History is a funny thing. It is not always as it appears at first glance. There is a famous line from a French writer to the effect that “History never embraces more than a small part of reality.” So, it is that so much of history that is accepted as fact is, something else altogether. Another appropriate line related to all of this that “History is a tale told by the victor.”

It is that we have heard for the past eight decades the stories of war crimes by the Germans and the Japanese during World War 2. It is only in recent times that we have learned that our side wasn’t free of this either. It depends on who tells the story. The bombing in the closing days of that war by the allies of the militarily unimportant German city of Dresden is a case in point. If the Germans had won the Second World War, then the bombing of Dresden would have found a place in the history books as a war crime. Only recently has there been any real discussion of flattening that beautiful city.

In the early history of post-war France, the bulk of written history was of the resistance. You don’t need to be a very astute observer to know that everybody wasn’t in the resistance in France and that quite apart from the puppet government in Vichy, France there was a portion of the French population who, to varying degrees, just survived by getting along with the German occupiers. It wasn’t that they were active collaborators. It just meant that everybody wasn’t in the resistance even though in our souls we wish it to be true.

Here in Newfoundland an early examination of events had Joe Smallwood’s disgraced and arrested economic director Alfred Valdmanis billed as a “Latvian Quisling, a man who had collaborated with Hitler and the Reich and all it stands for. It is only a later examination that tells us that such an interpretation on Valdmanis was superficial and the work of self-serving Smallwood apologists who floated the story to distance Smallwood from the convicted man he had hired.

Here at home a recent popular history book dismissed seal hunt protesters as professional money raisers without ever allowing for the possibility that even some of them might be well motivated by a genuine well-founded opposition to a hunt for furs used in the fashion industry.

Now all of that takes me to Mr. Abraham Lincoln. He is forever remembered in American history for being on the moral high ground and issuing the Emancipation Proclamation and freeing the slaves. That proclamation was issued in September of 1862, but it was a full two months earlier that he told his cabinet he was going to do it. He waited because he wanted to do it after a major union victory. In the summer of 1862, the Civil War was going very badly for the Union armies. There was even a suggestion that several European nations would recognize the Confederacy as a legitimate country. Lincoln needed to make a big move. It was after the Union victory at the battle at Antietam that Lincoln sprung his surprise. He freed the slaves. Well, kind of. The Proclamation actually freed the slaves in all rebellious states effective Jan. 1, 1863. That was it, though. It didn’t address the issue in the so-called “border states”. What did Lincoln hope to accomplish? Well, he thought that the act would cause thousands of freed slaves to come fight with the North, and he also thought that the Emancipation would play well in Europe.

What history now tells us is that in August of that year Lincoln wrote a letter to the editor of The New York Tribune saying, “My paramount objective in this struggle is to save the Union and it is not either to save or destroy slavery.” They don’t sound like the words of Lincoln. Well, history is like that. Once you get beyond the accepted version there is much to learn. It is not always a straightforward matter.  

You can contact Jim Furlong at jfurlong@ntv.ca