And from here I found Thomas F. Schwartz’s Spring 1999 article “Lincoln Never Said That” in For the People: A Newsletter of the Abraham Lincoln Association Vol. 1, Number 1, Page 4.
Mr. Schwartz presents his more in-depth research and findings. In it is a real gem by Robert Todd Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln’s son, denouncing this quote as a fake. I highly recommend reading it.
http://americanmissive.com/2009/03/20/did-abraham-lincoln-say-that/
Lincoln was a corporate lawyer for the railroad barons.
Too perfect, in fact. If you're familiar with Lincoln's distinctive way of expressing himself, you'll hear the false notes the passage strikes. For one thing, Lincoln just wasn't the "trembling" kind -- or if he was, he kept his trembling to himself. Words such as "enthroned" and "aggregated" are a bit too fancy for his plain, unclotted prose, and the phrase "money power" suggests a conspiratorial turn of mind that would have been foreign to him. Indeed, these words don't show up anywhere else in "The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln" (which, thanks to Gore's Internet, are now searchable at http://quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lincoln/).
Moreover, the point of the passage is very un-Lincolnian. A corporate lawyer whose long and cunning labor on behalf of the railroads earned him a comfortable income, Lincoln was a vigorous champion of market capitalism, even when it drifted (as it tends to do) toward large concentrations of wealth. Many of his administration's signal initiatives -- the transcontinental railroad, for example -- amounted to what liberals today would condemn as "corporate welfare." Lots of speculators got rich under Lincoln, as Gore notes. As Gore does not note, Lincoln seemed not to have minded.
Writing in 1999 in the Abraham Lincoln Association's newsletter, the great Lincoln historian Thomas F. Schwartz traced the bogus passage to the 1880s, about 20 years after Lincoln's death. One theory is that it first appeared in a pamphlet advertising patent medicines. Opponents of Gilded Age capitalism -- Gore's forerunners -- found the quote so useful that Lincoln's former White House secretaries felt compelled to launch a campaign "denouncing the forgery," Schwartz said. Robert Todd Lincoln, who was the president's only surviving son and himself a wealthy railroad lawyer, called it "an impudent invention" that ascribed to his father views that the former president would never have held.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/08/AR2007060802470.html
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