Flat Wrong About Lincoln -- A Madville Times Apology

I got Abe Lincoln flat wrong in a post yesterday. I ran a quote attributed to President Lincoln by, among others, Al Gore in The Assault on Reason (p. 88). Professor Schaff's keen ear heard something amiss, something unLincolnesque in the text and went looking. Sure enough, it's bogus, not a Lincoln quote. It appears nowhere in Lincoln's collected works. Rather, as Andrew Fersuson wrote last summer, it comes from a sham artist of the 1880s:

Writing in 1999 in the Abraham Lincoln Association's newsletter, the great Lincoln historian Thomas F. Schwartz traced the bogus passage to the 1880s, about 20 years after Lincoln's death. One theory is that it first appeared in a pamphlet advertising patent medicines. Opponents of Gilded Age capitalism -- Gore's forerunners -- found the quote so useful that Lincoln's former White House secretaries felt compelled to launch a campaign "denouncing the forgery," Schwartz said. Robert Todd Lincoln, who was the president's only surviving son and himself a wealthy railroad lawyer, called it "an impudent invention" that ascribed to his father views that the former president would never have held.

"I discovered what I think is the true and only source of this supposed quotation," Robert wrote in an unpublished letter, probably tongue-in-cheek. "It originated, I think, at what is called a Spiritualist Séance in a country town in Iowa, a number of years ago, as being a communication by President Lincoln through what is called a Medium." Even bloggers might think twice about trusting such a source [Andrew Ferguson, "What Al Wishes Abe Said," Washington Post, 2007.06.10].

Indeed. Even if Robert Todd Lincoln wasn't kidding, I'm not about to appeal to the supernatural for support in my efforts against the plutocracy.

Ferguson notes further that the language of the passage doesn't match Lincoln's typically plain prose. Nor does it match Lincoln's own background:

A corporate lawyer whose long and cunning labor on behalf of the railroads earned him a comfortable income, Lincoln was a vigorous champion of market capitalism, even when it drifted (as it tends to do) toward large concentrations of wealth. Many of his administration's signal initiatives -- the transcontinental railroad, for example -- amounted to what liberals today would condemn as "corporate welfare." Lots of speculators got rich under Lincoln, as Gore notes. As Gore does not note, Lincoln seemed not to have minded [Ferguson 2007.06.10].

The Madville Times apologizes to all who may have been deceived, however briefly. Thanks also to Professor Schaff for his quick investigative work and polite correction. Instead of deleting the erroneous post, I will leave it, with conspicuous correction, as a permanent record of the egg on my face, and a reminder to all fellow crusaders against corporate welfare to check your sources!

And now a bonus for Madville Times readers: a real Lincoln quote! (Yes, I checked this time.)

I believe it is an established maxim in morals that he who makes an assertion without knowing whether it is true or false, is guilty of falsehood; and the accidental truth of the assertion, does not justify or excuse him.
--Letter to Allen N Ford (11 August 1846)

Dang -- all the more reason to check your sources!