Come clean on this: You're a huge admirer of Theo Bilbo ..... his oratorical style, at any rate, which consisted of fixing on one word and ranting it over and over.
You throw the word "slaver" around as if you thought it had a Velcro backing.
Says Foghorn Leghorn, who always gets lost in his own ranting rhetoric.
You throw the word "slaver" around as if you thought it had a Velcro backing.
I don't recall every having used the word "slaver." Not my style.
He looks like a man who has an honest question about the reliability of the quote, and its provenience.
What quote? He made his comment about footnotes in relation to the whole piece, not to any particular quote, but if you're refering to the quotation he calls into question, the open field quote, it's from an address to an Ohio regiment. I found it in less than 5 minutes:
ADDRESS TO THE 166TH OHIO REGIMENT, AUGUST 22, 1864.
The "elevate the condition of men quote was also easy to find:
First Message to Congress, at the Special Session. July 4, 1861
There are plenty of bogus quotes floating around the Internet; and the passage cited would seem to be sufficiently trenchant, that anyone who's read David Donald, Wm. Herndon, Bruce Catton, or Carl Sandburg might reasonably wonder why he hadn't seen the quote before, if it had any power to illuminate Lincoln and his policies.
The "elevate the condition of men" quote is in Donald's biography. The "open field" quote is in Lincoln's collected works and in most collections of his writings. William Herndon was the source for Lincoln's reading on economics. Herndon's not always reliable, but if you recognize him as an authority, you can't say that you don't have an inkling of what Lincoln may have been reading.