Commenting on Salon’s intellectual standards is pointless, in that it does not have any intellectual standards to speak of, but I think this needs correcting, inasmuch as it is a reprint from a book written by a professor at Wake Forest and published by the University of Virginia Press, two institutions that presumably value their reputations.

Paul D. Escott writes:

As a young politician, Lincoln engaged in the race-baiting and racist rhetoric that was common among Illinois politicians. While his party’s newspaper, the Sangamo Journal, accused a Democratic presidential nominee of “love for free negroes,” the young Lincoln charged that his “very trail might be followed by scattered bunches of Nigger wool.”

By any reasonable standard, Professor Escott here is communicating that words in quotation marks — “very trail,” etc. — are the words of Abraham Lincoln. They are not. They are the words of J. A. Chestnut, a lawyer who wrote up an account of one of Lincoln’s speeches in the very Sangamo Journal mentioned above, published 8 May 1840. Chestnut’s language is colorful and hyperbolic, to say the least. I sent Professor Escott an email over the weekend suggesting that he correct himself, and he replied that the quotation was taken from Michael Burlingame’s biography of Lincoln, which it is — and where it is attributed to J. A. Chestnut, not to Abraham Lincoln.

No doubt Lincoln said some nasty things over the course of his political career. But he did not say this nasty thing.