What Bateman said to Herndon he was forbidden to publish, but the inference is ineluctable that he repudiated, in part, the interview with Holland, but did it on condition that Herndon should not publish the statement in a way that would raise the issue of veracity between himself and Holland.
This was in the autumn of 1865. In the spring of 1866, Herndon again called upon Bateman, but got no farther.
As the controversy waxed furious, Herndon made further and insistent efforts to obtain from Bateman a statement which could be made to the public. Herndon preserved notes of the interviews, which he dated, December 3, 12, and 28, 1866. Bateman still refused to emerge from his silence. One can imagine Herndon in his yellow trousers twice rolled up at the bottom, hitching his chair a little closer to the little superintendent, and with long, skinny forefinger outstretched, probing with insistent cross-examination into the innermost recesses of the ipsissima versa of the interview with Lincoln and the subsequent one with Holland. Whether he and Mr. Bateman continued to address each other politely is not known, but Herndon endeavored first to persuade and afterward to force, Bateman to do one of three things,—to avow over his own signature the story as Holland told it; to repudiate the interview and throw the responsibility upon Holland; or to permit Herndon to publish what Bateman had told to him. Bateman would do none of these three things. If he did the first, Herndon would accuse him of falsehood; if he did the second, Holland would accuse him of falsehood; and if he did the third, he would become the central figure in a controversy that already had become more than red-hot. He refused to say anything, and announced to all comers that the publicity was "extremely distasteful" to him.
Herndon went as far as he could toward making public what Bateman told to him. He published the following statement, designed to throw the greater part of the blame upon Holland, but to force Bateman to relate to the public what Bateman had said to him, and what he had written down and held ready to produce:
"I cannot now detail what Mr. Bateman said, as it was a private conversation, and I am forbidden to make use of it in public. If some good gentleman can only get the seal of secrecy removed, I can show what was said and done. On my word, the world may take it for granted that Holland is wrong; that he does not state Mr. Lincoln's views correctly. Mr. Bateman, if correctly represented in Holland's Life of Lincoln, is the only man, the sole and only man, who dare say that Mr. Lincoln believed in Jesus as the Christ of God, as the Christian world represents. This is not a pleasant situation for Mr. Bateman. I have notes and dates of our conversation; and the world will sometime know who is truthful, and who is otherwise. I doubt whether Bateman is correctly represented by Holland."—Lamon: Life of Lincoln, p. 496.
Mr. Bateman was, indeed, in an uncomfortable position and any one of the three ways out of it seemed likely to make it still more uncomfortable. He continued to maintain a profound silence. Years afterward when Arnold was preparing his Life of Lincoln for the press and Arnold asked him concerning the truth of the incident as recorded by Holland, he replied with extreme brevity that it was "substantially correct." (Arnold: Life of Lincoln, p. 179).
The only portion of Bateman's admission to Herndon which Bateman finally, and with great reluctance, consented to have published, was one which covered the alleged utterance "Christ is God." It was a letter written in 1867, and marked "Confidential." In this letter Bateman said:
"He [Lincoln] was applying the principles of moral and religious truth to the duties of the hour, the condition of the country, and the conduct of public men—ministers of the gospel. I had no thought of orthodoxy or heterodoxy, Unitarianism, Trinitarianism, or any other ism, during the whole conversation, and I don't suppose or believe he had."
This is a guarded letter, but it is sufficiently specific for our purposes. If the conversation between Bateman and Lincoln was of this character, with nothing to distinguish the view of Lincoln as Unitarian or Trinitarian, Lincoln certainly did not say:
"I know I am right because I know that liberty is right, for Christ teaches it, and Christ is God."