Transcripts For CSPAN3 Abraham Lincoln At City Point And Ric

Transcripts For CSPAN3 Abraham Lincoln At City Point And Richmond 20170122

Historical park and its about an hour and 10 minutes. Noah there are some odd themes going on here. Want to knowledge, i agree with him to a great degree. I will note that for this writer, there was a case where i think to tell an important story, you find yourself moving into realms of speculation where the evidence may not exist, but the suggestion of what has happened seems reasonably solid. A lot of what i am going to be talking about is the process of this book. All of you have seen the dvds with the special features section, and i guess this is the making of this book. For me, it took me into areas i had never gone before in terms of having to handle material. All the battle books ive read the information, a value weight the nature of sources, try to piece it together in a way that made sense, both in terms of the topography, what we knew, and what they were saying. Out of that comes the story. This particular story, the 16 days in march and april of 1865 that Abraham Lincoln spent in city point, took this reasonably cautious and careful historian onto increasingly thin ice. Which we will discover as a top about some of the information that led me to some decisions that i think will be controversial. I want to start by throwing some numbers out. In the last 100 years, the president of the United States have come to accept the fact that to survive in office, there needs to be some time out of the office. Iran some numbers, and im not going to say they are exactly right, of the times when some recent president s spent away from the white house, not doing the governments work. Dwight eisenhower, for instance, spent 461 days not doing government work. Lbj, 484 days. Fdr, 958 days, but of course, he had more than two terms. George w. Bush, it is simply a fact, spent 1020 days of his two terms not in office doing government work. In his first term as president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, by my account, spent 52 days outside of washington. Many of those were business trips. He had to go out and review troops were meet with generals. To give the gettysburg address. He did have this cottage in northwest washington that they visited. A couple of points to make there. This is a little like telecommuting in that anyone who wanted to get him and washington knew where to find him and it was a short ride. The door was constantly moving. When they needed him back at the white house, he just walked out the door, got in the carriage, and went back. He wasnt getting the benefit of the time off. Here we have at the start of the second term, all of you who have seen spielberg movie know the battles he fought to get the 13th amendment, and by all accounts i have been able to find, he is in terrible shape healthwise. Accounts from people who knew him, reporters writing about him. Clearly, this man was at a crisis in his life. He initially was only going to spend a few days at city point and it turned into an unprecedented 16 days. I have to say that even if you are not a president ial historian or a civil war historian, the fact that the president with his sort of track record spent 16 days, raises the question, what happened . How does it change him . Did it affect him at all . This was a question i decided i needed to try and answer. I want to it knowledge there was a study published around the end of the 1970s called Abraham Lincoln at city point. This is a preinternet book. He did all the research by hand, tracked down sources, found hardcopies, did some wonderfully solid research. In a way, he set in stone the template story of city point. Ive come to believe that most historians and lincoln biographers have missed the real story. I think the best historians and biographers are storytellers. I completely acknowledge that if you are telling the story of the last weeks of lincolns life, there is something called april 14, 1865, ford theater. It is a powerful, iconic moment in American History. I can see why many of these writers reach this odd point where lincoln leaves washington, is gone for 16 days, two more if you count travel, and then comes back. What is he going to do with it . When the big story is right there, april 14. I think for a lot of them, he was a dead man walking. With their knowledge of what was to come, it starts to affect how they evaluate what he is doing in those days. There is a template that emerged that the city point relies heavily on what i call low hanging fruit. These are sources that were published in the years after lincolns assassination, widely available for people who generally had credentials that connected them to the events, and these were heavily relied on in creating these template stories. When i started, my initial thought was, i will start with the template and use the new sources we have as researchers and writers to fill it in more, to add more color to it. What i didnt realize was how much i would have to change that template. How the evidence or suppositions that i made increasingly led me farther and farther away from the standard story. Lincoln, up to that point, theres a famous quote where he admitted, events have controlled me. I have not controlled events. When he gives his second inaugural speech, he talks about the war coming to an end, but he wont say how soon. I think when he leaves washington for city point, he still thinks he could be looking at another summer and possibly a fall of war. When he comes back, i think he realizes, like that thing in the mirror that are closer than they appear, he realizes the end of the war is closer than he thinks. It either confirms things he was going to do or opens some new things up for him. To understand this, i needed to get as much detail as i could into the story. What did lincoln see . Who saw him . What did he look like . What did he say . The template story is like a dotted line. There are lots of gaps in between the evidence. And some of the evidence, itself, is suspect. This was the challenge. Right at the beginning, this was a tough thing for an author to run into, i ran into two problems. One of which i expected, the other which was a complete surprise. I will give myself credit for one original idea, and that was at the beginning of the process, i said, jeepers, whats in the james river, the union navy, and the union navy kept law books . The ship that brings lincoln to city point, the river queen, does not have a logbook. The melbourne and the uss bat, a smaller boat that was assigned to escort for the river queen wherever it went whose captain had a personal commission to accompany lincoln as much as he could. That officer is John Stanford barnes. There we go. Barnes comes to us into articles listed in the 1900s, in which he accounts his experiences escorting Abraham Lincoln. I had those and said, great. Then i found the logbook. I compared it to barness recollection. Oops. Barnes is an honorable man, working with what he remembered. There were clearly some chronological problems with his recollections and some event problems. What do i do . Do i throw the recollection out and rely only on the logbook, a dry recitation of fact that mrs. Much of the color of barness recollection . Then i remembered the cannoneer. You are going to find ample quotes from an artillery man in a United States battery at gettysburg, augustus buhl, who called himself the cannoneer. It is after that that Research Finds he was in the unit, but posted to washington dc in the early weeks of july. He was not there himself. The first reaction is, throw him out. Second reaction was, wait a minute. Hes in the unit, hes talking with guys who were there, he is clearly pulling their stories because the stories have too much veracity to have been made up and elements that can be proven as fact. I think he is now looked at in that light, and that he called together the stories and did it as his own. I said, what if i treat barnes and the logbook that way . I will fit the barnes story into the details of the logbook. Thats what i wind up doing. Barnes plays a continuing role in this, but i can tell you all his actions conform to what i can prove in the logbook. The other challenge, and this was a big one. Even up until today, if you read any study of lincoln at city point, there are good odds you are going to see quoted as a witness a fellow named William H Crook. Selfproclaimed lincoln bodyguard. One of the things i did was culled through lots of newspapers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when lincoln lore was really popular. I cannot tell you how popular crooks recollections were. They started out as a Washington Post article, turn into a magazine article, and then a book. I contacted a lincoln scholar i know named wayne temple, and he said, for people who worked in the assassination and the trial after the assassination, crook is not have much credibility. He says things we can prove he is lying about. He claims to be in places, doing things that he clearly never did. That i happened to, in georgetown, find a lincoln amateur scholars papers, and he had a folder called crook. He had gotten an interview or found a transcript of an interview with a person who worked with crook in the latter part of the century. This person said, crook has made a career out of his presumed relationship with Abraham Lincoln. In that same folder, i found reference to a letter in the Washington Post, which i looked up. It was by another member of the lincoln staff named charles forbes. Anyone who looks into lincolns life, he was his manservant. He was so angry when the first crook articles appeared that, as far as i can tell, this is the only written element he ever contributed. This is a guy who spent time with lincoln and the white house, was his manservant, took care of him, prepared meals, all that kind of stuff. He was so incensed at crooks memoirs that he wrote a short letter that said, mr. Cook is wrong when he said he traveled to city point with Abraham Lincoln in march of 1865. He said, i did. Crook further states he was down there until april 1 when mary lincoln travels back to washington and he came back with her. He says when marilyn can turn around and came back, crook came with them. Once again, i am stuck with this fact that some of the best stories of lincoln at the time are through crook. I accepted the fact that crook did what buhl did. He started talking to everyone and spding time with lincoln and began culling some of their stories into his own narrative of the event. This is where the ice is getting thin under my feet and i can hear the cracking. Where i can confirm there was a reasonable witness their, and i think the likeliest candidate, lincoln had in army servant who collected this afterwards. Wherever i could do that, i decided to stay with it. We will see what happens there. I would like to say that i think the most important change in the world right now that i think will change civil war writing and history is the availability of large newspaper archives online with search engines. I used it extensively, and i will give you two examples of how it helped me with this book. In each case, they led me to the item. I was doing a search on lincoln and city point as the terms, and what pops up was a social page from a winnipeg, canada newspaper. They were covering the reception for the u. S. Council. The local woman, the Campbell Family was quite powerful in that part of the world at the time, was the hostess. She read a letter from her father, who was a contract surgeon in the union army during the civil war, who wrote to her about going to city point in 1865 and meeting general grant and Abraham Lincoln. That was the extent of the reference. I said, ok. I tracked dr. Buck back and found three ontario archives with luck papers. I contacted the archivists. Him sweated out a week or two waiting for the response, and got nothing, nothing, nothing. But in the course of doing all that searching, i also come across a genealogical site for the campbellbuck family. I contacted that archivist and got the message saying, weve got a folder marked dr. Buck archives and i got a copy. I think you have all seen some of these movie makings up or they spend two days shooting that unfold as 30 seconds in the movie. It may be two lines, but to me, we had the story of lincoln at fort wadsworth. We had a relatively accessible artillery man, and i was able to add a second line. It fills in with more certainty a moment and lincolns time at city point. To me, it was well worth all the trouble, and i can tell you, i think that i dont believe any other lincoln or 1865 book uses dr. Bucks letter, that i only found through the newspapers. This is one where i am going out of the speculative but wound up getting the evidence i really needed. Anyone who does cursory research and to lincoln at that time will look at the washington newspapers around the time he leaves washington on march 24 to see what they are saying about him. There is a notice in the papers on the 23rd saying that lincoln is about to take a trip down to city point, and they list the passengers who are going to be on the river queen. Including on that list were were two u. S. Treasury officials. When the river queen gets there, they are not on board. At that point, i am showing my age on my computer, but you know how you take the file to the trash bin . I think at this point the note was moved to the trash bin because come up for whatever reason, they didnt travel with lincoln. I was doing other things, i come across the archive of lincoln papers at the library of congress. I was looking through the headers and logs, and ill be 23rd of march, i saw a message to Abraham Lincoln. I opened it up, and it said, we have decided not to travel down with you. We will take the revenue cutter and meet you while you are down there. I said, ok, take it out of the trash bin and put it on the active file. From a chicago newspaper, again, thank you search engines, i found Washington Bureau notes that said, treasury officials had just returned from their visit to city point. I had the date he had come back. I knew from the log books how long it took the river queen to get down to city point, so i figured things out and had a window of the morning of one particular day where it is possible that they were likely all in the same place at the same time. I worked out lincolns schedule. I had a hole in his schedule that morning. In my early draft of the book, i laid out that evidence and suggested that it was likely he met with these two. They were in charge of implementing one of the lincoln administrations strange policies having to do with trading with the south. Early in the war, once the connecting lines north and south were cut, the textile industry in new england was starting to hit the panic button because the sources of cotton they needed were being cut off. Under a lot of pressure, the government came up with an amazingly an amazingly byzantine policy. You cant give them hard currency because they are going to buy bullets to shoot union soldiers. They had to get vetted agents who would agree to do the work and the money would be escrowed. It was unbelievably complicated. They were too involved in implementing this policy. It seemed very logical that thats what they would talk to lincoln about. I cant think they would have gotten together and talked about something else. At that point in time, i felt comfortable enough the evidence i had to posit the meeting, which no other biographer has taken note of, and when i thought it happened. There is one site i used a lot in this, called fultonhistory. Com. It is an archive of largely upstate new york newspapers. It turns out that risely was a favorite son of new york. I thought he had added some thousand numbers of news papers and ran my search again. From the freedonia sensor from 1865, they printed a letter from him. He was talking about meeting with lincoln at city point. The other details all fall into place. Like it actually said, ive got to go talk to grant. Grant hated that policy. As a general, he hated anything that penetrated his lines with people he couldnt control. When risley was explaining why the policy was important, he made it clear the final say was grant, and grant made it clear he wasnt going to approve. It got a little heated at times. Lincoln turned to him and said, in a couple of days, it is not going to matter. Grant had been slowly sharing with him details of his plan of a coming offensive. Here is a case where following these clues and allowing for issues of corruption of memory over time, i had what i saw was solid evidence of the meeting, the subject, and actions that took place. It is still a piece of the lincoln story that had never been touched on before. Now, you have been very good staring at it. Lets see if we can get you to stare at some pictures. Lets start with captain barnes. That is how he looked at about the time he wrote his memoirs. I had some questions about him, and i have to say, i am not a genealogist. I roughed out an abbreviated family tree. I did some searches and found a speech given at a new england cultural event by a woman who was the greatgranddaughter of john barnes. She was a watercolorist. From the state Watercolor Society website, i got her addressed and sent her a note, and she was a direct descendent of John Stanford barnes. She put me in contact with the Barnes Family, who provided me with this picture. They told me he wrote a second memoir. The reason no one ever found it is because he only distributed it to his family, although one copy got into the New York Historical society in new york city. He called it egotistophy of a Rolling Stone that gathered moss for the amusement of his family. [laughter] researching Abraham Lincoln, i doubt you will find that. It was his military career of the civil war preceding city point. Any Barnes Family numbers who happen to hear or see this, there is powerful evidence that at the time he was there, he wrote letters to his wife. Why this is important is because of mary lincoln. Some of the worst stories about mary lincoln come out of lincolns time at city point. You can trace them back to two sources, Horace Porter and adam but go. Their attitude towards mary lincoln is like some quarters and outwards hillary clinton. S

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