Researchers aim to identify Lincoln writings

SPRINGFIELD -- Researchers plan to use new computer technology to identify the newspaper articles Abraham Lincoln is said to have written anonymously or under a pseudonym.

The National Endowment for the Humanities has provided a $50,000 grant for the research by the Papers of Abraham Lincoln project.

The team will use computer software to analyze aspects of Lincoln’s writing style to authenticate articles in the Sangamo Journal during the years he served in the Illinois legislature, from 1834 to 1842.

Contemporaries of Lincoln and historians have suggested that he launched scathing political attacks against rivals in anonymous newspaper articles and that many were libelous. But until now no historian has done a systematic search or developed a way to definitively identify which writings Lincoln authored.