[rustbucket]

I was unclear in what I said. I have a copy of that article made for me by the University of Texas. I suspect it was made from a microfilm of the paper’s editions. They had moved their Baltimore Sun papers or microfilm to where only students and faculty could access it, but they kindly made a copy of this one article at my request.

The University in the past has asked me to sign a statement that I would not publish a copy made from an actual paper they owned, and I have followed that guidance even with microfilm. The words in the old articles are no longer under copyright, but photos of papers they own or microfilm might be.

I’d be happy to take a picture of the heading over the article the University gave me which lists the paper they copied and even which page it was on if that would satisfy you.

The link I provided in my last post lists Lincoln’s words which agree with what I just posted above in case you question my accuracy. It makes no sense for me to misquote something and lose credibility.

[rockrr]

I might be inclined to believe it if you could proffer a newspaper article where someone sat down with the president and asked him questions and got that quote. Likewise if you could supply us with the extract of a speech, independently verifiable.

It isn't that I doubt your word Rustbucket, but something as important as this phantom quote has to remain suspect until a primary source can be found.

[x]

You said you had a copy of the Baltimore Sun with the anecdote. Most of the published versions of the story cite the Baltimore Exchange saying they got the story from the Baltimore Sun.

It would have been useful to know if the story actually appeared in the Sun (or the Exchange for that matter. There actually is an image of a page of the Exchange online that is supposed to have the story. But you say you can't release an image from the Sun. That's nice, but it doesn't resolve the question.

You also say that there are various accounts of Lincoln saying the "What about my tariff" line. Of course there are. It became part of the folklore (if it wasn't folklore all along). It was repeated time and time again in different versions and contexts. But we still don't know if Lincoln actually ever said it. We can be pretty sure that a lot of those variant versions weren't said by Lincoln.

Moreover the context is lost. If Lincoln said it, was it really a jaw-dropping moment that revealed his inner-most motivations, or was it one of many things said in the conversation? Plenty of the versions that have come down to us have clearly been "remembered" so as to make the tariff more central than it may have been.