Lincoln and slavery
Sir, – In his letter about Abraham Lincoln (June 12), Kearney Smith becomes a
propagator of two fallacies – each a suppressio veri and a suggestio falsi –
that are all too familiar to students of US history.
The Emancipation Proclamation, says Mr Smith, was by Lincoln’s own confession
a move to forestall British and French recognition of the Confederacy.
Certainly it was; whoever denied it? – but it was designedly much more as
well. Smith would have done well to rely on the text of the Proclamation
itself, where Lincoln says, “upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act
of justice, warranted by the Constitution upon military necessity, I invoke
the considerate judgement of mankind and the gracious favor of Almighty
God”. Mr Smith will hardly deny that the emancipation was an act of justice,
even if incomplete; and that it was indeed driven by military necessity
seems equally indisputable. Slavery was the rock on which the Confederate
army relied; it crumpled rapidly after January 1, 1863, and in the end took
the Confederacy down to ruin with it; and Lincoln made sure that it could
never be resurrected by extirpating it from the whole Union through the
Thirteenth Amendment, which passed the House of Representatives before
Lincoln’s death. Secretary Seward may not have understood this in 1862 (I
would like to know Mr Smith’s authority for his allegation on this point);
nor did The Times, but both knew better in 1865.
Mr Smith’s other blunder concerns the famous letter to Horace Greeley of
August 22, 1862, which Lincoln sent because Greeley, the widely influential
editor of the New York Tribune, was trying to bounce him into a premature
proclamation of emancipation. Smith does not give the sentences that he
quotes complete (all too few controversialists do). They run: “My paramount
object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or
to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I
would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it;
and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also
do that”. The point that is almost invariably overlooked is that Lincoln had
already decided to free some and leave others alone, and had read the first
draft of an emancipation proclamation to his Cabinet on July 22. Following
Seward’s advice, he opted to keep this decision secret, and if possible
unsuspected, until a convincing Union victory would make it seem an act of
strength, not weakness. The letter to Greeley was a smokescreen, to be
judged as such, not as an expression of Lincoln’s full and deepest thoughts.
For those it is best to refer to the letter’s closing paragraph, in which he
says, “I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty;
and I intend no modification of my oftexpressed personal wish that all men
every where could be free”.
HUGH BROGAN
Department of History, University of Essex, Colchester.
Age of eloquence
Sir, – I take exception to Brian Vickers’s review of Carla Mazzio’s The
Inarticulate Renaissance (May 29) on two counts. My first objection relates
to the terms set out by Vickers himself in his review. A glance at the book
– or even at its subtitle, “Language trouble in an age of eloquence” – makes
clear that Mazzio is very well aware of the enormously prestigious status
enjoyed by the rhetorical arts throughout the Renaissance; it is explicitly
against this background that Mazzio is writing, rather than being, as
Vickers implies in his opening paragraphs, in need of a lesson in the
requisite humanist background. To claim that Mazzio is “aligning herself
with mumbling and other forms of sub-linguistic activity”, thus placing
herself “outside Renaissance concepts of language, in the zone that Hamlet
unkindly attributes to the groundlings, ‘capable of nothing but inexplicable
dumb shows and noise’”, is absurd. One may as well claim that a book about
fascism is, perforce, fascist.
My second, and perhaps weightier, objection: as Vickers must surely know, the
book is Mazzio’s first monograph. It is one thing to take on established
scholars whose work one dislikes; and it is of course fair enough to
disagree with this book and its premisses; but there is no small degree of
unkindness involved in publishing quite so viciously negative a review of a
young academic’s early work.
DAVID HILLMAN
Faculty of English, University of Cambridge.
Sir, – In his review of The Inarticulate Renaissance: Language trouble in an
age of eloquence, Brian Vickers finds fault with Carla Mazzio’s assumption
that the playlet in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy was performed, as
Hieronimo instructs, in “unknowne languages”. His reason? A note, inserted
in the 1592 edition, in which the printer explains that “this play of
Hieronimo in sundrie Languages, was thought good to be set downe in English
more largely, for the easier understanding to every publique reader”.
Vickers assumes that this “same consideration \[‘for the easier
understanding’\] must have applied in the performance”. I wish to question
his peremptory “must”. As the most recent and thorough study on the play has
argued (Lukas Erne’s Beyond the Spanish Tragedy: A study of the works of
Thomas Kyd, 2001), there is no sound reason to doubt that the playlet was
performed in sundry languages. So who is making the assumption here? And on
what grounds? Vickers seems to think “easier understanding” is the sole
point of drama, in reading and in performance. But surely “understanding” is
precisely what is not intended in Hieronimo’s send-up of the confusion of
tongues. Vickers wryly adds that seventy lines in “unknowne languages” would
have driven the groundlings to accuse “the actors of producing ‘inexplicable
dumb shows and noise’”. But why should they complain, if as Hamlet
maintains, they “are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb-shows and
noise”? This suggests that Vickers may be missing something besides the
value of Mazzio’s book: that incomprehensibility has a role to play, even in
an Age of Eloquence.
MARGRETA DE GRAZIA
Department of English, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
19104.
Careless as Dickens
Sir, – My review of the Penguin Modern Classics edition of Norman Collins’s
London Belongs to Me (April 17), which, among other things, considered
Collins’s dealings with George Orwell, omitted one salient piece of
information. Orwell reviewed the novel in the Manchester Evening News of
November 29, 1945. While wondering whether “anyone nowadays is genuinely in
the mood to write so voluminously and so carelessly as Dickens”, noting the
existence of “dead wood” and suggesting that its 700 pages had “probably
been written at high speed” he was broadly approving: “. . . the
spiritualistic scenes and most of the passages dealing with the murder are
excellent, and since the arrangement of the book facilitates skipping, this
can be numbered among the few novels published this year that are worth
reading”. The full text may be read in I Belong to the Left, Volume XVII of
Peter Davison’s edition of George Orwell: The complete works (1998).
D. J. TAYLOR
Caragh House, 1 Poplar Avenue, Norwich.
Modern Masters
Sir, – In her otherwise generous and perceptive review of my book When the
Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies (June 12), Lynsey Hanley wrote
that I had “mistakenly” attributed a series of 1970s primers on key
thinkers, titled Modern Masters, to Penguin rather than Fontana. This is not
quite accurate. While Fontana did publish a Modern Masters series in the
1970s, so did Penguin – the British Library catalogue lists thirteen titles
– and that is the series to which my book refers.
ANDY BECKETT
The Guardian, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1.
Middle East envoys
Sir, – In reviewing Patrick Tyler’s A World of Trouble: America in the Middle
East, Oliver Miles (May 29) uses quite a lot of his text to identify a
number of American officials as Jewish, from the 1920s to Kissinger and
right down to Barack Obama’s recent appointees, Rahm Emanuel, identified as
the son of an Irgun terrorist, Dennis Ross, and Daniel Shapiro, who is
described as both Jewish and as the 2008 presidential campaign’s “Jewish
Outreach Coordinator” – he is evidently very Jewish.
Miles does the same for Tony Blair’s former envoy to the Middle East, Lord
Levy. Like some especially crass Arabs, Miles clearly implies that no Jew
should have any role in shaping or executing US or British Middle East
policy, thereby blandly imputing disloyalty to any Jewish official,
regardless of his record or expressed opinions. That is exactly racist. He
also writes that the “Arab mother” of President Obama’s special envoy,
George Mitchell, could turn out to be his “Achilles heel”. But few people
would be foolish enough to emulate Miles by referring to his mother in order
to attack Mitchell – it would only disqualify the attacker.
EDWARD N. LUTTWAK
4510 Drummond Avenue, Chevy Chase, Maryland 20815.
To read Oliver Miles's review, click here.
‘Biarritz’
Sir, – There seems to be some confusion about Jerome K. Jerome’s contribution
to the 1896 musical farce Biarritz (NB, June 5 and 12). This was composed by
F. Osmond Carr (1858–1916), and the lyrics were supplied by his regular
collaborator Adrian Ross (later to achieve notable success with his words
for the first English-language production of Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow).
Jerome wrote the dialogue or book, which was conceived as a vehicle for the
popular comedian Arthur Roberts. The story concerns the adventures of
Jenkins Junior (Roberts), who is sent to take over the management of his
family’s hotel in Biarritz. Some members of the resident staff plot against
him. A typical piece of dialogue between two chambermaids goes thus:
Ann: Miss Mapledown, No 48 says he’s rung three times for hot water and it
isn’t even warm!
Janet: Why, what does he want? Ringing won’t make it any hotter!
Ann: He says he’ll make it hot for the manager.
Despite several changes of cast, new material being added, and the title
changed to John Jenkins in Biarritz, the play only lasted for seventy-one
performances.
PATRICK O’CONNOR
37 Theobalds Road, London WC1.
Other Monica
Sir, – I enjoyed Hugo Williams’s spirited account of the Movement Reconsidered
evening (Freelance, June 12), but I think he must be confused by his memory
of the name of a London department store: the edition of Philip Larkin’s
letters I am preparing for publication next year is not of Larkin’s letters
to Monica Dickens but to Monica Jones.
ANTHONY THWAITE
The Mill House, Low Tharston, Norfolk.
