The Pope Did It?

[RJNorton]

Paul, in addition to the questions maharba and I have for you, I thought of another one overnight. How did Chiniquy recall for 20+ years the exact words of Abraham Lincoln? Wasn't his book published more than 20 years after the assassination? Here is a word-for-word example of what Chiniquy claimed he remembered from what President Lincoln said to him:

“This war would never have been possible without the sinister influence of the Jesuits. We owe it to Popery that we now see our land reddened with the blood of her noblest sons. Though there were great differences of opinion between the South and North, on the question of slavery, neither Jeff Davis nor any one of the leading men of the Confederacy would have dared to attack the North, had they not relied on the promise of the Jesuits, that, under the mask of Democracy, the money and the arms of the Roman Catholics, even the arms of France, were at their disposal if they would attack us.”

If I think back to conversations I had with people in 1996 there is no way I could present word-for-word examples like this. Don't you find this the least bit suspicious? The quote above is in the Fehrenbachers' book and is given an "E" - the lowest possible grade.