A Ripping Yarn About Fake News, Market Manipulation, and the Civil War
Please join my conversation with author Elizabeth Mitchell on her new book, "Lincoln's Lie."
“The country has been made the victim of false news, manufactured reports, exaggerated statements, fictitious accounts…”
This quote comes from a remarkable new book about conspiracy and sedition, market manipulation and free speech, political crisis and division; it’s about the president of the United States declaring war on the press, accusing critical journalists of nothing less than treason. Full of shocking revelations, it somehow finds a fresh story to tell about a four-year-long national catastrophe about which I had foolishly presumed I had little left to learn.
The book is not about Donald Trump; it’s about Abraham Lincoln. It’s called Lincoln’s Lie: A True Civil War Caper Through Fake News, Wall Street, and the White House; it’s by Elizabeth Mitchell; it came out last October. I’ll be interviewing Mitchell tomorrow for the powerhouse Arizona State University-affiliated publisher/events-hoster Zócalo Public Square, at 4pm Eastern/1pm Pacific. If you’re interested in Lincoln and the Civil War, or issues related to freedom of the press and emergency powers, I’d very much recommend tuning in to our discussion.
I don’t think I’ve ever scrawled so many “wows” in the margins of a book. Mitchell tells the astonishingly little-known story of a proclamation, supposedly authored by Lincoln, that appeared in two New York newspapers on the morning of May 18, 1864. The text, noting that Union forces had faced staggering losses in recent battles in Virginia, said that 400,000 men would soon have to be drafted into the army to fill the place of the dead.
Less than a year after the streets of Manhattan had run red with the blood of victims of the so-called Draft Riots, when mobs of enraged whites tore through the city, targeting Black people at random as well as abolitionists, Republicans, and other perceived supporters of the then-unpopular war, this purported presidential proclamation raised the possibility of another outbreak of gruesome violence; it also threatened, once the news spread to Europe, to undermine the Lincoln administration’s theretofore successful bid to keep Britain and France from recognizing the Confederacy. The proclamation, Mitchell persuasively shows, could well have turned the tides of the war.
But it wasn’t real—or so Lincoln claimed. Denouncing the proclamation as a dangerous fraud perpetrated by his political opponents—the two newspapers supported the Democratic Party and had harshly criticized the administration—he ordered the editors and publishers of the newspaper arrested and the printing presses seized; he also arrested the operators of telegraph lines in New York, Washington, and elsewhere, suspecting a broad-based conspiracy to undermine home-front morale. These rash and likely unconstitutional maneuvers eventually led to a dramatic legal showdown in a Manhattan courtroom between federal and New York lawyers—the latter of whom, accusing Lincoln’s military underlings of illegal behavior in shutting down the newspapers, threatened (like the Confederates) to use force to defend what they deemed the rights of the sovereign states.
The story is complex and multilayered (to say the least), but Mitchell tells it masterfully, in gripping prose that one of her illustrious blurbers compares to that of “a suspense novel”; another, similarly, says the book could “pass for a novel”; yet another that the author possesses “the flair of a novelist.” All that, I submit, sells short both her achievement and the possibilities of non-fiction writing. I know as well as anyone how difficult it can be to shape a mass of ungainly research material into clear, concise, mellifluous prose, and even more how difficult is to do all that while keeping the narrative moving. If you’re able to do and stick to the truth, that’s an accomplishment that stands fully on its own, needing no comparison to other genres.
Mitchell, whose work I’m sorry to say I had not encountered before (her last book, on the construction of the Statue of Liberty, especially piques my interest because I’ve lately been reading another version of the same story—tailored, however, for toddlers), spins a fun and fascinating yarn. Just when the mystery seems solved, she introduces a new clue that makes us look at the case anew. I won’t spoil things, should you care to read the book, which I highly recommend, but suffice it to say the proclamation may not have been as fraudulent as Lincoln contended; he may have overreacted not from genuine anger at the propagation of a falsehood but from fear of divulsion of the truth. Mitchell’s theory about what the published proclamation really represented—and who was really responsible—is equally astonishing and plausible. I promise it will take your breath away.
I’m so looking forward to tomorrow’s conversation. Please tune in if you have a spare hour (it will also be posted online afterward). And please do check out this remarkable, revelatory, and wildly relevant book.