Lincoln on Capital and Labor
The claim that Lincoln regularly read Marx, or picked up economic doctrines from Marxist writings, is entirely anachronistic. Marx did not publish the first volume of his treatise Capital until 1867, some two years after Lincoln was assassinated. His earlier writings on the relationship between capital and labor primarily appeared in obscure European outlets with little circulation in North America, and even the Communist Manifesto of 1848 went almost completely unnoticed in the English-speaking world until sometime after 1870.