As soon as he moved to Illinois in 1830, Abraham Lincoln found himself on the opposite side of the political fence from Peter Cartwright, a well-known Methodist preacher and politician. They crossed paths in the Illinois legislature, but their best-known confrontation was as opponents in the 1846 congressional election, which Lincoln won handily. Late in that campaign Lincoln found himself having to combat a rumor that he was an “infidel,” or unbeliever, a charge uncomfortably close to the truth. If Cartwright had anything to do with that rumor, he may have regarded Lincoln’s discomfort as the evening of an old score, for what follows is the story of a stinging satirical attack on Cartwright, written a dozen years earlier, but hitherto unknown in Lincoln biography.

When William H. Herndon, Lincoln’s old law partner, was gathering information for his biography of the President, he collected two accounts of how Lincoln had once pilloried Cartwright in print. Caleb Carman, one of Lincoln’s New Salem friends, wrote to Herndon, “Lincoln once rote an Artical against Peter Cartwrgh which was a good one the name Sined to it was Diotrefus you may Bet it used the old man very Ruff it was a hard one it was Published in the Beardstown Cronicle by Francis Earns Simeon Francis would not publish in the Sangamon Journal.”

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