You didn’t read the article either. That is what the person who wrote the message thought he wrote, not what was actually written. There was quite a span of time between the writing and the remembering.
You're right.
But so was I. The notion that some watchmaker scrawled something about ending slavery being a goal of "Honest" Abe in April 1861 in Lincoln's watch was BS. Reasonable people might wonder how it is such a story arose, and why only now has someone opened the watch to reveal that the story was and is BS.
ML/NJ