Anyone attempting to dismiss Lincoln’s belief in the prophetic nature of dreams is most likely trying to dismiss Lincoln’s Christianity and belief in an all knowing and intimately personal God. Tough beans for the cynic. Lincoln’s impromptu remarks on July 9th 1863 after the victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg on the 3rd and 4th of July caused him to reflect upon the stunning Christian understanding of the populace; that God must be with the Union because of those July 4th victories just as that same God took home the only two Presidents who signed (and authored and promulgated) the Declaration on the fifty year jubilee day of July 4th 1826.

I always try to imagine how Carl Sandberg felt, constructing his humanist Lincoln over so many volumes, to be confronted with a powerful testimony of Lincoln’s faith turning up a decade after he put down his pen — with the discovery of Lincoln’s Devotional in the early 1950′s.

The final problem is to understand how difficult it is to create a faux dream out of thin air; and then to ask oneself “Why would Lamon bother to go to such lying lengths?” He was Lincoln’s bodyguard, after all. The remarks to him by Lincoln would be entirely appropriate, especially the discussion afterward. There is no good answer for that except a 21st century smugness that declares there is no God but especially no God who tenderly cares for humanity.

Stephen Oates, in *With Malice Toward None*, does claim the words “His dream was prophetic”– words he thinks Mary spoke at the Petersen house– are to be found in Arnold’s biography of Lincoln, on p. 433. But that quotation is not on p. 433 or any other page of Arnold, as far as I can tell. (I checked the 1866 and 1884 editions of Arnold’s book.)

Oates’s actual source for the quotation appears to be Ruth Randall herself, *Mary Lincoln: Biography of a Marriage* (1953 hardcover edition), p. 383. She gives her source for “His dream was prophetic” as Ward Hill Lamon’s *Recollections*, p. 120. That’s the correct page in Lamon’s book, though Randall goes ahead and embellishes his account.

Oates apparently took the dream quotation from Randall, then accidentally misread her footnotes: he wrongly attributed the quotation not to Lamon, as she did, but to the source listed in her following footnote: none other than “Arnold, p. 433.” Of course Randall was citing “Arnold p. 433″ as her source for something else altogether: Mary Lincoln’s comment at the Petersen house that she wished she could die along with her husband.

That comment about wanting to die herself is well-attested: it was reported in print by more than one source in April 1865. The prophetic-dream comment, on the other hand, is poorly attested, since as far as we know it comes only from Ward Hill Lamon, and was published only decades later.

As the Fehrenbachers make clear in their book *The Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln*, Lamon’s memories have to be used with extreme caution, and some of them, like the dead-president dream, are especially dubious.

If Randall did quote Mary, I suspect Randall was embellishing on Lamon, playing out a logical scenario: if Mary heard Lincoln recount the dream, as Lamon alleged after her death, then Mary, after the assassination, would have considered the dream prophetic; if she considered it prophetic, she might well have said, “his dream was prophetic”; since she might well have said it, there’s no reason not to claim she said it.

Unfortunately, some biographers still feel free to turn the sentiments a person might logically have felt into an actual statement inside quotation marks. They don’t see any objection to that kind of fictionalizing, since they don’t see it as creating a falsehood. They think it just adds drama to a biographical truth.