Claim

Abraham Lincoln endured a steady stream of failure and defeat before becoming President of the United States.

Origin

The unsourced “Abraham Lincoln Didn’t Quit” list reproduced below is a ubiquitous piece of American historical glurge that has been printed in countless magazines  and newspaper columns over the decades, including an appearance in a 1967 Reader’s Digest collection of humor and anecdotes:

Abraham Lincoln Didn’t Quit

The Cornell University Library has removed a bust of President Abraham Lincoln and a bronze plaque of the Gettysburg Address after reportedly receiving a complaint.

Randy Wayne, a professor of biology at Cornell, said the library had removed the display, which had been there since 2013, after "someone complained," the College Fix reported .

A bust of President Abraham Lincoln and a plaque of the Gettysburg Address have been removed from a Cornell University library. 

“Someone complained, and it was gone,” Cornell biology professor Randy Wayne told the College Fix of the matter. 

The bust of Lincoln and the bronzed plaque of the president’s historic 1863 address had been in the Kroch Library, where the university’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections is located, since 2013. 

A controversial statue depicting Abraham Lincoln standing over a half-dressed, formerly enslaved man has been removed from its longtime location in Boston’s Back Bay, months after the city’s Art Commission voted to take it down amid a nationwide reckoning on racial justice.

On Tuesday morning, workers took the statue, “Emancipation Group,” from its perch in Park Square across the street from the Park Plaza Hotel.

On Dec. 15, 2020, various conservative news outlets published stories reporting that public schools in San Francisco were set on changing the name of Abraham Lincoln High School in the city’s Sunset District because Lincoln “didn’t show Black lives mattered to him.”

Jamelle Bouie mounts a dishonest effort to rewrite history.

According to New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, “Neither Abraham Lincoln nor the Republican Party freed the slaves.” Instead, “the slaves freed the slaves.” Emancipation “was something they took for themselves.” The most that can be said of Lincoln and the nation’s political leadership is that they “helped set freedom in motion and eventually codified it into law with the 13th Amendment” (emphasis added). Of the Union Army, Bouie allows only that it “delivered the news of the Emancipation Proclamation.”

Wednesday, Jan. 1, begins the new year. It also marks the anniversary of a new America.

On Jan. 1, 1863, as the Civil War, the bloodiest of America’s wars, approached the end of its second year, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring “that all persons held as slaves” within the rebellious states “are and henceforward shall be free.”