The Mystery of the Dem's Lincoln Quote Talking Point

They're digging deep for this one, folks:

Tuesday morning on Bill Bennett's radio talk show, C. Boyden Gray of the Committee for Justice responded to a question about the propriety of senators querying Supreme Court nominees on their views about particular issues by quoting Abraham Lincoln: "We cannot ask a man what he will do, and if we should, and he should answer us, we would despise him." This quotation has been making the rounds lately, and the import of it is clear: There is supposed to be some sort of threat to judicial independence — or even to due process itself — if judicial nominees are pressed to state their views on legal and constitutional issues that might appear (or reappear) before the bar of the Court. Naturally it is being used by supporters of the White House to fend off any "litmus test" questions of too direct a variety from Democratic senators.

No sooner did I hear Gray recite this quotation than I had a look at Tuesday morning's New York Times, which ran the same quotation in a front-page story by Todd Purdum. But Purdum added the next sentence in the quotation, which changes the import of the statement by about, oh, 180 degrees: "Therefore we must take a man whose opinions are known." As Purdum noted, Lincoln was after a chief justice who would hold for the constitutionality of the government's legal tender law (forcing people to take the federal government's paper money in payment of private debts). Lincoln chose his Treasury secretary, Salmon P. Chase, who had helped draft and advocate the law, but who reversed course (five years after Lincoln's death) and voted that the law was unconstitutional — a ruling that was itself reversed just a year later.

Encountering this quotation twice in one day — and with such drastically different readings of its meaning — I grew curious about it. I thought I'd read just about everything Lincoln wrote and said on the subject of the Supreme Court, and this remark was news to me, so I began a little quick research — made easier by the digitization of so many resources online nowadays.

There is no sign of this remark in Lincoln's Collected Works — an eight-volume set from a half-century ago that is now online thanks to the University of Michigan and the Abraham Lincoln Association. But a little more searching in proprietary databases (to which I have access thanks to the fine librarians at Radford University) turned up a citation. It appears the quotation comes from a two-volume 1902 memoir by a retired politico named George Sewall Boutwell. After a long career that included stints as governor of Massachusetts, first commissioner of internal revenue, member of the House (where he led the impeachment of Andrew Johnson), and senator, Boutwell published Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs at the ripe old age of 84. His report of a conversation with Lincoln about the Chase nomination was 38 years old by this time, but while everything else about his book — and about the man himself — has faded from memory, this one brief quotation has lived on, in law-review articles, popular histories of the Court, and journalism.

That's it, folks. One witness, attesting to a conversation that may or may not have happened at all, in which Lincoln may or may not have said the remark now making the rounds. One witness, uncorroborated, relating in 1902 a verbatim remark purportedly made in 1864. Did Lincoln say it? I think we simply can't know. Was Boutwell puffing up his own importance by "recalling" a conversation with the Great Man of the Age in such detail? I don't know. When I have the book in hand (on its way to me from interlibrary loan) I'll be able to judge that better by looking at the work as a whole.