So I've gotten some questions about how/why I messed up here & fell victim to what's actually a century-plus-old hoax. I thought I'd explain here, as a window into the research process and its pitfalls. Important to point out: I fuck up all the time. /1
I'm working on a textbook for the Civil War/Reconstruction/late 19th century eras, and as part of my research, I have an Evernote folder where I dump interesting quotes, references, and materials I come across so I can process them and follow up later. /2
So I have scans, excerpts from documents, bilbiographic citations, tweets, and a whole bunch of ephemera in this folder--which I call "The Commonplace Book" because I am a huge dork. I have my phone and tablet scan apps set to dump things right in this folder. /3
Several months ago, I was doing a bit of research for a chapter section on the 1896 election, and in particular how the populists saw themselves as the heirs of "free labor" ideology. I came across this (hoax) quote from Lincoln decrying "the money power" and said "wow!" /4
So I scanned it, dumped it in my Evernote folderto use when I drafted the chapter. Of course, the quote was a fake. When I draft chapters, I double check everything I use and corroborate with citations to original docs. This quote wouldn't have made it thru that process. /5
Twitter threads are another story, and I didn't do that cross-check. Obviously, I should have. In retrospect, there are all sorts of red flags I should've noted. First, the use of the phrase "money power" was much more a late 19th c. thing; Lincoln wouldn't have used it /6
Second, the context of Lincoln decrying corporations as a complaint about wartime profiteering might be plausible, but doing so in such prophetic, "fear for my country" terms in 1864--when there were bigger fish to fry--doesn't ring true. /7
So how would I have cross-checked? Well, the Collected Works of Lincoln are online (quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lincoln/) and searchable, so I could have checked the name and date of the letter, or done a phrase search. I usually do both when drafting chapters. /8
But in my haste to dunk on one of my least favorite people, I didn't do that. And it's clear this quote didn't pass the smell test. I had only run across it once, in that Populist pamphlet, and I have read TONS of Lincoln's stuff. I should've dwelled on that more. /9
So that's what happened, and more importantly, didn't happen. And now I showed my ass on the internet. But it's an object lesson in how we ought to approach using evidence in an argument, even in an "informal" platform like Twitter. /10
I'm leaving the thread up, as well as my corrections underneath and QTing the offending tweet, because I won't run away from my public mistake--I'll wear it. It underscores the point that when it comes to people like Lincoln, there's a lot of fabricated stuff out there. /11 
But what makes me (and other professional and scholarly historians) different than the stuff I'm criticizing here, is that when I fuck up, I own it. So here's my mea culpa, and I'll do better next time. /fin
