Mr. Oates's Response to Mr. Burlingame

Once again, Burlingame serves up those familiar parallel passages as evidence of plagiarism in my work. His mode of analysis, however, is spurious, because the passages are taken completely out of context. To make matters worse, Burlingame has surgically altered some of these examples, eliminating and compressing words, with the use of ellipses, to create the illusion of similarity. If you examine the pages these passages come from, you will discover how different the writing, organization, emphasis, and interpretations are between my books and the volumes I am accused of plagiarizing. Moreover, all of my books are adequately referenced.

Any history or biography is vulnerable to a charge of plagiarism on the basis of the parallel-passage method of analysis. To make my point, I was going to cite examples from a few books. But I changed my mind. Burlingame or someone like him might discover which books the passages come from. If so, the unsuspecting authors might well find themselves accused of plagiarism. I don't want anyone to suffer the kind of hell I've gone through from that lethal charge.

Burlingame has done all in his power to undermine the now-famous public statement, signed by the 23 eminent historians, that the accusations of plagiarism against me are"totally unfounded." He alleges that one of those defenders informed him:"I have told Oates personally (and so did several others) that he had committed . . . a . . . sin against scholarship." This is not true. None of my defenders has told me any such thing.

Burlingame likes to attack scholars who disagree with him about my integrity. He's even accused several of them of plagiarism. When a famous United States Senator, presidential candidate, and Lincoln scholar had the temerity to defend me, Burlingame wrote him a letter so vicious that it made one cringe to read it.

As he always does, Burlingame purposely ignores the fact that a group of prominent scholars at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, then my employer, examined the charges of plagiarism against me and issued a public statement that the allegations were totally groundless.

11Mr. Burlingame, have we not had enough of your accusations? You and certain members of the AHA professional division have done much to create the suspicious, accusatory climate that plagues our great profession. I ask you the same question that Attorney Welch asked Joseph McCarthy during the Army-McCarthy hearings:"Have you no sense of decency, sir? Have you left no sense of decency?"*

*Quoted in Eric F. Goldman, The Crucial Decade--and After: America, 1945-1960 (New York: Vintage Books, 1960), p. 278.