Human Memory and History

[David Lockmiller]

It is our good fortune that Abraham Lincoln was President of the United States and he had two good secretaries to assist him.

In the last post that I made, I referenced a letter from President Lincoln to Secretary of the Navy Welles. There was an actual copy of the letter in the newspaper article that I referenced. There was even a follow-up newspaper note that the wedding took place two weeks later in a church close to the White House. The whole story is short and true, substantiated with finality by the contemporary newspaper account of the wedding.

And, there's another good thing about the history regarding Lincoln and that is all of the detailed high quality scholarship available to a student of Lincoln. These scholars scrupulously detail by footnote the source of their factual statements.

And, there are contemporary published news accounts of President Lincoln's speeches and public events. For example, the speech that was given to a committee of five free black men on August 14, 1862 was covered by the New York Times and other major newspapers and magazines (at the invitation of the White House, I believe) for national consumption. And, if it were not for that particular New York Times article published the following day in 1862, I could not have disproved the fictional history, describing that same meeting, by Nikole Hannah-Jones (winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary) and published in the New York Times Magazine 158 years later.