Unwanted Facts, blah, blah, blah

[L Verge]

Thank you both for those unsolicited words of kindness. I have had a wonderful team of mentors and friends over the years who have really earned me those accolades.

To add some fuel to the fire regarding depending on Eisenschiml's "contributions" to the study of the Lincoln assassination, I would like to quote several passages that I ran across today while looking for something else. In a 1990 issue of the Surratt Courier, we carried excerpts from an article entitled "The Historian vs. Gamesman" which ran in Civil War History, Vol. XXXVI, No. 1, published by Kent State University.

...Eisenschiml craved wealth, recognition, acceptance. But because he was both brighter and more self-assertive than other people, he craved something else. He explained it in his autobiography, indeed in the book's title. As a youth and as a chemist, the periods of his life with which the work principally concerned, he was "Without Fame." Eisenschiml longed obsessively for fame.

Why Was Lincoln Murdered? made him famous, but its dismissal by most historians as an advocate's brief, rather than a judicious effort to discover truth, infuriated him, and he retaliated by denouncing the historical profession. Like professional chemists, historians lacked imagination and curiosity...

Historians rejected the Eisenschiml thesis because it was unreasonable and wrong. Eisenschiml freely admitted that there was no evidence of the kind admissible in court to establish a relationship between Stanton and the assassination conspiracy, thus protecting his incessant pretensions of scientific objectivity. But by implication and innuendo and by the raising and phrasing of questions ... he insinuated throughout his book that such a relationship had existed. When reviewers observed that that was what he had done, he became indignant...

...Eisenschiml thrived on controversy and cultivated the role of outsider, of maverick, of non-conformist, for it was one sure way to prove that he was what he most admired - an original...

...Yet, the Eisenschiml thesis was a deliberate falsification of the American past. It dishonored the reputation of a great secretary of war and true friend of Lincoln and distorted the nature of political controversy in the wartime North. In short, it misrepresented the history of the country's most traumatic incident, Lincoln's murder, and of its most profound experience, the Civil War. Further, it helped condition Americans to assume the existence of sinister conspiracies behind other events, past and present, great and small, and thus encouraged irrationality and the simplistic search for villains upon whom to blame all difficulties...

I urge readers here to pay special attention to the last paragraph and to understand the lasting effects that speculative and spurious historical writing can have on history.