Abraham Lincoln is the most revered and respected figure in American history. His global fame is immeasurable—with the closest thing to a metric being the oft-stated but rarely proven statistic that “Honest Abe” stands next to only Jesus Christ and William Shakespeare as the most written about person in the English language. What’s more, a core component of his identity is literally right there in his nickname.
But that’s also where the trouble starts. Mix together elements of Lincoln’s public image—widely respected, good with words (especially pithy pearls of wisdom), known for his honesty and integrity—and you get a perfect target for misinformation. Add that he lived in a time when famous people’s words were written down, but not quite enough of them that Lincoln’s are always easy to fact check, and the combination becomes explosive.
Looking back on my 15 years at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, scarcely a day went by when I wasn’t engaged with Lincoln’s words, especially their online footprint. When I started in 2010, I had some awareness of Lincoln’s growing stature as an internet quote machine, but I was unprepared for the true breadth of the problem.
I wish I had kept a tally, but I must have received hundreds of queries to authenticate Lincoln quotes. My rough guess is that around 75% of these quotes turned out to be fake or at least impossible to verify. There were a few recurring “greatest hits”—“Whatever you are, be a good one,” “My best friend is a person who will give me a book I have not read,” “The best way to predict the future is to create it”—but amazingly I continued to encounter new ones throughout my tenure.
Attributing specious words to Lincoln is nothing new. Even during his lifetime, Lincoln found himself frequently misquoted or mischaracterized, often by political opponents. His ascension to the presidency, his assassination, and eventually his martyrdom only exacerbated the problem by inspiring everyone who ever knew him (and some who didn’t) to write down and publish every little detail they knew (or claimed to know) about him, including his spoken words. Scholars approach these reminiscences with care, not least because their authors are often recalling events that happened years or even decades before. Caution is even more necessary when the person is claiming to remember exactly what Lincoln said in a moment long ago. It might surprise you that many of Lincoln’s most famous quotes come down to us this problematic way:
- Lincoln’s resolute statement upon signing the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 that “I never in my life felt more certain that I was doing right than I do in signing this paper”? That’s Secretary of State William Seward’s son Frederick recalling it in 1891.
- Lincoln’s lament after the 1863 Confederate victory at Chancellorsville of “What will the country say? Oh, what will the country say?” That’s reporter Noah Brooks in 1878.
- Even Lincoln’s last words, “She won’t think anything about it,” spoken to his wife, Mary, when she worried their Ford’s Theatre guest, Clara Harris, would think her hosts were snuggling too much? That’s their doctor and friend Anson Henry—although it has the benefit of being remembered only five days after it was reportedly spoken.
In fact, there are so many remembered quotes from Lincoln that Don E. and Virginia Fehrenbacher published Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln in 1996, which included every quote they deemed noteworthy with a grade for reliability. Seward and Brooks, for instance, are each given a C for “a quotation recorded non-contemporaneously.”
While Lincoln’s premature death encouraged a bounty of recalled quotes, it also created a scarcity of his actual writings for collectors hoping to own a piece of the “Great Emancipator.” This opened the door for professional forgers. The monumental and trustworthy Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln features a whopping 161 pages only listing “writings for which no text has been found, forgeries and spurious or dubious items attributed to Lincoln, certain routine communications issued on Lincoln’s authority, and routine endorsements”—suggesting a massive corpus of by-design fake quotes.
But it’s the internet that sent the phenomenon of problematic Lincoln quotes into overdrive. The advent of social media and the rapid widespread use of memes gave rise to a powerful collection of new and old false statements by the 16th president, whose abundance is matched only by its persistence. Conduct any internet search for “Lincoln quotes” and the majority of the results will be fake or spurious. Probe deeper into the search results and things get even worse. At this moment, for instance, on the Amazon-owned Goodreads social media site’s “Abraham Lincoln>Quotes” page, unwitting users are greeted by nine spurious quotes before finally reaching “Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves”—which Lincoln did, in fact, write on April 6, 1859, but which the site misattributes to a nonexistent 12th volume of his Collected Works.
On the brighter side, along with spreading these fake quotes, the internet is also the best way to vet them. Careful digging reveals many of these misattributions originated in the first decade of the 21st century—just as the internet was edging into every aspect of our lives. Since then, the fakes have remained glued to Lincoln by the kind of viral inertia only the internet can produce. Online newspapers and digitized historical books can sometimes reveal a proper attribution: “Whatever you are, be a good one” was novelist William Makepeace Thackery (1811-1863), for instance, and “the best way to predict the future” was Nobel physicist laureate Dennis Gabor (1900-1979).
On the darker side, the problem isn’t getting better. What the spread of the internet was to fake quotes 20 years ago, AI may be to them now. We’re still sorting out AI’s usefulness for research and composition, but it’s clear these programs lack the care necessary to adequately engage with tricky subjects like misattribution. When AI combs the internet for its generative answers, it’s all too easy to snatch up these fake quotes and continue their spread. Even when AI does sniff out trouble, its broad programming and eagerness to please often renders it incapable of addressing the issue with certainty or depth—defaulting instead to soft language unlikely to deter most users. Google’s AI, for instance, currently speaks with confidence that Thackeray’s “whatever you are, be a good one” is “actually a fake [Lincoln] quote,” but of Gabor’s quote it only says “there’s no concrete evidence” Lincoln said it and makes no mention of its actual author.
All of which is to say the cliche “Don’t believe everything you read on the internet” is truer than ever, especially when you’re dealing with a prominent historical figure. What strikes me about this particular corner of Lincolndom is that most people spreading this misinformation don’t appear to be doing so maliciously or selfishly. They just unwittingly pass along what they find, like a sort of historical malpractice chain letter. I suppose it’s reassuring that this practice isn’t more nefarious. However, that it happens so easily and is so rarely questioned should give us all pause for how we absorb and spread information.
Christian McWhirter is a historical consultant and the author of Battle Hymns: The Power and Popularity of Music in the Civil War. He previously served as the Lincoln Historian for the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum and as editor of the Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association.
Related topics: Abraham Lincoln
