Robert Todd Lincoln --The vitals

[David Lockmiller]

(01-19-2018 10:29 AM)L Verge Wrote:  Good example of a more human Lincoln, who could show venom like anyone else when ticked off. Thanks, David.

One question, however, since there were no tape recorders in those days, how did Admiral Porter remember that those were Lincoln's exact words (notice the quote marks, indicating such)? How much of that report was Lincoln's verbiage and how much was the Admiral's opinion of Duff Green and the South? Just saying...

That observation could be applied to any and all long Lincoln quotations. I have always wondered that myself. If there is more than one person in attendance, one can always compare accounts with matched sections providing greatest assurance of actual events.

But there is one other consideration that has been lost in time. Back in those days, many people kept daily diaries of their activities. And, being an admiral at that period of the Civil War, the author must have been intellectually gifted. One must also consider that the subject matter of his observations was the President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln. You are going to be observing the facts of stories that you can tell your friends, children and grandchildren. And, many of these officers wrote books (Recall recently the staff officer who disputed the accounts of his commanding officer General Sickles regarding the meeting Sickles had with President Lincoln shortly after the Battle of Gettysburg.) Thank goodness that F.B Carpenter came up with the idea of painting President Lincoln's first presentation to the Cabinet of his Emancipation Proclamation. What a wealth of first hand accounts was provided to history.

And, then there is the problem of variations on the same story. As I mentioned in a previous post elsewhere, I was determined to no longer post stories from Emanuel Hertz's book "Lincoln, A Biography in Anecdote" without corroboration. Well, I remembered that the answer that I provided to your question was in this book. I looked up the answer in which Hertz noted the source as the New York Daily Tribune, Jan. 1885. I then did a Google Books search with a prominent line from this newspaper story and this led me to Admiral Porter's version of the story.

Presumably, Admiral Porter was the source for both. But newspaper reporters might well add little embellishments. For instance, I noticed that in the newspaper account it was written: "His courage failed him, and he turned and fled out of the cabin, and up the cabin stairs as if the avenging angel was after him." The same scene was in Porter's account in the next to last paragraph of my previous posting. This apparently was a minor embellishment. But how do you know when a major embellishment to history has been made on a second telling of a Lincoln story?

Another example of this phenomena occurred in the third paragraph of my previous posting between the following two sentences: "He was another man altogether. Green went on without noticing the change . . . ."

The newspaper man inserted an entire paragraph between these two sentences:

"Had anyone shut his eyes after Duff Green commenced speaking, and opened them when he stopped, he would have seen a perfect transformation. His slouchy position had disappeared, his mouth was compressed, his eyes were fixed, and he looked four inches taller than usual."

Perhaps, you can sell more newspapers this way or maybe the newspaperman just likes to write. Remember the story about Lincoln and Judge Davis when another attorney wrote a very long court filing and Davis asked Lincoln to respond with a story. Lincoln, I believe, cited the example of a preacher who wrote out a very long sermon and Lincoln stated that the reason for this was that the "preacher was too lazy to stop writing." [Unfortunately, this story was from Hertz's book as I recall.]

You can see now why I like to make my signature postings as I do.