Lincoln Studies and a Stacked Deck

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)

View all posts