The subsequent paragraphs are more extensive quotations from a letter to involved parties of some months ago. For those who are interested in what happened, they contain that explanation, as well as our attitude toward all this before our slander impresarios started this most recent campaign.
At the same time, one place where Dr. __________ is patronizing is a place where he has every right to be. In my mind, this is the most serious and reasonable of Dr. __________ concerns, and it is one important place where he has a legitimate point, and an important one. I quite agree with him on the sinful and unscholarly nature of plagiarism, the need to avoid it, and the importance of correcting anything of this nature immediately. Further, any fault involved on our part (however it happened) should be acknowledged straight up the middle. I have been involved in disciplining students for this offense, and I agree with Dr. __________ general approach to it in a college setting.
Dr. __________ is quite right in pointing to a serious problem with our footnotes and citations. He is also right in assuming that there was nothing whatever intentional in this. Steve wrote his section separately from mine, and we both had our different footnotes, and when he sent his piece to me electronically, I did the editing and blending of his writing and mine. I do not know how these problems crept in (one possibility is an electronic jumbling or stripping of footnote numbers and/or quotation marks). Even though they occurred in Steve’s section (he wrote the Time on the Cross material), I had the editing responsibility, and did not check the notes and numbering against the book in the final draft. I had not read Time on the Cross at that time, and that must have helped to make me mistake some material from Time on the Cross as though it were Steve’s. This also probably accounts for the orphaned footnote that Dr. __________ pointed out (p. 12).
In addition, I sent Dr. __________ paper to Steve, and another possibility that Steve shared with me is this:
“I haven’t seen the particular places he’s found but I’m not willing to argue with him. My part of the pamphlet was adapted from one of my lectures — I referenced very few of the quotes and thus, had to go back to try to locate the places where I got them and properly reference them. I don’t doubt that I missed some of them, but there was no intent to deceive. When I gave the lecture, I always acknowledged that I was drawing from Fogel and Engerman in that section and relying upon their work not my own. I thought we had made that pretty plain in that section of the pamphlet though I haven’t gone back to read it. In any case, I’m willing to confess my carelessness there. Though it doesn’t excuse ‘plagiarism,’ I hope it at least explains it.”
The bottom line on this issue is that Dr. __________ is completely right that this is unacceptable, and it has already been fixed. We have already removed all existing copies of Southern Slavery in our inventory, and we will not sell any more unless all such problems are completely addressed. We do want to address this fault honestly and openly.
When Dr. __________ mentioned this problem to me on the phone some years ago, he did not give me the detailed specifics and I assumed that it must have been some kind of typo problem — and I had no idea of the magnitude of it. In his most recent letter to me, Dr. ___________ said that he did not mention the plagiarism problem to me in his first letter because he did not want to seem like he was “piling on.” But I really wish he had provided me with the specifics — this is not an area where we differ at all, and the booklet in its current form would have been pulled in 1996.
I had sent Dr. ___________ first letter to me on to Steve, assuming that in their discussion they would address any significant problems (since it was in Steve’s section of the booklet). It was only in this most recent go-round that I became aware of how significant the footnote problem actually was. A few weeks ago I asked Steve if Dr. ___________ had raised any plagiarism issues with him, and he said no. Honestly, I would have fixed this problem years ago had I known the specifics of it.
This was a competence issue, but I believe the problem was primarily in the area of editing and electronic transfers, etc. and not in the area of thinking that Lincoln did a lot of bad things to the Constitution. But whatever kind of problem it was, nostra maxima culpa, and it has been dealt with. My deep thanks to Dr. __________ for catching this.