Lincoln wasn’t perfect

Treated as a secular saint and icon by most Americans, and unarguably the nation’s most eloquent president, Abraham Lincoln has become almost wholly a mythic figure.

Following several new books about him during and after the 200th anniversary of his birth in 2009 (a recent example is Harold Holzer’s superb Lincoln and the Power of the Press in 2014), however, a more human, imperfect and perhaps even more interesting Lincoln has emerged, yet his overall eminent stature has remained.

In late April, 1865, two weeks after Lincoln’s assassination, with the Mississippi flooded and in cold weather, the boilers on the steamboat Sultana exploded in the night soon after sailing from Vicksburg. 1,800 persons died either immediately from drowning or from burns and exposure as a result of the sinking. No sea disaster in war or peace, including the sinking of the Lusitania 50 years later, killed more Americans. The death toll even exceeded all those lost on the Titanic in 1912.

The Sultana had been ferrying former Union prisoners of war back to the North, one of many Mississippi River steamboats used for this purpose. Many of these soldiers had been held at the infamous Andersonville prison camp, and all of them were undernourished and weakened by their captivity.

Offering a bounty of $5 for every enlisted man and $20 for every officer, these former prisoners were herded onto crowded steamboats for the ride North. In what turned out to be the worst maritime disaster in U.S.  history, almost 2,500 persons (mostly soldiers) were packed into the Sultana in Vicksburg, even though the wooden ship had a maximum capacity of only 350 passengers and 85 crew.

There were several men who shared levels of responsibility for this tragedy, but clearly the greatest villain was a Union quartermaster named Reuben Hatch, who had a long history of corruption and incompetence Historical evidence clearly points to his taking bribes and kickbacks to place as many soldiers as possible on the vessel.

How did he get to be placed in this position?

Despite a history of criminality during the Civil War, Hatch happened to be the brother of an Illinois state official who was a home state crony of president Lincoln. Each time he got into trouble, Hatch’s brother wrote to Lincoln who promptly wrote letters getting the quartermaster off the hook. The most recent and most tragic example was a note from the president penned only a few days before his assassination, and which enabled Hatch’s role in Vicksburg. As one of the most preeminent Lincoln scholars today, Harold Holzer, concedes, had he survived, Mr. Lincoln would likely have had to answer for his part in the Sultana disaster.

Ironically, at about the same time he was writing such inspiring speeches as the Gettysburg Address and his second inaugural address, indisputably among the most sublime public speeches in American history, Lincoln the politician was writing notes of patronage and giving favors for supporters and their friends and relatives, including his repeated efforts on behalf of Lt. Col. Hatch.

There is no evidence, of course, that Lincoln could know what his notes to help Hatch would lead to, but there can be little doubt that the always world-savvy president knew what a bad actor the brother of his friend was. Others protected Lt. Col. Hatch, including Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and General Ulysses S. Grant, but it was Lincoln, in the highest position of all, whose complicity is the most serious.

Reuben Hatch was not punished for his crime. Realizing he would be prosecuted, he hurriedly resigned from the army and went into hiding.Later efforts to prosecute him failed to materialize, and he died in 1871 before justice could catch up with him.

Despite the enormity of the catastrophe, it was little known outside the Vicksburg area. The nation was still reeling from the shock of Lincoln’s assassination two weeks earlier, and the headlines and stories filling the nation’s newspapers were of the capture and killing of John Wilkes Booth the day before the sinking.

Today, such huge loss of life would be the number one news story all over the world, but in late April, 1865, the nation had just endured four years of immense death and casualties. More than 600,000 American soldiers, north and south, had died. How could 1800 more deaths stand out to a nation  already in shock and immense grief?

The tragedy of the Sultana was soon forgotten. Lincoln became a martyred and sainted figure. After a brief period of Reconstruction and emancipation, old patterns of prejudice, civil injustice and racial segregation reappeared.

Lincoln is my favorite American political figure, my favorite American writer and speaker. He remains so, perhaps even enhanced so, not  because I can or want to condone his tragic error in this case, (or his pattern of reckless patronage), but because like all great men and women of the past, the present, and the future, he was sublimely imperfect, not just a myth.

Read more from Barry Casselman at www.barrycasselman.com.