In a recent post, Cory at Madville Times tries to adopt Abraham Lincoln to his "the plutocrats are coming" campaign by using this quote attributed to Abe:
I see in the near future a crisis approaching. It unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. The money power preys upon the nation in times of peace and conspires against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than a monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy. It denounces, as public enemies, all who question its methods or throw light upon its crimes.
I have two great enemies, the Southern Army in front of me & the financial institutions at the rear; the latter is my greatest foe. Corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in the hands of a few, and the Republic is destroyed.
--President Abraham Lincoln, Nov 21, 1864 (letter to Col. William F. Elkins)
The only problem with this quote is that Lincoln never wrote this letter. I thought this sounded suspicious, as this is not Lincoln's form of language and the idea that Lincoln thought that corporations were a bigger threat to the Union than the Confederacy/slavery is, to say the least, inconsistent with the evidence. I looked in both the online version of Lincoln's collected works and in my paper edition. No quote. This, however, is not necessarily definitive as recent Lincoln findings are not in the Collected Works. I then found this piece from the Washington Post by Andrew Ferguson, author of Land of Lincoln. He confirms my suspicions that this quote is made up. To sum up:
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.
Apparently this quote is gaining in currency as it is being disseminated by Al Gore.
We all make mistakes as writers. I am sure this is an honest mistake that Cory will correct at first opportunity.
Update: And presto! Cory corrects.
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