Elusive Truths
Davy Crockett and Amelia Earhart are not alive and well on Atlantis. Or are they?
But Lincoln probably didn't write the letter--his secretary, John Hay, did, says Burlingame. And Bixby was a liar (only two of her five sons died in the war), a Southern sympathizer, and the mistress of a whorehouse. Tradition says she loathed Lincoln and tore up the letter.
The historian compared each word in the letter with the words in a database of Lincoln's writings. Then he did the same for Hay, but without a computer: He "read everything John Hay ever wrote." Words used often in Hay's writings, like "beguile" (at least 30 times), but nowhere in Lincoln's, were clues. And he found a copy of the letter pasted in a scrapbook Hay kept of his media mentions. "I've been like a dog with a bone on this one. I knew controversy existed, but I never thought it was something I'd spend much time on," he says.
Burlingame continues to pursue Lincoln arcana. He's now using similar stylistic analysis to find anonymous satirical newspaper articles that Lincoln wrote when he was a journalist in his youth. "It's kind of a minor footnote," he says. "But I love detective work like this."
Burlingame's theory didn't cause an outcry or damage Lincoln's literary reputation--after all, he still wrote the Gettysburg Address. But historians can and do strike nerves when they challenge cherished myths. Since its translation into English in 1975, an account of Mexico's 1836 campaign in Texas has caused outrage and anxiety among worshipers of Davy Crockett. The account, by Mexican Army officer Jose Enrique de la Pena, says that Crockett did not die fighting on the ramparts of the Alamo but was executed on the order of Mexican Gen. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. "How dare you degrade Davy Crockett? . . . This is one of the Communists' plans to degrade our heroes. He's still king of the wild frontier," wrote a fan to Dan Kilgore, whose 1978 book, How Did Davy Die?, gave credence to the theory.
Before the 1950s Disney TV show seared Crockett's macho death into millions of baby boomer brains, there was no debate, says Don Carleton, director of the Center for American History at the University of Texas-Austin, which owns the de la Pena document. Scholars are more interested in the evolution of Alamo history than in the specifics of Crockett's death. Even the mystery of why people care about the mystery is subject to study--Brian Huberman, a professor of art and art history at Rice University in Houston, just wrapped a documentary on the topic. "What this whole controversy has done is show the way in which history works, in the sense that it has to be revitalized regularly for each generation," he says.
The debate was revitalized in 1994, when New York City firefighter Bill Groneman wrote Defense of a Legend. The book asserted, based on stylistic, factual, and other inconsistencies, that the de la Pena account was fake. Scholars fussed and fumed, and Groneman was accused of being an obsessive fan unable to accept his hero's ignoble death. "Don't write that I'm obsessed!" he says. (And his heroes are his father and John Steinbeck--not Crockett.) Despite the flak, Groneman enjoys his role in the controversy. "I don't really feel like sitting back and letting someone else get the last word."
advertisement
