive to any change in the national weather. This bad period in American history has been, paradoxically, a good period for American history writing. There have never been so many intelligent biographies (yes, they are often written in academe but not by the squirrels) and interesting historians. But pure history, if such a thing could be, is flawed because “history will never reveal to us what connections there are, and at what times, between…” For the novelist it is the imagining of connections that brings life to what was. Finally, “History,” as Tolstoy also observed, “would be an excellent thing if only it were true.” Perhaps, in the end, truth is best imagined, particularly if it is firmly grounded in the disagreed- as well as agreed-upon facts.
My side of these exchanges is now complete. Let others argue elsewhere.
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
August 18, 1988
*1 Burr; Lincoln; 1876; Empire; Washington, D.C.
*2 See Robert B. Warden, An Account of the Private Life and Public Services of Salmon Portland Chase (Cincinnati, 1874), p. 627.
*3 Tyler Dennett, ed., Lincoln and the Civil War in the Diaries and Letters of John Hay (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1939), p. 203.
*4 Paul Simon, Lincoln’s Preparation for Greatness: The Illinois Legislative Years (University of Oklahoma Press, 1965).
*5 Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1939), Volume I.
*6 New York: McGraw-Hill (1958), p. 227.
*7 William S. McFeely, Grant: A Biography (New York: Norton, 1981), p. 64.
*8 Louis J. Weichmann, A True History of the Assassination (New York: Vintage, 1977), p. 44.
*9 Ruth Painter Randall, Mary Lincoln: Biography of a Marriage (New York: Little, Brown, 1953); Justin G. Turner and Linda Levitt Turner, eds., Mary Todd Lincoln: Her Life and Letters (New York: Knopf, 1972).
*10 LaWanda Cox, Lincoln and Black Freedom: A Study in Presidential Leadership (University of South Carolina Press, 1981), p. 23.
*11 Mark E. Neely, Jr., “Abraham Lincoln and Black Colonization: Benjamin Butler’s Spurious Testimony,” Civil War History, Vol. XXV (March 1979), pp. 77–83.
*12 Diaries and Letters of John Hay, p. 203.
APPENDIX
Shortly before I gave this talk to the National Press Club, I spoke to the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination League in Washington (March 13, 1988). I used the same text, giving the history of the National Security State. Then instead of suggesting some things that might be done to help free ourselves from our masters, I addressed the thousand Arab-Americans on problems of specific interest to them. In the audience was the most dreaded of The New Republic’s secret agents, code name: Weasel, who, despite a shoulder-length gray fright wig, was easily identified by his tiny ruby-red rabid eyes. Later he characterized my remarks on the National Security State as “cheap patrician rant”—whatever
that is; I’ve never heard a patrician rant the way I do, and at such cost: He characterized what follows not, surprisingly, as “anti-Semitic” but as “nativist,” and accused me of now cheating the Arabs as I had once cheated the Jews. This is plainly code, meant to be understood only by the initiate. The Weasel knows:
It has been my fate—or, perhaps, function—to give warnings long before the politicians and the press are able to absorb them. After all, they are in place to give a rosy view of the National Security State, and they give good value for their salaries. Since I’m not paid, I can ruminate; and share my findings.
I am here today because I said much of what I’ve said just now in New York City at the Royale Theatre, on January 11, 1986. I also passed on the news that the American empire had officially died the previous year when we became, after seventy-one years, a debtor nation, and the money power had gone from New York to Tokyo. I was predictably attacked by the press that serves the National Security State. I was also attacked by those simple Jesus Christers who have been taught all their lives to fear and loathe communism, whatever it may be, and I was also attacked by that not-so-simple Israel lobby which never ceases to demonize the Soviet Union in order to make sure that half the federal revenue goes to defense, out of which the state of Israel, the lobby’s sole preoccupation, is financed. I was promptly attacked by that small group of Israel Firsters, who call themselves neoconservatives. I hated my country, they said, because I had criticized that National Security State in which, like a prison, we have all been obliged to live—and go broke—for forty years.
I responded to my critics with characteristic sweetness, turning the other fist as is my wont. I said that as much as I hated what our rulers have done to my country, it was not us, the country, who were at fault. I then added, while we’re on the subject of our respective homelands, I’m not so keen about yours, which is Israel. Until then, no one had really challenged the lobby in so public a way. Congress and president and press are all more or less bought or otherwise intimidated by this self-described “sexy” lobby. While the sins and errors of Israel are openly debated in Israel itself, there has been only fearful silence in bravery’s home and freedom’s land. Well, I lanced the boil. Naturally, I was called an anti-Semite, usually with the adjective “frenzied” or “virulent” attached.
Now, at the risk of hurting more feelings, I must tell you that I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. I see no good in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam—good people, yes, but any religion based on a single…well, frenzied and virulent god, is not as useful to the human race as, say, Confucianism, which is not a religion but an ethical and educational system that has worked pretty well for twenty-five hundred years. So you see I am ecumenical in my dislike for the Book. But, like it or not, the Book is there; and because of it people die; and the world is in danger.
Israel had the bad luck to be invented at a moment in history when the nation-state was going out of style. These two clumsy empires, the Soviet Union and the United States are now becoming unstuck. Only by force can the Soviets control their Armenians and Moslems and Mongols, and only by force can we try to control a whole series of escalating race wars here at home, as well as the brisk occupation of the southern tier of the United States by those Hispanics from whom we stole land in 1847. The world, if we survive, will be one not of nations but of international cartels, of computerized money hurtling between capitals, of countries making what contributions they can to a more or less homogeneous world economy. Simultaneously, armies and flags and centralized administrations will give way to a regionalism that is interdependent with everyone else on earth.
Is this possible? Well, Switzerland is a splendid small-scale model of what the world could be. Four languages, four races, four sets of superstitions about one another—all live most harmoniously in a small area where they make a fortune out of those of us who haven’t learned that we are living in a post-national security world. When we finally stop giving to Israel the money that Japan so reluctantly lends us, peace will have to be made. If a cantonal system is set up, some areas of Palestine will be Orthodox Jewish; others Shiite Moslem; others secular Jewish and/or Moslem and/or Christian. In any event, the Great Bronze Age realtor in the sky will finally have to accept that none of those desirable rental properties between the Nile and the Euphrates can ever again include in the lease a discrimination clause.
So what shall we celebrate this joyous Sunday? The slow but highly visible collapse, due to bankruptcy, of the National Security Council-68 state and its ramshackle empire. Once we Americans are free of this dangerous state and its imperial burden we may not have heaven on earth, but we will certainly have lessened the current hell, and got our country back.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
GORE VIDAL wrote his first novel, Williwaw (1946), at the age of nineteen while overseas in World War II.
During four decades as a writer, Vidal has written novels, plays, short stories, and essays. He has also been a political activist. As a Democratic candidate for Congress from upstate New York, he received the most votes of any Democrat in a half century. From 1970 to 1972 he was co-chairman of the People’s Party. In California’s 1982 Democratic primary for U.S. Senate, he polled a half million votes, and came in second in a field of nine.
In 1948 Vidal wrote the highly praised international best seller The City and the Pillar. This was followed by The Judgment of Paris and the prophetic Messiah. In the fifties Vidal wrote plays for live television and films for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. One of the television plays became the successful Broadway play Visit to a Small Planet (1957). Directly for the theater he wrote the prize-winning hit The Best Man (1960).
In 1964 Vidal returned to the novel. In succession, he created three remarkable works: Julian, Washington, D.C., Myra Breckinridge. Each was a number-one best seller in the United States and England. In 1973 Vidal published the popular novel, Burr, as well as a volume of collected essays, Homage to Daniel Shays. In 1976 he published yet another number-one best seller, 1876, a part of his on-going American chronicle, which now consists of—in chronological order—Burr, Lincoln, 1876, Empire, and Washington, D.C.
In 1981 Vidal published Creation, “his best novel,” according to The New York Times. In 1982 Vidal won the American Book Critics Circle Award for criticism for his collection of essays, The Second American Revolution. In 1984 Vidal published his most popular novel, Lincoln. A propos Duluth (1983), Italo Calvino wrote (La Republica, Rome): “Vidal’s development…along that line from Myra Breckinridge to Duluth is crowned with great success, not only for the density of comic effects, each one filled with meaning, not only for the craftsmanship in construction, put together like a clock-work which fears no word processor, but because this latest book holds its own built-in theory, that which the author calls his ‘après-poststructuralism.’ I consider Vidal to be a master of that new form which is taking shape in world literature and which we may call the hyper-novel or the novel elevated to the square or to the cube.”
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