Is That You, Mr. Lincoln?: Applying Authorship Attribution to the Early Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln

The words of the Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural steadied a nation consumed by civil war and have since encouraged countless millions around the globe in their struggles for democracy and equality; however, Abraham Lincoln did not always write to inspire. Both his contemporaries and subsequent historians have suggested that as a young Illinois legislator, Lincoln frequently wrote vicious, and oftentimes libelous, newspaper articles and published them anonymously or with a pseudonym. Thus far, however, no historian has conducted a systematic search of relevant newspapers or developed a way to identify which articles Lincoln authored. This project proposes a solution. By merging two areas of the humanities, history and linguistics, this project will apply a series of innovative authorship attribution tests to the question of which anonymous and pseudonymous newspaper articles Lincoln wrote early in his career.