By DOUG SHAVER
December 10, 2010
Something reminded me earlier today of Ken Burns’s reference in his miniseries The Civil War to a meeting between Abraham Lincoln and Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin had been published about a decade earlier. According to Burns, Lincoln greeted her with the remark, “So you’re the little lady that started this great war.”
A lifetime of study has made me skeptical about quotations like that, so I got to wondering whether the meeting even happened and, if it did, whether Lincoln made that statement. I quickly found an article about it in the Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, written by Daniel R. Vollaro and titled “Lincoln, Stowe, and the ‘Little Woman/Great War’ Story: The Making, and Breaking, of a Great American Anecdote.” According to the evidence presented by Vollaro, yes, the meeting did happen, but no, Lincoln probably never made that statement during whatever conversation he and Stowe had.
Vollaro’s article also touches on the question of whether, even if Lincoln had said it, the statement would have been true. Did Uncle Tom’s Cabin really arouse as much abolitionist fervor as the legend would have us think? It seems unlikely. The social and political forces that produced America’s first civil war were already so thoroughly entrenched in the national psyche that one more popular novel was not going to make a difference. Or at least, this novel did not make the difference. The war was coming, with or without it.
Superficially, this is just another exercise in historiography. We have an anecdote about two famous people meeting each other on a certain occasion and one of them saying something to the other on that occasion. We have some textual evidence about the occasion, and from that evidence we can make certain inferences about the truth of the anecdote. But as Vollaro goes on to observe, we can also make certain inferences about why the anecdote was reported in the first place and why it became so popular as to be treated by some writers as if it were an undisputed fact. And that makes this more than just an academic dispute among historians of the American Civil War.
Vollaro touches on what we might learn from this academic dispute in his conclusion. Lincoln’s greeting to Stowe is typically labeled by historians as “apocryphal,” by which they “mean that it cannot be traced back to the canon of writing left behind by either Lincoln or Stowe.” And, he goes on: “This distinction between a canon of authorial writing and the body of critical and scholarly work that surrounds it—the difference between a primary and secondary source—can be clearly defined in a world where the tangible artifacts of an author or historical figure's words still have value.” Unfortunately for us in the 21st century, he thinks, “on the Internet, the distinction mostly vanishes, because everything is sourced through the same medium—the computer screen—which effectively erases any clear distinction between an ‘original’ and its many reproductions, versions, snippets, and fictionalized accounts.”
That blurring of distinctions does seem to be a problem, but it didn’t come with the Internet. For most people throughout history, there has been only one medium through which their information came. For everybody, before the invention of writing, there was only speech, and to this day, it has remained the only medium for the illiterate, who were the majority of people until just a few centuries ago. Even after writing was invented, texts were little more than permanent records of somebody’s speech until barely yesterday, historically speaking. Only in very modern times did some educated people begin to notice a difference between primary and secondary sources, but most even then failed to make the proper distinction. The average citizen, if they were even aware of it, regarded it as a kind of nitpicking having no relevance to anyone but professional historians. For this average person, any anecdote was credible if it came from a credible source, whether by word of mouth or in a book or other document, and few learned anything useful about how to evaluate a source’s credibility.
So the medium is not the problem, because the medium was never the message, and it is the message that has to be judged. The problem is that too few people have learned the right ways to make that judgment. Source credibility is relevant, but it has its own criteria, and they start with finding out who the source is and where they, in turn, are getting their information. This used to be Research 101 in college classes, and maybe it still is, but in any case it was rarely assimilated. It was something students had to learn for writing term papers and then could forget as soon as they handed their assignments in. Unless they were history majors, perhaps.
The problem has persisted into the Internet age despite its inconsistency with the Enlightenment values that drove the scientific progress that gave us the Internet to begin with. Those values were never universally accepted, even during the so-called Age of Enlightenment, and as evidenced by the general reaction to Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now, they are now quite out of intellectual fashion. Vollaro didn’t say he was blaming the Internet for any of this, but plenty of other people are, and they are part of the problem. Blaming any technology for people’s misuse of it is always a mistake.
Nitpicking about sources is not just for historians or other academics. A healthy democracy needs a lot more of it than we’re seeing these days. I’m not saying everybody needs to be ready to fact-check Ken Burns the way I did, but if almost everyone is getting most of their news from the Internet these days, and if almost everyone believes whatever they find on the Internet, then our democracy is in serious trouble. If there is anything that nobody disputes, it is that you can’t believe anything just because you read it on the Internet. That said, though, it is not true that you can believe nothing that is on the Internet. There is plenty of truth on the Internet, and it is not that difficult to learn how to recognize it when you find it.
Not that difficult, but not intuitive, either, and this, too, has nothing to do with the Internet itself. It has to do with critical thinking, another virtue to which our modern society pays more lip service than actual attention. During my brief tenure as a candidate for a high-school teaching credential, I was told that I’d be expected to teach critical-thinking skills to my students. That was almost two decades ago, and I assume all prospective teachers in California were told the same thing. Without trying to pin the fault on anyone in particular, one may easily observe that the typical high-school graduate these days is not adept at critical thinking.
Public education is supposed to produce the kind of informed citizenry that is vital to any democracy, but information is of little use to people who do not know how to evaluate it. That is one difference between real education and mere indoctrination, and there is much evidence that our colleges of education have been hijacked by people far more interested in the latter than the former.
It was probably always so. There was much that I had to unlearn about the American history I was taught during the 1950s, so some reforms were needed. But the teaching of dogmas is not corrected by the teaching of different dogmas. Sure, the things I was taught about the American Civil War made the nation look better than it really was, but it is a better nation now than it was then. The improvement will not continue but can only be reversed if modern curricula, such as the 1619 Project, give our students the idea that the progress we have achieved is only a fraud perpetrated by racist capitalists.
I get it now, as I did not when I was in elementary and high school, that the abolition of slavery was never the North’s primary motivation in fighting the Civil War. I also get it that not all abolitionists were motivated by a commitment to racial equality. But many were so committed, and abolition was never an irrelevancy among the war’s causes. If the nation had been as systemically racist as so many are now saying it always has been, there would have been no Civil War and slavery would never have been abolished. Never abolished, that is, unless chattel slavery had eventually proved itself to be incompatible with free-market capitalism, as some of us think it is and which Adam Smith himself apparently believed.
Whether it is or isn’t compatible cannot be proved, of course, just by quoting Adam Smith or anybody else. The only proof is to be found in observable evidence, including evidence about human nature and the motivations grounding human behavior. It is more complicated than figuring out whether Lincoln really greeted Stowe by saying, “So you’re the little lady that started this great war,” but we can use the same method, if the truth is what we’re really interested in.