I insist that you respond to it, and to nothing else. What is at issue here is honesty and integrity.
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To summarize:
1] The author of the Civil War volume of "The Oxford History of the United States" is struck precisely by the total absence of evidence that DiLorenzo says is "virtually" everywhere in the Lincoln Douglas debates.
2]The editor of the "Collected Works" of Lincoln uses the phrase "his words lacked effectiveness" to describe a portion of a single speech about slavery, but only when that speech ventures beyond its central, crucial topics regarding slavery. In 1998, Dr. DiLorenzo clipped this sentence to make it mean precisely the opposite. Four years later, he reports instead that the editor judges Lincoln's words on slavery for almost a decade to have "lacked effectiveness" and seemed "not at all sincere."
3] A Pulitzer Prize winning historian writes a careful and balanced account of Lincoln's impatient youthful frustration at Democratic resistance to the constitutionality of a national bank. Dr. DiLorenzo tells us that the historian spoke of Lincoln's seething resentment at the Constitution itself.
4] Lincoln quotes with withering disapproval the words of a Virginia clergyman who repudiates and mocks the Declaration doctrine of human equality. Dr. DiLorenzo presents snippets of the clergyman's words as Lincoln's own – a gross falsehood – in order to "prove" that Lincoln's love of the Declaration was insincere.
Suppressed evidence, misquotation, misconstruction of context, incompetent citations, inaccurate implication – it's all here. I have chosen these four examples from a much longer and ever-growing list. But these examples are utterly characteristic of the entire book. Dr. DiLorenzo wonders why the scholarly world has not responded with argument to his revelation of evidence that Lincoln was a tyrant. It may be because his "evidence" is such a cooked up mess.
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I repeat, I want responses to these items, and these only.
If you don't give them, I will haunt you with them.
The immediate issue is truth.
Either stand by DiLorenzo on these things, or repudiate him, or leave the discussion.