Abraham Lincoln at the Phelps Farm

[...]neither in the critical controversy that this scheme has been the subject of nor elsewhere in published material by or about Mark Twain has the boys' time span been associated with Lincoln's.3 Admittedly, no specific link between Mark Twain and the President's 1862 proposal can be supplied in this essay, except to note the fact that the message was published in Twain's vicinity by the Sacramento Daily Union, December 3, 1862. "6 A period of fourteen years. [...]Thirty-seven year-and he come out in China" is just another ofTom's numerous mistaken recollections of the foreign romances that are his authorities on style and planning. The difference between immediate emancipation and gradual, compensated emancipation had weighed on President Lincoln's mind and heart when he proposed his Constitutional amendment in December 1862, one month before the Emancipation Proclamation was destined to go into effect in areas of the South under Union occupation. In neither of the more recent editions of the novel (1985 and 2003) from the Mark Twain Project of the Bancroft Library does the repeated mentioning of "thirty-seven-years" warrant an explanatory note or citation of President Lincoln. 4 The leading authority on Twain's political proclivities remains Louis J. Budd, Mark Twain: Social Philosopher (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962).