Lincoln’s Lie: A True Civil War Caper Through Fake News, Wall Street, And The White House, by Elizabeth Mitchell

Now, this book is somewhat falsely titled. The author, herself a member of that unethical variety of pond scum known as the political journalist, which is perhaps an insult to more honorable pond scum, had the temerity to title this book as Lincoln’s lie, which is itself a bit of fake news that is fitting of the level of integrity of contemporary journalists. This book is interesting enough as a caper, although the informational value of the book is hindered by the book’s casual attitude to truth and its simultaneous adoption of and criticism of the truth-bending aspects of journalism that were common to the age of Lincoln and to our own. There is a story in here that is worth reflecting on, but the harshness of the author towards Lincoln’s behavior in this incident is strongly biased by her own membership in a class of people that has a casual and often antithetical relationship to issues of security which are of paramount importance to governments, especially in the midst of a civil war.

This book is about 250 pages and is divided into 13 chapters. It reads more like a whodunit form of mystery novel than like a nonfiction book of history, which is at least somewhat appropriate given that this book boils down to a whodunit. The author begins with a discussion of a proclamation for the drafting of 400,000 troops just days after the beginning of the Overland Campaign by Grant which sparked a panic on Wall Stret and a somewhat predictable run on the gold market (1). This is followed by a look at the way that Lincoln was viewed as a laughingstock at the beginning of his presidency in part because of the comical and false description of a disguise that he was supposed to have worn while entering Washington DC (2). The author then turns her attention to the crime that was involved in printing a fake presidential proclamation (3), which led to frantic activity on Wall Street as people sought to verify the news while also reacting to the rumor (4), and a warning that there would be consequences from Washington DC (5), which there were when the two newspapers that ran the proclamation, both Democrat-leaning ones, were ordered stopped by the government (6). This led to a manhunt for the person or people responsible for the false proclamation (7), which eventually led to a generally pro-Lincoln reporter who nonetheless was in some money trouble (8) and found himself in Fort Lafayette with others who had been denied habeus corpus, at which point some more insider leaks that purported to be from the jailed reporter landed him in more trouble (9). The chaos of the situation, and the threat of state action against Lincoln’s administration from New York’s attorney general (10, 11), eventually led to a strange suspension of the trial and the freedom of the reporter, after a few months in prison. The author finds the key in the matter of gold speculation (12) by which both the reporter and–the author alleges, Mary Todd Lincoln herself–sought to trade insider knowledge of a written proclamation that was nonetheless not sent out to spark a temporary gold panic that would allow them to make some quick money. Strangely enough, the reporter himself did not suffer long-term from his dishonorable behavior (13) because he continued to be loyal to Lincoln. The book ends with acknowledgements, notes, and an index.

Ultimately, this book is what happens when someone tries to create a new work about Abraham Lincoln and differentiate the work from the tens of thousands of such books that already exist. This work is a bit dodgy on the historical value and, being written by a journalist rather than a historian, shows a high degree of ignorance about Lincoln’s tendency to write documents without intending them to be sent or acted upon, and a rather cavalier attitude to the problem of leaks that reflects her own lamentable bias as a political journalist, a worthless class of humanity that often depends on lies and leaks and fake news for their own daily bread and influence within society. This book shows all the tendencies of someone who wants to read back contemporary views of the freedom of the press and of journalistic privilege to a past where reporters had to face a good deal more potential trouble if they departed from the straight and narrow. That New York City and its press has always been a cesspool of treason and corruption is not at all a surprise, even if the author seems not to recognize that it is the combination of Washington insiders and scummy New York journalists and financial speculators that mark the true villain of the tale, a group of people who has been a cancer in the body politic now for at least 150 years.