Although Kevin Levin has already highlighted this brilliant revisionist (see what I did there?) understanding of emancipation, I think it’s worth presenting again, just so we can see how the minds of some passionate Confederate heritage advocates function:
Day: March 2, 2014
Quote of the Week: February 23-March 1, 2014
Don’t Tell Me What I Don’t Want to Know
(this post originally appeared at Civil Warriors on October 14th, 2006)
One of the more interesting moments in historical research is when one comes across information that challenges a long-cherished account that has been accepted as unchallenged truth. For me, one of those moments happened in the early 1990s. I was starting work on several articles that helped to establish the foundation for my biography of Ulysses S. Grant: one concerned the Lincoln-Grant relationship. I’ve always found it useful to return to original accounts whenever possible, instead of relying upon filtered versions of the accounts, and it was with that in mind that I revisited Alexander McClure’s account of a conversation he had with Abraham Lincoln in the aftermath of Shiloh. Here is the key portion:
“I appealed to Lincoln for his own sake to remove Grant at once, and, in giving my reasons for it, I simply voiced the admittedly overwhelming protest from the loyal people of the land against Grant’s continuance in command. I could form no judgment during the conversation as to what effect my arguments had upon him beyond the fact that he was greatly distressed at this new complication. When I had said everything that could be said from my standpoint, we lapsed into silence. Lincoln remained silent for what seemed a very long time. He then gathered himself up in his chair and said in a tone of earnestness that I shall never forget: ‘I can’t spare this man; he fights.’”
The only problem is that the rest of McClure’s account argues against the authenticity of this conversation. McClure advanced a series of claims that simply had no basis in the historical record, claiming that Lincoln had somehow arranged for Halleck to come to Grant’s army after Shiloh and make Grant second-in-command in order to keep him under cover for a while. At the right time, according to McClure, Lincoln would restore Grant to command. None of that is supported by a shred of evidence. Halleck had planned to join Grant before he learned of Shiloh; it was Halleck’s idea to place Grant in a second-in-command slot (and Grant didn’t like it); Lincoln (through Stanton) had asked Halleck whether Grant was at fault for Shiloh (suggesting Lincoln could well spare him); Lincoln did not restore Grant to command (Halleck’s departure to become general-in-chief and the dispersal of Halleck’s joint force after Corinth took care of that); and there is absolutely no documentation to support any of the claims McClure makes. So why trust the quote? If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s not a football.
I published my findings and was honored when Don Fehrenbacher, one of the greatest of Lincoln scholars, cited my findings in the book his wife and he assembled that evaluated quotes attributed to Lincoln. If one could question the “I can’t spare this man” quote, then Lincoln’s ambivalence about Grant, including his willingness to lend an ear to John McClernand and his decision to investigate Grant’s command in the spring of 1863 make more sense. No one offered any evidence to suggest I was wrong.
It didn’t matter.
Geoffrey Perret embraced the old story in his 1997 biography, even though his footnote cited my article in Lincoln Lore on this issue; Jean Edward Smith endorsed the old tale as well in his 2001 biography. It’s appeared on websites that cite my own Grant biography, which is amusing. See
http://www.mrlincolnswhitehouse.org/inside.asp?ID=133&subjectID=2
for an example.
Why would one want to continue to use a story that is not only not supported by evidence, but rather clearly contradicted by it, and where the veracity of the account in which the story appears is questionable, to say the least?
You tell me.
Crossroads 