about a year or more ago. I'm not going to work them into a single post as I believe you'll be able to figure out the points I want to get across.
Oh. And by the way, whereas Rick Crawford (whom I assume was or is a student at UC Davis), spent 3 hours researching his topic, I've been reading biographies of Mr. Lincoln and histories of the Civil War for a little over 40 years, wrote a biography of Mr. Lincoln for teenagers, and have lectured often at various schools and colleges on Mr. Lincoln and his remarks at Gettysburg.
* * *
I do not believe this is a quote by Mr. Lincoln.
I can find no reference to this quote in the multivolume
Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, which most Lincoln biographers & Civil War historians consider the basic source for Lincoln's writings. (A searchable electronic version encompassing both the
Collected Works and the
Supplemental volumes is available at www.alincolnassoc.com/). The best I could find is a disclaimer on the "Abraham Lincoln Online" website calling the quote "a forgery which surfaced during the presidential campaign of 1888." (
http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/speeches/sfaq.htm)
I was very skeptical of this quote when I first read it, and I grow increasingly skeptical each time it's posted on these boards. It seems too out of character for Mr. Lincoln, too "prophetic" in its pronouncement of definite doom, and too critical of the existing social order -- a nascent corporate society Mr. Lincoln was far too dependent upon for financial support of the war for him to risk alienating it. The Civil War cost the U.S. Treasury an astonishing amount of money every day. And much of that money came from the wealthy -- the initial tax laws of the war spared in large measure the laboring class (they were allowed to give their lives, instead). For this reason, if no other, I find it difficult to believe Mr. Lincoln would pen the quotes in question. He
had to win the war -- the very essence of his political beliefs demanded no less -- and for him to risk it all on a few uncharacteristic words, words that furthered no discernable policy is, to me, incomprehensible. For words
meant something to Mr. Lincoln, he understood their power for good as well as ill, and he chose every one with painstaking diligence. (The masochists amongst us may wish to compare and contrast this with Smirk's insiped blather.)
It may be that additional research may prove this quote’s origin, but for the moment I remain skeptical of Mr. Lincoln’s authorship.
* * *
The Ratical Site has been brought up here before as a source for this quote. However, it leaves me even less convinced of the authenticity of the Lincoln quote.
It’s true, as Rick Crawford writes, that Mr. Lincoln "re-used his own material frequently, and virtually identical passages appear in several places.” One of the joys of Lincoln scholarship is following the development of his thought, “watching” him (as it were) as he formed and refined his thoughts and struggled to find their perfect expression. But in everything I’ve read about Mr. Lincoln, and through the years of research I've done on him, I cannot recall, and have been unable to find, any similar opinion in the collected body of his writings.
There’s another point in Rick Crawford’s description of his search for the authenticity of the quote that leaves me skeptical. I’ve heard William Herndon (Mr. Lincoln’s law partner) described in many fashions, but “scrupulously honest” is not one of them. His biography of Mr. Lincoln, though quite rich in detail, brims with gossip and hearsay, and gives us much of the material later writers would use to weave some of the many legend’s that formed in the shadow of the President’s death.
More to the point of Rick Crawford’s credibility, he bases his entire website, by his own admission, on “about 3 hrs of research.” And then there’s the matter of the source itself,
The Lincoln Encyclopedia, edited by Archer H. Shaw (Macmillan, 1950, NY). It’s amazing that a book published in 1950, containing such an explosive social analysis by Mr. Lincoln, should not be cited in any of the major works on Lincoln that have been published in the past half century. I find it amazing that Col. William F. Elkins, the supposed recipient of this social analysis by Lincoln, isn’t mentioned either in any of the major works on Lincoln. If nowhere else, the quote and the letter should at least be contained in the eight volume
Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, edited by Roy P. Basler (Rutgers University, 1953), or in its expanded, electronic version, which is available on the web at www.alincolnassoc.com/. This electronic version has a great search engine, providing searches for everything from simple words and phrases to boolean and proximity searches.
So I keep coming back to the conclusion I drew in my last post: The quote seems too out of character for the Lincoln I know, too "prophetic" in its pronouncement of definite doom, and too critical of the existing social order -- a nascent corporate society Lincoln was much too dependent upon for financial support of the war for him to risk alienating it.
There is much to learn about Mr. Lincoln’s beliefs on the relationship between labor and capital. He expressed himself on the subject throughout his political career. An accomplished corporate attorney, made wealthy by his work for some of the major business concerns of his day (the railroads and steamboats primary among them), his beliefs are, at times, somewhat naive, given the corporate structure of his own day. Whether he would hold the beliefs expressed in the quote in question is open for debate. That he would express these beliefs during the war. . . no, I can’t believe that.
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