Lincoln writing the Gettysburg Address on the train.

[STS Lincolnite]

(12-03-2019 09:07 AM)LincolnMan Wrote:  Since we have new members here since this thread was posted I'd like to ask again if there was any connection between Lincoln and Pickett?

I found this question asked in another online forum.
https://civilwartalk.com/threads/fact-or...ett.87367/

It sounds like there is no real connection at all and that much of the so-called connection was concocted by Pickett’s widow.

The following is part of an answer from a poster called “Copperhead-mi” on the forum linked above:

I checked Pickett biographer, Edward G. Longacre's book and it stated the following about the oft told Lincoln - Pickett story:
"In the late summer of 1841 Stuart apparently confided to Captain Symingtqn that were he reelected to Congress the following February he would make the nomination in George's favor. Late in August Andrew Johnston wrote Stuart asking whether George's family might 'look for his appointment in February next.' Presumably he was assured that such was the case. In the end Stuart decided not to stand for reelection but came through anyway. On April 19, 1842, Secretary of War John Canfield Spencer sent George his conditional appointment to the Military Academy. The young man promptly returned his acceptance along with his father's consent to George's serving in the U.S. Army 'eight years unless sooner discharged.' Because Stuart had once been a law partner of Abraham Lincoln, tales later surfaced that the latter had helped obtain George Pickett's appointment. An equally enduring myth is that Lincoln himself secured Pickett's place in the West Point Class of 1846-a neat trick since Lincoln was not a national Congressman at the time George applied and thus lacked the power to nominate applicants.

"In the writings she published after her husband's death, La Salle Corbell Pickett created the enduring fiction that Lincoln not only secured her late husband's appointment but that the future President took an avid interest in his Academy career as well as in his service as a Confederate officer. To support her claims, Mrs. Pickett fabricated at least two letters from the Illinois legislator to his young protege, one supposedly written before and one shortly after George's matriculation at the Academy. The general's widow was also responsible for the fiction that her husband was so grateful to Lincoln for his interest and assistance that he never permitted anyone, in his presence, to criticize his benefactor.

"Mrs. Pickett went to elaborate lengths to persuade her readers that her husband and the President remained close even in the throes of civil war. She concocted and several times repeated the tale that Lincoln, visiting dying Richmond at the close of the conflict, stopped by the house at Sixth and Leigh, introduced himself to the general's widow, assured her that he bore no ill will toward her husband, and exchanged kisses with one-year-old George Pickett, Jr. By evoking the image of the.martyred President, a supposed friend of the South whose lenient plan of Reconstruction had been thwarted by radicals in his own party, Mrs. Pickett invested her story with mythic properties while exploiting a reunion theme popular with her postwar audience. By the time Mrs. Pickett wrote, on the threshold of the twentieth century and after, close acquaintances of 'her soldier' and of Lincoln, who might have exposed her accounts as fabrications, were few. One who doubted the credibility of her stories was Union Major George A. Bruce, who had been in Richmond during Lincoln's April 1865 visit and who in after years contributed to the history of the war. Like other critics North and South, Bruce chose not to go public with his contention that Mrs. Pickett was perpetrating a literary fraud. He never doubted, however, that the Lincoln-Pickett relationship was a carefully crafted piece of fiction."
Leader of the Charge - A Biography of General George E. Pickett, pp. 6-7