The same man that wrote The Last Best Hope of Earth: Abraham Lincoln and the Promise of America. He and Lincoln must have kneepads on if they thought Lincoln & the Union were the Messiah.
But a review posted at Amazon.com reports thusly:
Editorial ReviewsMaybe I will read it. Maybe he has Lincoln pegged.
From Publishers WeeklyShortly before issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared slaves free in the secessionist states, Abraham Lincoln gave assurances to the border states of an all-white society to come, whereby freed slaves would be shipped to South American colonies. [emphasis mine]
I suppose this is a bit off topic but the following is an update on where things stand on the Butler issue.
I obtained a copy of Neely's essay on it a few weeks ago and have been poking holes throughout it. Neely bases his argument against Butler entirely upon the account's placement of the City Point visit and the Seward horse accident - the two coinciding events that Butler seems to have flipped and placed after his last meeting with Lincoln instead of before it. Neely does all this in spite of (1) the fact that Butler was notorious throughout his book for slightly misplacing the dates of battles, meetings, and other events, though typically no more than a week off, and (2) the fact that Butler clearly states in the text with regards to the Seward accident that his placement of it was only to the best of his memory, not a certainty.
Though it seems that credible reasons exist as to why Butler's placement of the City Point trip should NOT be used to specifically date the Lincoln meeting, Neely treats it as conclusive and, without even looking for further evidence such as the recorded meeting with Lincoln at the White House a week later on April 11, asserts that Butler never met with Lincoln when he claimed or even anywhere in the timeframe! How he could have missed the April 11th memo is itself a bit baffling considering that it appears only a few pages after letters he quoted from in the file of Butler's papers.
I've also found more evidence as to why it may be reasonably concluded that, through failing memory, Butler simply misplaced the City Point trip on his timeline by about a week. In Butler's papers is a letter from one of his friends in Lowell, MA written during the first week in April while Butler was in DC and Lincoln still in City Point. Butler's friend essentially says something to the effect of the following (i've got a photocopy of the handwritten letter but haven't had time to transcribe it electronically yet so this is just a paraphrase): "I tried to drop by the other day but discovered you were still in Washington. I assume that since you stayed in Washington the prospects are looking good for you to get your meeting with Lincoln in the next few days when he returns from City Point."
In other words, at some earlier point Butler had told the guy he would be coming home to Lowell in the first week of April unless he found out he was able to meet with Lincoln, in which case he would stay in DC a few days longer. Since he did not return to Lowell, this letter is conclusive evidence that Butler expected to meet with Lincoln upon the president's return!
And not only that - it also makes way for the possibility if not likelihood that Butler met with Lincoln not once but twice - exactly as he stated in his book.
The documented final meeting with Lincoln was on the 11th, a Tuesday, at 9 AM. Butler doesn't give a date in his book but states that he called on Lincoln early in the morning not long before the assassination, so the April 11th meeting is indisputably that event. It is the second of the two meetings on colonization described by Butler in his book.
Butler says that the first meeting took place about a day or two before the 9 AM one on April 11th. Lincoln returned from City Point, as best as I can tell, on the 6th or 7th (thursday or friday) exactly as had been reported to Butler in another letter he recieved from an official in Lincoln's Treasury Department during the city point trip (that letter basically informs Butler that Lincoln will be staying in City Point until sometime around Thursday, which was the 6th, and then coming back). That essentially means that Butler could have feasibly met with Lincoln for the first of the two discussions at any point over the weekend or between the 7th and 10th, when Hay delivered the memo informing him of the scheduled time on the 11th.
And yes - there is in fact some loose evidence of this first meeting: When Butler recieved the letter from his friend in Lowell while Lincoln was still at City Point, he obviously could not have known about the April 11th meeting, which was not scheduled or delivered to him by Hay until April 10th. Thus Butler had to have known about another meeting before the 11th, of which the scheduling record simply did not survive.
Please do. He nailed the Davis regime and their massive violations of legal and civil rights, too.