Posted Wednesday morning, June 24, 2020.
Detail from a posthumous portrait of Abraham Lincoln by George P.A. Healy. 1869. Via Wikimedia Commons and the Google Art Project.
In this scene from Gore Vidal’s novel “Lincoln”, the President has just told his flabbergasted Secretary of State William Seward of his decision to suspend habeas corpus in Maryland, a slave state, teetering on secession, where local politicians were openly defiant of federal authority and mobs of pro-slavery citizens had torn up railroad tracks and the mayor had allowed the dismantling of a railroad bridge so Union troops from Massachusetts heading to Washington to shore up the city’s defenses couldn’t get there...
Seward...looked up at Lincoln. “Will you be forgiven, sir, when the people learn of this?”
“Well, I don’t plan to make a public announcement just yet---”
“But the word will spread.”
“Mr. Seward, for the moment all that matters is to keep Maryland in the Union, and there is nothing that I will not do to accomplish that.”
“Well, you have convinced me of that!” Although Seward chuckled, he was more alarmed than amused. “What happens when those hotheads in Baltimore find out?”
“Well, as we have a list of the worst of the lot, I reckon [General Butler] will lock them all up in Fort McHenry.”
“What happens if the people of the city resist our troops?”
“We burn Baltimore to the ground. We are at war, Mr. Seward.”
“Yes, sir.” Seward wondered what precedents there were for the disposal of a mad president. Like so many other interesting matters, the Constitution had left the matter unduly vague.
---from “Lincoln” by Gore Vidal.
Why I like Gore Vidal's *Lincoln*:
It anticipates Doris Kearns Goodwin's *Team of Rivals* with a scene near the end in which Lincoln, on the eve of the second inauguration, notes that he, William Seward and Gideon Welles are the only ones left from the first (yes, there was such a team, but it wasn't in place as long as you might think); and
Vidal has a scene in which Seward muses on how he expected that for the Union to survive, it would need a leader who would be more than a President and less than a dictator. He wasn't sure that there would be such a one (particularly not when he didn't become the sixteenth President!), but he recognizes, to his amazement, that there is such a man in the White House...and his name is Abraham Lincoln.
Salmon Chase would never have been so generous.
George MacDonald Fraser has his anti-hero Harry Flashman meet Abraham Lincoln in *Flash for Freedom!* and Seward in *Flashman and the Angel of the Lord.* Both highly recommended!
Posted by: Charles Sperling | Wednesday, June 24, 2020 at 08:16 PM