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

[Rob Wick]

Quote:Were not both authors using the same basic historical materials in order to write on the same subject?

So what? One of the first things you learn in a historical methods class is that presenting evidence alone is not what makes history but rather the interpretation and analysis of that evidence, then putting it into a narrative form. Historians can look at the same evidence and come up with two totally separate conclusions.

Quote:A "Reality Check" for Seward, according to Burton Hendrick, in Lincoln's War Cabinet, page 361:

Two days after Lincoln had submitted his original paper, Seward wrote John Lothrop Motley, minister to Austria, inquiring: "Are you sure that today, under the seductions and pressures that could be applied to some European powers, they would not rise up and resist an attempt to bestow freedom upon the laborers whose capacity to supply cotton and open a market for European fabrics depends, or is thought to depend, upon their continuance in bondage?" Motley's almost thunderous negation, "A thousand time No!" was evidently not exactly the response which Seward had hoped to elicit.

Motley's response to Seward was an indication by Hendrick that not everyone believed the same as Seward. To me, it's no more than providing a different interpretation and is something real historians do.

Best
Rob