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Paul Serup · 11-05-2015, 10:30 PM

(10-30-2015 05:22 AM)RJNorton Wrote: Hi Paul. Can you cite any of the standard Lincoln biographies that mention/confirm Chiniquy's meetings with Lincoln when Lincoln was President? Sandburg does not mention them...neither does Donald, Burlingame, Oates, Thomas, etc. Also, neither Hay nor Nicolay mention Chiniquy ever meeting the President in the White House.

Can you cite any letters written by Lincoln that mention any of these White House meetings?

Chiniquy quoted Lincoln as follows:

"I do not pretend to be a prophet. But though not a prophet, I see a very dark cloud on our horizon. And that dark cloud is coming from Rome. It is filled with tears of blood. It will rise and increase till its flanks will be torn by a flash of lightning, followed by a fearful peal of thunder. Then a cyclone, such as the world has never seen, will pass over this country, spreading ruin and desolation from north to south. After it is over, there will be long days of peace and prosperity: for Popery, with its Jesuits and merciless Inquisition, will have been for ever swept away from our country. Neither I nor you, but our children, will see those things."

Can you name any other people who claimed/wrote Lincoln had these sentiments after they personally met with him? Can you cite any letters ever written by Lincoln where these feelings are expressed?

Greetings,
You stated “Also, neither Hay nor Nicolay mention Chiniquy ever meeting the President in the White House.” What evidence do you have that they would have been aware of every person who visited Lincoln at the White House and also would have recorded / reported everyone that visited? You asked what biographies have mentioned Charles Chiniquy seeing President Lincoln at the White House. Before I deal with this, could you answer these questions? Based on the evidence, what contact do you think Charles Chiniquy had with Abraham Lincoln during his lifetime and what evidence do you base this on?

You reproduced Chiniquy, who quoted Lincoln, and asked if I could, “name any other people who claimed/wrote Lincoln had these sentiments after they personally met with him?” Several pages before where you obtained the quote from Chiniquy in Fifty Years, Chiniquy gives a quote from Newton Bateman. The Bateman quote originally came from Josiah Gilbert Holland’s 1866 Life of Abraham Lincoln which Allen Guelzo called “in a number of ways, the first great comprehensive Lincoln biography”.

Holland reported in the months before Lincoln went to Washington as President-elect, “Mr. Newton Bateman, Superintendent of Public Instruction for the State of Illinois, occupied a room adjoining and opening into the Executive Chamber. Frequently this door was open during Mr. Lincoln’s receptions; and throughout the seven months or more of his occupation Mr. Bateman saw him nearly every day. Often when Mr. Lincoln was tired he closed his door against all intrusion, and called Mr. Bateman into his room for a quiet talk.”

Bateman declared that during one talk, Lincoln stated, among other things, “I see the storm coming” and also that “now the cup of iniquity was full, and the vials of wrath will be poured out”. Holland reported that Lincoln also repeatedly declared to Bateman his conviction that the day of wrath was at hand, and that he was to be an actor in the terrible struggle that would issue in the overthrow of slavery, though he might not live to see the end. This was before Lincoln occupied the White House. The original statement of Bateman on his talk with Lincoln, in his own hand, is held by the New York Public Library.

Chiniquy reported that that once Lincoln was in the White House and the United States in the midst of the bloody Civil War, his views of the role the Roman Catholic Church was playing changed as he became informed on what was really going on. Lincoln said that he spoke of these subjects only to Chiniquy and very few others. Though he was very eloquent, Lincoln was a “shut-mouthed” man. He evidently bought the Illinois Staats-Anzeiger, a German newspaper, not exactly like buying a corner grocery store. He bought this newspaper, I understand, and yet reportedly never mentioned anything about this purchase in public, by mouth, by letter. Are you saying he couldn’t have owned this entity because he didn’t speak about it? If he could have done this, he could have done and said other things and not spoken about them as well.

Richard Lougheed, who wrote The Controversial Conversion of Charles Chiniquy, is an authority on Chiniquy. He is unique as he is both an admirer and a critic of the clergyman. He thought, (mistakenly) that Joseph George had provided a strong argument for dismissing what Chiniquy said about his friendship with Lincoln. However he said something I do agree, in principal, with and that is that George “based his case on an argument from silence. The fact that other accounts do not mention the friendship can never prove that Chiniquy is a liar.” Silence is what you may want to lean on and that does not make a good argument, I suggest.