President Lincoln vignettes in F.B. Carpenter's "Six Months at the White House"

[David Lockmiller]

Here is the second controversy:

May 30, 2018 email from Mr. Walter Stahr

Dear Mr. Lockmiller, it is odd that you mention Carpenter’s version of the emancipation meeting, because I discuss that in my Seward book. That is another point at which I think Carpenter is colorful but not accurate. Like you I do not like to lose parts of Lincoln’s life. But I want to focus on what really happened, not what people thought SHOULD have happened. Best, Walter

I cannot understand what possible reason that F.B. Carpenter would have to make up a story about Seward raising the issue of timing for public release notice of the proposed Emancipation Proclamation.

Carpenter wrote what Lincoln said to him as follows (pages 21 - 22):

Nothing, however, was offered that I had not already fully anticipated and settled in my own mind, until Secretary Seward spoke. He said in substance: 'Mr. President, I approve of the proclamation, but i question the expediency of its issue at this juncture. The depression of the public mind, consequent upon our repeated reverses, is so great that I fear the effect of so important a step. It may be viewed as the last measure of an exhausted government, a cry for help . . . . His idea," said the President, "was that it would be considered our last shriek, on the retreat." (This was his precise expression.) "'Now,' continued Mr. Seward, 'while I approve the measure, I suggest, sir, that you postpone its issue until you can give it to the country supported by military success, instead of issuing it, as would be the case now, upon the greatest disasters of the war!'" Mr. Lincoln continued: "The wisdom of the view of the Secretary of State struck me with very great force. It was an aspect of the case that, in all my thought upon the subject, I had entirely overlooked. The result was that I put the draft of the proclamation aside, as you do your sketch for a picture, waiting for a victory."

Mr. Stahr in his book Stanton at page 227 interjected the following scenario:

Another document in the Stanton papers, a long letter from Francis Cutting, a New York lawyer and former Democratic member of Congress, summarized Stanton's thinking in 1862 (in a letter from Cutting to Stanton dated February 20, 1867) and implicated Weed as the one who persuaded Lincoln to delay the proclamation. According to Cutting's account, when he visited Stanton on the morning of July 22, 1862, the secretary was keen for an immediate emancipation proclamation.

Stanton took Cutting to see Lincoln, with whom Cutting used similar arguments and who Cutting thought would issue a proclamation. The next morning, however, when Cutting encountered Weed at the Willard Hotel, he learned that Weed "had undone in the evening what [Cutting] had nearly accomplished in the morning; that after further reflection the President had decided to postpone the proclamation."

In Doris Kearns Goodwin's book Team of Rivals at page 268, she makes reference to this same February 20, 1867 letter in a footnote. But this Lincoln historian's interpretation of the same events are entirely different, but consistent with her perceived veracity of Carpenter's words: "Seward's argument was reinforced later that day by Thurlow Weed, who met with Lincoln on a visit to Washington."

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