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.
Fine, then it shouldn't have been too much trouble to cite in the first place.
Remember, we've seen Wlat and capitan_refugio's "quoting" style before.
[You, dissembling] Says Foghorn Leghorn, who always gets lost in his own ranting rhetoric.
I notice that you forgot to deny the charge, that you use "slavery" as a bludgeon just like the Abolitionists did, i.e. dishonestly, and patently so since there is no slavery in the United States, and yet you continually try to attach it to people who disagree with you and object to your sectionalist diatribes.
As for my posts, please show me an example of a "ranting rhetoric" that your fevered imagination tells you I posted.
[Me] You throw the word "slaver" around as if you thought it had a Velcro backing.
[You, dissembling some more] I don't recall every having used the word "slaver." Not my style.
Oh, you don't? "I ..... forgot!!" </Steve Martin>
And yet you continue to use slavery as a moral club, as if simply writing "slavery" transmutes dross into gold, and falsifies everything other people tell you about American history. Used in that way, it becomes an ad hominem argument, and you use it to blackguard people living and dead who never owned a slave.