Mary was a leaker

[David Lockmiller]

This thread aroused in me an object to determine the validity of a story regarding Lincoln and the loyalty to the Union by Mary Lincoln that I was fond of reading in Emanuel Hertz’s book “Lincoln Talks.” Of course, I could not find it to read tonight. But nevertheless, I thought that there might be many persons here interested in the discussion on this specific topic and related topics by Eastern Carolina University Professor of History Gerald Prokopowicz (especially Civil War history, in his book “Did Lincoln Own Slaves?: And Other Frequently Asked Questions about Abraham Lincoln” at pages 118-119.)

Did Lincoln appear before a Congressional committee to defend his wife’s loyalty to the Union?

No, but there’s a story out there that he did.

It has the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, which regularly met in secret to oversee Lincoln’s actions, questioning his wife’s patriotism. After all, the committee thinks, Mary Todd Lincoln of the slave state of Kentucky has a brother and three half-brothers serving in Southern armies. In 1863, she allowed her half-sister Emilie Todd Helm to stay at the White House after Emilie’s husband, Brigadier General Benjamin Hardin Helm, was killed at Chickamauga—fighting for the South. But before the committee can even begin calling witnesses to start the inquisition, the president arrives unexpectedly, stands before them with hat in hand, declares his unequivocal faith in Mary’s loyalty, and leaves.

In the story, this dramatic testimony puts the kibosh on any further Congressional speculation about Mrs. Lincoln. In real life, it never happened. No president before Gerald Ford ever appeared formally in front of a Congressional committee. The constitutional separation of powers generally makes it unthinkable that a president would deign to testify before Congress. Only under the extraordinary circumstance of President Ford’s pardon of former president Richard Nixon did a sitting president agree to such a procedure.

What gives this Lincoln legend particular interest is that historians have had the opportunity to see it grow before their eyes, like geologists studying the birth of a volcanic island. It may have begun as a confused version of Lincoln’s meetings with Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee in 1862 over suspicions that Mary Lincoln was involved in leaking the president’s 1861 Annual Message to Congress to the New York Herald; these meetings were misreported in the New York Tribune as though Lincoln had formally testified before the committee. Whatever the source, the story of Lincoln suddenly showing up before the Committee on the Conduct of the War first appeared in a newspaper article published around 1905, then as a pamphlet in 1916, as part of a book in 1931, and in Carl Sandburg’s famous 1939 biography (The War Years, vol. 2, page 200, published in 1939). Many people read it there, but it still lay beneath the surface of public consciousness. Finally, in 1973, it erupted. During the Watergate hearings, Senator Lowell Weicker read Sandburg’s account aloud in an effort to persuade Richard Nixon to appear before Congress voluntarily and explain himself. Now everyone “knew” that Lincoln had gone hat in hand to stand in front of Congress when the good of the country required it. Although Lincoln experts immediately pointed out that there was no evidence to support the story, the cat was out of the bag, and the legend continues to circulate today.

Since the last decade of the twentieth century, the Internet has made it possible for conscientious writers to check the validity of Lincoln stories like this one before incorporating them into speeches, books, or other publications. It has also made it possible for sloppy or malicious writers to create and spread new Lincoln legends much faster than ever before. In December 2003, for example, a magazine columnist who thought anti-war members of Congress should be “exiled, arrested, or hanged” attributed those words (wrongly) to Abraham Lincoln. The new quote immediately began circulating below the scholarly radar, appearing on Web sites some 18,000 times over the next three years, until it finally burst into the view of the mainstream when a Representative from Alaska read it on the floor of Congress. Retractions and corrections followed, but the damage was done, and the quote has become part of the ever-increasing stock of things that Lincoln didn’t really say.