Mary was a leaker

[David Lockmiller]

(10-30-2017 12:33 PM)RJNorton Wrote:  (David, I know how you feel, and I thank you for your input.)

Hi Roger. Thank you for that acknowledgement.

I thought that I might have offended you since you expressed your agreement so forcefully with the position taken by Professor Prokopowicz and Ed Steers.

Until now, I was completely unaware that at one time you "accepted the older version, [based in large measure upon] Carl Sandburg's [Lincoln] biography."

I tried many years ago to read the "highly acclaimed" Carl Sandburg's [Lincoln] biography. But I gave up doing so because when I read some of his extended Lincoln quotes I just could not bring myself to believe that they were always entirely true. In fact, sometimes I believed the opposite and so I gave up reading Sandburg's Lincoln biography.

Some time ago, I wrote in an email to Professor Prokopowicz some of my additional thoughts on why I did not believe that the "myth" was a myth. He did not respond to this last email. Perhaps I shall use the contents of this misguided email to Professor Prokopowicz to post another comment on this thread.

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The following is the email that I sent to Professor Prokopowicz on Sunday, October 22. I did not receive a response from him.



Professor Prokopowicz,

The Committee on the Conduct of the War were to investigate the "specific accusation that Mrs. Lincoln was giving important information to secret agents of the Confederacy."

Late last night, I was watching on TV the latter portion of the movie “12 Angry Men.” At the point that I began watching, the jury vote was ten or eleven for a “guilty” verdict. By the end of the movie, a jury poll was 12 “not guilty” verdicts. Various elements supporting a “guilty” verdict were contradicted by analyses of various members of the 12 man jury. And, at the end of their deliberations, 12 “not guilty” verdicts set a probably innocent young man free.

In her 1942 Pulitzer Prize winning book in History, Reveille in Washington, 1860 – 1865, Margaret Pulitzer Leech wrote: “Rumors had begun to spread that she was not only a traitor at heart, but that she was acting as a spy, communicating the secrets of the Union generals, as she learned them from the President, to the Confederate authorities.” (page 292) Margaret Leech is among a limited number of Lincoln historians who believe[d] that President Lincoln’s appearance before the Committee on the Conduct of the War to defend the loyalty of his wife was not a myth.

Regarding the rational basis for the belief that the Committee did conduct such an investigation regarding Mrs. Lincoln, the book paragraph that ended with the quote contained in the immediate preceding paragraph [in this email] reads as follows:

“Several Republican newspapers made her the target of malicious attacks. She was assailed for her political interference, her extravagance and her Kentucky origin. Slanderous accusations were made against the loyalty of the President’s wife. She was called ‘two-thirds pro-slavery and the other third secesh.’ It was noted that she had two brothers in the rebel army, and that one of them, David Todd, had treated Yankee prisoners at Richmond with brutality.”

You wrote in your October 17 email to me that ‘[t]he reason that the committee never investigated the ‘specific accusation that Mrs. Lincoln was giving important information to secret agents of the Confederacy’ could be that there never was such a specific accusation.

I quote from an email below my posting made to the Lincoln Symposium website on October 16:

“At last reports that were more than vague gossip were brought to the attention of some of my colleagues in the Senate. They made specific accusation that Mrs. Lincoln was giving important information to secret agents of the Confederacy. These reports were laid before my committee [on the Conduct of the War] and the committee thought it an imperative duty to investigate them, although it was the most embarrassing and painful task imposed upon us.”

Since there does not appear to have been made a specific report ["by the committee" -an explanatory addition that I am now making to my email to the Professor] on this subject of Mary Lincoln’s possible disloyalty, it remains unknown whether the reason for this was that no specific allegation was made that could be investigated by the Committee or Lincoln’s appearance and statement before the Committee ended any investigation of the specific allegation of disloyalty of the President’s wife.

Perhaps the strongest argument that can be made that there never was such an investigation by the Committee is that the Senator or Congressman who related the story has never been specifically identified.

I would argue that since the sessions of the committee were necessarily secret, there is also a high likelihood that each and every member swore themselves absolute secrecy from discussion of any Committee investigation subject matter [] in addition to the timing and location of such investigative hearings. According to the published accounts that such a hearing did take place is the following information: “The President had not been asked to come before the committee, nor was it suspected that he had information that we were to investigate the reports, which, if true, fastened treason upon his family in the White House.”

In a manner of speaking, this placed every member of the Committee in a moral dilemma. It was the plan of the Committee not to call upon either President Lincoln or Mrs. Lincoln to present opposing arguments. Yet, if the story is not a myth, presumably a member of the Committee who had previously been sworn to secrecy actually informed President Lincoln of this subject matter of Committee investigation that may have resulted in a charge of treason against the wife of the President of the United States (in addition to the time and place of such a Committee hearing). If true, the Committee member would have no immediate incentive to divulge his identity and, in fact, would have had much to lose (i.e., his seat in Congress). He had gone against his oath of secrecy because he had concluded that the cause of democracy and loyalty to President Lincoln were more important. Perhaps, years or decades later, this former Congressman concluded that this particular Lincoln story was quite important to history.

I personally think that accurate Lincoln history is very important. I would hate to see an important and actual moment of Lincoln history to be lost.

On the Lincoln Symposium website, I began a thread that stated that I would not watch the Spielberg “Lincoln” movie because of the trailer that I had seen wherein Mary Lincoln allegedly berated Mr. Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre for not doing enough to achieve passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U. S. Constitution. That scene alone was so absurd and false that I refused then and refuse now to see the movie. How many millions of Americans and people around the world have seen this falsehood and now believe it to be the truth about Lincoln?

If you [Professor Prokopowicz] would want to destroy this new Lincoln myth, I will do all that I can to help you.

Yours truly,
David Lockmiller