[dforest]

How would any of us know? We were not around to hear every word Lincoln uttered. I doubt each word was documented for posterity.

[katana]

Political speeches back then were recorded and published in newspapers around the country as big news and the fodder for dinner table, general store, and saloon discussions. We've got plenty of Lincoln's speeches, letters, legal briefs from his time in Springfield, from his earliest years to the day he died.

What we don't have, but which all his contemporaries commented on, are the stories and jokes he told. Maybe because, for the time, a lot of them were country style bawdy. They allude to it in all of the movies ... Henry Fonda 1939: "Well then if it's all the same to you, I'll call you Jack Cass". Today with Trump it's almost the reverse. Throughout his career before becoming a candidate Trump can probably count fewer than ten occasions when he had to deliver a carefully prepared lawyeresque speech. So trying to compare his and Lincoln's styles is pointless.

And besides, I never heard of Lincoln saying anything like "And ah tain't no ways tard" either.