What is in some respects the foremost example of platform and pulpit oratory concerning Lincoln is the oration of Bishop Charles Henry Fowler, deceased, of the Methodist Episcopal Church. It illustrates at once the excellency and the defects of works of this character. The oration had its beginning in a eulogy delivered in Chicago on May 4, 1865, the day of Lincoln's burial at Springfield. From time to time as years went by, Bishop Fowler had occasion to deliver other addresses on Lincoln, which, in 1904, he reshaped into something like the final form of the oration. First delivered in Minneapolis, it was repeated in many cities and before great audiences. It became the Bishop's best known and most popular address. It is the first and easily the greatest of the five that make up the volume of his Patriotic Orations, the others being on Grant, McKinley, Washington, and The Great Deeds of Great Men. Of that large book it fills more than a hundred pages. It was too long ever to be delivered at one time, but it was completely written, and fully committed to memory, so that he chose at each delivery what portions he would utter and what he would omit. Even with the omissions he rarely spoke less than two and one-half hours, and sometimes occupied three hours, his audiences hearing with sustained interest to the close. Of it his son says, that "through its delivery in various parts of the country, and by the natural process of accretion and attraction, new facts were added and others verified, until in 1906 it was put in this final form."
Here is an address whose composition occupied a strong and able man for thirty-one years. It thrills with admiration for its subject. It is alive with patriotism and religion. It deserved, in many respects, the attention which it received. Men have been known to say that having heard this address they would never spoil the impression by listening to any other address on Lincoln.
And yet it would not be safe to quote this lecture in any of its substantial parts without further investigation of the authority on which Bishop Fowler relied. He was a truthful man, and a man of ability, and if he had been asked what means he took to verify his statements, he would probably have said that he admitted no statement to his lecture which he did not find attested by some competent and truthful witness. Doubtless so, and most of the lecture is true, and the impression which it makes as a whole is substantially true, but that is not enough. Doubtless Bishop Fowler read in some book or magazine article by a truthful writer that on the day Lincoln submitted the Emancipation proclamation to his Cabinet, he first read in the presence of the Cabinet a chapter in the Bible. It would not have required very much of investigation to have convinced Bishop Fowler that what Lincoln really read was not the Bible, but Artemus Ward. He did not intend to lie about it. He picked up the account from some other speaker who had heard or read that Lincoln read a chapter from some book, and thought that the Bible was the proper book to read on an occasion of that character. Neither the speaker nor Bishop Fowler intended to be untruthful, but neither of them had any training in or inclination toward historical investigation. It would be easy to guess that a thousand Methodist preachers and some others have retold the story on the authority of Bishop Fowler. And that is far from being the only inaccuracy in the lecture. Indeed, it shows throughout how much it grew "by the natural process of accretion and attraction" and how little by the verification of the facts.
This lecture is cited because it is in many respects the very best of its type, as it is probably also the most noted, and one that was delivered to more people than any other on Abraham Lincoln.
It does not suffice to rely upon any second authorities in investigations of this character, nor to accept the statements of even truthful witnesses without some sifting of the evidence.
With this in mind, we come to what is the most crucial and difficult of all the incidents bearing upon our inquiry—the incident reported to Dr. Holland by President Bateman.