Well...was he arrested and jailed? Or not? That would be the more telling “proof” of the story. Perhaps Lincoln did do it but calmer heads prevailed and the action was aborted?
“..... Perhaps Lincoln did do it but calmer heads prevailed and the action was aborted?”
The historian Thomas J. Lorenzo gave a lecture in which he said the name of the officer to whom Lincoln issued the arrest warrant, but the officer could never bring himself to serve it and other event soon overtook Lincoln’s interest in carrying the order out. Lorenzo also claims that one of his graduate student researchers had located two copies of this order and both are in closed collections of papers at different university libraries and that his researcher was denied access to both. So, this issue is not entirely closed.