Set aside the question of whether Abraham Lincoln — who had a great many strengths as a leader and politician — should be the end-all source of all questions regarding dissent and wartime. After all, this is the guy who suspended habeus corpus, too.
That said, if folks are going to quote him on such topics, they should be careful to make sure it’s a real quote.
Supporters of President Bush and the war in Iraq often quote Abraham Lincoln as saying members of Congress who act to damage military morale in wartime “are saboteurs, and should be arrested, exiled or hanged.” Republican candidate Diana Irey used the “quote” recently in her campaign against Democratic Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania, and it has appeared thousands of times on the Internet, in newspaper articles and letters to the editor, and in Republican speeches.
But Lincoln never said that. The conservative author who touched off the misquotation frenzy, J. Michael Waller, concedes that the words are his, not Lincoln’s. Waller says he never meant to put quote marks around them, and blames an editor for the mistake and the failure to correct it.
Let us leave aside as well the question of whether any candidate for office should be suggesting (even backhandedly) that their opponent be “arrested, exiled, or hanged.” Analysis of Waller’s article not only indicates that attributing the general sentiment to Lincoln is an error, but the article itself is full of other factual errors.
For what it’s worth, upon learning that the quote was not an actual quote, Ms. Irey acknowledged and apologized the error (though not for the sentiment behind it).