Abraham Lincoln Second Inaugural Address

[David Lockmiller]

He certainly punctuated by ear, much to the chagrin of John Defrees, who fought a losing battle trying to purge the excessive commas from the state papers Lincoln sent to the government printing office.[34] As president it was still his custom, according to one of his secretaries, “to read his manuscript over aloud, ‘to see how it sounded, as he could hardly judge of a thing by merely reading it.’”[35]

Are not these two sentences from my previous post contradictory?