History is crazy!
Robert Lincoln, by the way, would continue to run the War Department for Garfield’s successor Chester Arthur. In the 1880’s, this mostly entailed managing the dwindling Indian Wars out west, with one ghastly exception. The same week Garfield was shot, one of Lincoln’s charges, a twenty-five-man Arctic scientific expedition was en route to Lady Franklin Bay. Robert Todd Lincoln, writes Leonard F. Guttridge in Ghosts of Cape Sabine, “could not have cared less about the North Pole.” Underprovisioned, thanks mostly to Lincoln’s indifference toward the project, the men arrived in the North Pole to set up a base, expecting a relief ship the following year. It never came. After two years went by without supplies or rescue, the starving party abandoned their camp and retreated home. Only six survived. The survivors ate the dead men. It was a fiasco of planning and leadership, a national embarrassment and disgrace, and as the bureaucrat in charge, Robert Lincoln had frozen blood on his hands. When the rumors of cannibalism surfaced, Lincoln and his counterpart the secretary of the navy conspired to cover it up by announcing that the reason the bones of the dead had been mangled by knives was that the survivors cut up their comrades’ flesh to use as “shrimp bait.” That’s how ugly the scandal was - that turning human flesh into shrimp bait was a positive spin.
- Sarah Vowell, Assassination Vacation
