Charles Chiniquy (1809-99) was a priest who converted to Protestantism in 1860 and became a leading critic of Catholicism in America after the Civil War. In his
Fifty Years in the Church of Rome, Chiniquy recounts three interviews over several visits with Lincoln during the Civil War. In these conversations, Lincoln not only professes to orthodox Christianity but also fervently denounces Catholicism.
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How dependable is Chiniquy? There were no witnesses to the private conversations that Chiniquy relates. One can form some idea of his accuracy, though, by comparing one incident he recounts with other available historical evidence. In his autobiography, Chiniquy says that while he was still a priest in 1856, some enemies in the church hierarchy set out to discredit him. At the instigation of a bishop, alleges Chiniquy, one Peter Spink accused him of immorality and had him dragged into court. There Chiniquy was defended by lawyer Abraham Lincoln. The first trial ended with a hung jury. At the beginning of the second trial, Lincoln helped uncover a Catholic plot against Chiniquy, and Spink withdrew his charges, saying that he knew Chiniquy was not guilty. However, Lincoln's work so angered the Jesuits that they became his mortal enemies, their hatred climaxing when John Wilkes Booth (a Jesuit agent, Chiniquy alleges) assassinated Lincoln in 1865.
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As the research of Joseph George shows,
21 the records of the Illinois law courts give a somewhat different account. Spink did bring suit against Chiniquy but for slander, for in a sermon Chiniquy had charged Spink with perjury. Chiniquy did hire Lincoln as one of his attorneys, and there were two mistrials. When the case came up the third time, Lincoln negotiated an out-of-court settlement. In that settlement, written by Lincoln, Chiniquy swore that he had never accused Spink of perjury, except by repeating a secondhand story that he personally did not believe; furthermore, he said that he believed Spink had never committed perjury. Spink and Chiniquy then split the court costs. The differences in detail in this account compared with that in
Fifty Years in the Church of Rome at least call into question Chiniquy's unsubstantiated accounts of lengthy conversations with Lincoln written twenty years after the president's death.
22 The most that one can say, based on Chiniquy's account of the Illinois court case, is that Chiniquy may have met with Lincoln during the war but that the former priest's own views deeply colored his recollection of those meetings.
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