"Famous" Lincoln Quote is Bogus

Have you heard folk say that anyone who speaks out against the war is a traitor, and Lincoln said anyone who did that should be hanged?

The Factcheck.org folk run down the truth.

Raw Story:

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

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.
[ . . . ]
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.

There's more.