Limbaugh has cited the Milligan case several times. Claiming that he
knows his history he told us the Lincoln had suspended habeas corpus.
Limbaugh never mentioned that the Supreme Court ruled that, even in war
time, a President can only take that action when the civilian courts can
not function
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Misquoting Lincoln
Bush supporters falsely quote Lincoln as advocating arresting, exiling
or hanging members of Congress who damage military morale in wartime.
August 25, 2006
Modified: August 25, 2006
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Summary
Supporters of President Bush and the war in Iraq often quote Abraham
Lincoln as saying members of Congress who act to damage military morale
in wartime "are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled or hanged."
Republican candidate Diana Irey used the "quote" recently in her
campaign against Democratic Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania, and it has
appeared thousands of times on the Internet, in newspaper articles and
letters to the editor, and in Republican speeches.
But Lincoln never said that. The conservative author who touched off the
misquotation frenzy, J. Michael Waller, concedes that the words are his,
not Lincoln's. Waller says he never meant to put quote marks around
them, and blames an editor for the mistake and the failure to correct
it. We also note other serious historical errors in the Waller article
containing the bogus quote.
Analysis
This false Lincoln "quote" has become a favorite of those who like to
accuse critics of Bush's war policy of disloyalty or treason. Our
Internet search brought up more than 18,000 references to it.
Origin of a Specious Quote
Then:
"Congressmen who willfully take action during wartime that damage morale
and undermine the military are saboteurs, and should be arrested, exiled
or hanged," that's what President Abraham Lincoln said during the War
Between the States.
-J. Michael Waller, "Democrats Usher in An Age of Treason." Insight
magazine, 23 Dec. 2003.
Now:
The supposed quote in question is not a quote at all, and I never
intended it to be construed as one. It was my lead sentence in the
article that a copy editor mistakenly turned into a quote by incorrectly
inserting quotation marks.
-J. Michael Waller, email to FactCheck.org, Aug. 21, 2006
Should Murtha be Hanged?
A recent example is an appearance by Diana Irey, the Republican
candidate running against Rep. Murtha, a leading critic of Bush's war
policy. She said at a news conference May 24, at the National Press Club
in Washington DC, that Murtha's comments and actions "are not that of a
patriot" but "serve to aid and comfort our enemy." And as if those words
weren't strong enough, she added:
Diana Irey: Our 16th President once said, and I quote: 'Congressmen who
willfully take action during wartime that damage morale and undermine
the military are saboteurs, and should be arrested, exiled or hanged.'
After savoring the applause of her partisan audience, Irey went on to
make clear that she wasn't actually advocating hanging Murtha, saying
that "Lincoln's remedy" was too extreme for him.
A Bogus Quote
But in fact it isn't "Lincoln's remedy" at all. The sentence she
attributed to Lincoln is the brainchild of J. Michael Waller, a
conservative scholar who wrote an article for Insight magazine that
appeared Dec. 23, 2003 under the headline, "Democrats Usher in An Age of
Treason." He started his article with the quote, adding, "that's what
President Abraham Lincoln said during the War Between the States."
In fact there's no evidence of Lincoln ever advocating hanging members
of Congress at all. We searched The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln,
but the phrase "exiled or hanged" simply doesn't appear there, let alone
the entire quote. And according to Lincoln historian Thomas F. Schwartz,
there is also no trace of this quote in The Recollected Words of Abraham
Lincoln, a 1996 compilation of quotes later attributed to Lincoln by his
contemporaries. Schwartz is Illinois State Historian and secretary of
The Abraham Lincoln Association, and also writes a column called
"Lincoln Never Said That" in the association's quarterly newsletter, For
The People. In the issue for Autumn, 2005, he wrote, "The Internet is a
great incubator of spurious Lincoln sayings and no clearer examples can
be shown than several that have recently surfaced," including the quote
in question here.
When we contacted Waller he said we were the first to ask him about it.
He readily conceded that the quote is bogus and blamed the matter on
editors at Insight magazine. Here is the pertinent portion of his reply,
in full, to our emailed inquiry:
J. Michael Waller: Thank you for giving me the opportunity to correct
this important issue. The supposed quote in question is not a quote at
all, and I never intended it to be construed as one. It was my lead
sentence in the article that a copy editor mistakenly turned into a
quote by incorrectly inserting quotation marks.
Additionally, I filed my story with the lead sentence ending in the
words "Civil War," which my southern editor switched to "War Between the
States."
Oddly, you are the first to question me about this . I'm surprised it
has been repeated as often as you say. My editors at the time didn't
think it was necessary to run a correction in the following issue of the
magazine, and to my knowledge we received no public comment. The
magazine is no longer being published.
Again, thank you for asking about this and for providing the opportunity
to correct it.
We followed up by contacting Insight's former managing editor Scott
Stanley. He denied putting quote marks in Waller's copy, but said such a
thing might have been done by one of six "formatting editors" at the
publication, who sometimes "took liberties" with the copy. "I know
Waller well enough to know that if Waller said it, he did," Stanley
said. He said Waller might have put the phrase in italics, and that a
formatting editor might have changed it to a direct quote by mistake,
following an Insight policy of not opening a story with italicized
quotes. "My guess is that somewhere along the line, somebody played with
it thinking they were doing the right thing," Stanley said.
Might Lincoln have said that?
Even without the quote marks, Waller's article still suggests that
Lincoln might have said it, or that the words sum up his policies. But
we find little evidence that Lincoln endorsed anything so extreme as
executing members of Congress for any reason, let alone for merely
"acting to damage military morale." We also discovered that Waller rests
his case in part on a material misstatement of fact, and also on a
serious historical error.
It is true that Lincoln temporarily exiled a former member of Congress,
Democrat Clement Vallandigham of Ohio, a prominent critic of Lincoln
who advocated allowing the South to secede. Vallandigham had given a
fiery anti-war speech in Mount Vernon, Ohio saying, among other things,
that the Civil War was being fought to liberate blacks and enslave
whites and that men who would submit to being drafted for the Union army
did not deserve to be free men. In a famous letter to Democratic Rep.
Erastus Corning dated June 12, 1863, Lincoln defended the military trial
and the attendant suspension of habeas corpus, and at one point
referring to Vallandigham as an agitator who had been urging soldiers to
desert:
Lincoln, 1863: Long experience has shown that armies can not be
maintained unless desertion shall be punished by the severe penalty of
death. The case requires, and the law and the Constitution, sanction
this punishment-- Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts,
while I must not touch a hair of a wiley agitator who induces him to desert?
But there's historical evidence that the arrest caught Lincoln by
surprise and that he wouldn't have advocated it had he been consulted in
advance. The arrest was the doing of Gen. Ambrose Burnside, not Lincoln.
The general later offered his resignation to Lincoln after hearing that
the President's entire Cabinet was in an uproar over his actions.
Lincoln's private reply can hardly be taken as an endorsement of what
the general did:
Lincoln (message to Burnside, May 29, 1883): Your despatch of to-day
received. When I shall wish to supersede you I will let you know. All
the cabinet regretted the necessity of arresting, for instance,
Vallandigham, some perhaps, doubting, that there was a real necessity
for it---but, being done, all were for seeing you through with it.
Even if Lincoln had ordered the arrest it offers scant support for the
notion that he favored arresting anyone solely because they "damage
morale and undermine the military." While encouraging draft evasion or
desertion may fall under the broad heading of "undermining the military"
it is a far more serious matter than the mere stating of political
opinions that might "undermine morale." We also note that today there's
no draft to evade, and we know of no prominent Democrats who are urging
troops to go AWOL, making Waller's parallel a dubious one at best.
The fact that Lincoln exiled Vallandigham was also a matter of political
damage control. Burnside's court had ordered the ex-Congressman held in
a military prison for the duration of the war, but Lincoln overruled the
sentence and ordered Vallandigham sent through the lines and into the
hands of a Confederate soldier near Murfreesboro, Tenn. Vallandigham
later slipped quietly back into the Union through Canada and despite the
sentence hanging over his head was allowed to resume his political
activities unmolested. He was quite prominent, attending the Democratic
national convention of 1864 and offering a resolution to make unanimous
the nomination of George McClellan to oppose Lincoln for re-election.
A Hanging Offense?
While we find little support for the idea that Lincoln favored arresting
members of Congress (or even former members) for merely saying things
that dispirit the troops, we find none for the notion that he favored
hanging. Waller's article makes much of the trial of a man who was
sentenced to hang, but Waller makes serious mistakes in the way he
describes that case.
He wasn't a congressman: Waller calls it "the case of Rep. Lambdin P.
Milligan [D-Ind.]," making the vital error of describing Milligan as a
member of Congress. In fact, Milligan was never a member of Congress.
His name does not appear in the official Biographical Directory of the
United States Congress, a comprehensive listing of House and Senate
since 1774.
He wasn't hanged:Milligan was a lawyer and Confederate sympathizer from
Huntington , Ind. who was tried and convicted by a military tribunal.
Lincoln actually delayed his execution. After the war and Lincoln's
death the Supreme Court took up his case and rendered a landmark ruling
overturning Milligan's conviction and holding that martial law could not
supersede the civil courts in areas where the government and civil
courts were still open and operating. Milligan went free, practiced law
until 1897 and died in 1899.
The allegations were deadly serious: Milligan hadn't merely tried to
"discourage enlistments" in the Union army, as Waller writes. In fact
he'd been implicated in a fantastic plot to free Confederate prisoners
of war from several Union prisons, to arm them with weapons to be stolen
from federal and state arsenals in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, and to
march these troops against Union forces in Missouri and Kentucky. He was
convicted of nothing less than plotting to overthrow the US government
while in communication with the Confederate enemy. That's a far cry from
merely damaging military morale, the offense Waller would have us
believe warranted hanging in Lincoln's mind.
Waller concedes that the quote is bogus. We judge that it's a bad
-by Brooks Jackson
Acknowledgment: FactCheck.org thanks subscriber Cliff Hancuff for
bringing the dubious Lincoln quote to our attention, for sharing
research pointing to Waller as the likely originator, and for sharing
video of the Diana Irey news conference.
Sources
The Abraham Lincoln Society, The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln,
1953 (electronic edition
Thomas F. Schwartz, "Lincoln Never Said That," For The People, quarterly
publication of the Abraham Lincoln Association, Autumn 2005.
J. G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History, in The Century;
a popular quarterly, Volume 38, Issue 1, New York, May 1889:127-137
Ohio Historical Society, "Clement Vallandigham", Ohio History Central:
An Online Encyclopedia of Ohio History, 2005.
Message, Lincoln to Burnside: Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Volume
6. Lincoln, Abraham, 1809-1865, 29 May 1863.
Letter, Abraham Lincoln to Erastus Corning and Others, Abraham Lincoln
Papers at the Library of Congress, Transcribed and Annotated by the
Lincoln Studies Center, Knox College. Galesburg, Illinois, June 1863.
Have Shaped the Constitution, ed. John A. Garraty, New York: Harper &
Row, 1962.
The Senate Historical Office and the Legislative Resource Center of the
House of Representatives, Biographical Directory of the US Congress,
online edition , searched Aug. 21, 2005.
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