The Pathetic Truth About Lincoln Scholarship

[Publisher's Note, by Gene Kizer, Jr. - The two articles, below, by distinguished scholars of the Abbeville Institute, shine a great deal of light on the Lincoln fabrication, which is what so much of Lincoln scholarship is.

Kevin Orlin Johnson's 680 page 2023 book, The Lincolns in the White House, Slanders, Scandals, and Lincoln's Slave Trading Revealed (nominated for the Lincoln Prize) is based on irrefutable primary sources and is powerfully written by a distinguished scholar.

Johnson's "Lincoln Studies and a Stacked Deck" is a blistering assessment of Lincoln scholarship and why much of it is a fraud, a myth.

Clyde Wilson's review of Johnson's The Lincolns in the White House - "Lincoln Sells His Slaves" - follows and concludes that Johnson's book is "a stellar contribution to the growing body of sound scholarship about the real Lincoln."

Johnson's The Lincolns in the White House is not to be confused with a book of the same name by Jerrold M. Packard. Packard's book is on Amazon but Johnson's is not.

Go to the publisher, Pangaeus, to order Kevin Orlin Johnson's book: https://www.pangaeus.com/the-lincolns-in-the-white-house.

An appeal of the decision that led to the removal of the Confederate Reconciliation Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery has been filed. The removal of that 109 year old world class monument to peace and patriotism has desecrated Arlington National Cemetery, which will remain desecrated and dishonored until the Confederate Memorial is restored. For an update go to www.DefendArlington.org and please contribute.]

Lincoln Studies and a Stacked Deck

By Kevin Orlin Johnson

(Published March 26, 2024 on the Abbeville Institute blog)

BACK IN 1949, two researchers, J. S. Bruner and Leo Postman, wanted to sort out the relationship between what we see and how we interpret what we see. They did a proper study of it — “On the Perception of Incongruity: A Paradigm”, Journal of Personality, 18:206 ff. (1949), if you want to look it up.

Bruner and Postman asked people to identify playing cards flashed before them for a fraction of a second. But they’d put in a few trick cards — a red six of spades, for instance, or a black four of hearts. The idea was that the trick cards would delay the response time as the subjects paused to figure them out.

It didn’t work. The subjects went at it knowing for a fact that a deck of cards has four and only four descriptive classifications — red hearts, red diamonds, black spades and black clubs. That presumption overcame observation, and the subjects immediately described the cards as they expected cards to be, not as those particular cards really were.

Bruner and Postman let the test subjects look longer and even asked leading questions, but still none of them could see the reality right there in front of their eyes. If forced to think about it, they became visibly confused and uncomfortable. “Oh, I don’t know what it is!” one shouted. “Take it away!”

And so it is, Bruner and Postman concluded, “either a very sick organism, an overly motivated one, or one deprived of the opportunity to ‘try-and-check,’ which will not give up an expectancy in the face of a contradictory environment. It would be our contention, nonetheless, that for as long as possible and by whatever means available, the organism will ward off the perception of the unexpected, those things which do not fit his prevailing set.”

That is, people honestly cannot perceive anything that doesn’t fit their expectation. That affects any investigation at least a little, but Lincoln Studies rather depends upon it.

Recently a few studies have pointed that out. In 2002 Thomas DiLorenzo published his The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War, which he followed in 2006 with his Lincoln Umasked: What You’re Not Supposed to Know About Dishonest Abe.

In 2009 John Avery Emison gave us Lincoln Über Alles: Dictatorship Comes to America. Now there’s my own little effort, The Lincolns in the White House: Slanders, Scandals, and Lincoln’s Slave Trading Revealed. It has plenty of details and documentation of how Lincoln Studies goes wrong, a whole chapter on their method, in fact. And there’s lots more to come.

Just as an overview, though, real historiography starts with the evidence and then logically derives conclusions. But professional Lincoln Studiers work backwards. They start with a few standard assertions — Lincoln Was A Hardy Pioneer Youth, Lincoln Saved The Union, Lincoln Freed The Slaves, Lincoln Was The Greatest President, that sort of thing. Of course there’s not a shred of evidence confirming any of those conclusions — no, there really isn’t — that’s the point — and every shred that we have left to us confirms just the opposite. So for the past 150 years or so Lincoln Studiers have trimmed and tucked those shreds to fit those categories because those are the only categories possible, as far as they can see.

Sometimes they just paraphrase the document into its reverse, which is understandable as an honest report of what the Lincoln Studier got out of reading it. Bruner and Postman might have had more to say about it when the interpretation flatly contradicts the original document quoted right there on the same page.

They might be hard pressed to explain how documents get lifted from their context and set into another series of events altogether. It’s like forcing a puzzle piece into the wrong place because you know for certain that the picture is supposed to be different from the one on the box, the one into which all of the other pieces fit perfectly.

Sometimes professors of Lincoln Studies have to cut out significant passages to make a document fit, so sometimes what’s left makes no more grammatical than historical sense. But in fact altering original documents to fit those preconceptions is so normal in the field that it’s difficult to get to real evidence about Lincoln.

Sometimes even the most prominent Lincoln Studiers edit a document just a little to say what its author must have actually meant, because nobody could actually mean what that author wrote about Lincoln. That’s why, as you read along, you might be puzzled by an added “not” or a missing one. One recent prize winner inserted “[Mrs.]” in front of Lincoln’s name to deflect an insult from The Emancipator to Mary Todd, whom he frankly despises — you always have to check the originals.

That’s another problem, though. The violence to the originals is often so astonishing in its scope that it can’t be accidental. For example, the son of Lincoln’s Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles thoroughly re-wrote his father’s diaries before publishing them with the promise that “the text of the diary has been in no way mutilated or revised… No other evidence can be more sacred than a diary.”

The official editions of Lincoln’s own writings, even Roy P. Basler’s Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (Rutgers 1955) — eight volumes, index, supplement and all — silently correct Lincoln’s habitual misspellings and his constant grammatical solecisms, but that way it all fits into the picture better.

Still, rewriting documents can only go so far. So from the beginning the giants in the field have simply gathered up and burned any documents within their grasp that said otherwise — and it all said otherwise. Notably, Henry Horner, Vice President of the Abraham Lincoln Association and Governor of Illinois; Oliver R. Barrett, President of the Board of Trustees of the Illinois State Historical Library and greatest Lincoln collector of them all; and of course Robert Todd Lincoln himself are all on record as ordering some of the greatest collections of primary Lincoln documents ever known consigned to the flames. Or just burning them, themselves.

That’s why you’ll notice in the Lincoln literature that no new evidence is brought forward, no new information is added to our understanding. Generations of Lincoln Studiers haven’t had any choice but to play the cards that they’re dealt, and shuffle them over and over again.

Kevin Orlin Johnson

Kevin Orlin Johnson holds a Doctor of Philosophy degree in the History of Architecture, a Master’s degree in Art History, and a Bachelor’s degree in Art History; he has also fulfilled the requirements for a Bachelor’s degree in History. His publications in his principal field, on topics as varied as Louis XIV’s first designs for Versailles or the design of the Chapel of the Most Holy Shroud in Turin, are considered definitive by many scholars here and abroad. He is the author of The Lincolns in the White House (Pangaeus Press, 2022).

Lincoln Sells His Slaves

By Clyde Wilson

(Published on the Abbeville Institute blog February 14, 2024)

“The literature on Abraham Lincoln is vast, but it isn’t very good.”  You have to love a book with a first sentence like that!  The book is Kevin Orlin Johnson’s The Lincolns in the White House. While he has some interesting history of the Executive Mansion (the White House) the author is not limited to that one place and short time period, as indicated by the subtitle: Slanders, Scandals, and Lincoln’s Slave Trading Revealed. He presents a fresh and highly original social and political portrayal of the whole Lincoln era.

Probably people will find most interesting Lincoln’s direct order in 1850 to SELL the slaves of his father-in-law’s estate.  It is plainly there in the documents, which somehow the host of Lincoln scholars have previously failed to notice. Not surprising, since other Northern heroes, Steven Douglas and U.S. Grant, also got slaves from the wife’s families and like Lincoln considered it a routine matter.

Johnson is eloquent, precise, and definitive in his exposure of the large and well rewarded class of “historians” he calls the Lincolnolators.  In chapter and verse he shows how they have misinterpreted documents and suppressed others and counted undocumented third person gossip long after the fact as if it were conclusive evidence. Johnson contributes a needed revelation about the state of American historianship these days.

Lincoln was not personally corrupt in the White House but he apparently enjoyed considerable “honest graft” from gifts and insider information.  When he died there were found in his office uncashed cheques and bonds worth more the $1.5 million in today’s money.  He was certainly the first President to leave the White House richer than he entered it.

But that was routine in administration built on corruption. Most of Lincoln’ major appointments became millionaires—an interesting sidelight on the holy cause of Union. To Johnson this meant the permanent establishment of what he calls “the Party,” the exploitation of the taxpayers by the combination of capitalists and party politicians that has been the American regime from Lincoln to this day.

I am happy to see the evidence that corrects two erroneous assumptions that I had gathered from the literature:

1) Lincoln was not really a highly successful lawyer. He certainly was not nobly defending the humble. He was best-known for diverting juries by tricks and irrelevant story telling. During the Springfield years the house was bought and living expenses were paid out of Mary Todd Lincoln’s inheritance. What he earned (nothing in the last two years before his election) he spent on himself and politicking.

2) Mary Todd Lincoln was not a bad woman. She is pervasively portrayed in the literature as a shrewish spendthrift who embezzled government funds and became insane. Just another burden that St. Abraham patiently bore. In fact, as a Southern lady she was a first-rate hands-on housekeeper even with the extreme demands on a President’s lady dealing with irregular and inadequate support. Unlike most of those around her, she never did anything illegal. She was committed to an asylum, it is true. Her son Robert, truly an evil man, through greed had two thugs physically rob her of the bonds that were her main property and thrust her into an institution where she was heavily drugged, causing suffering for the rest of her life.

Dr. Johnson adds to his merit by a sprightly style and touches of satire.  This is a stellar contribution to  the growing body of sound scholarship about the real Lincoln, something America badly needs.

Clyde Wilson

Clyde Wilson is a distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at the University of South Carolina where he was the editor of the multivolume The Papers of John C. Calhoun. He is the M.E. Bradford Distinguished Chair at the Abbeville Institute. He is the author or editor of over thirty books and published over 600 articles, essays and reviews and is co-publisher of www.shotwellpublishing.com, a source  for unreconstructed Southern books.