When I was little, I committed forgery. No, not anything criminal, just something to invariably save my own behind from my mother's leather belt buckle. Instead of a whipping, though, I got something much worse: I managed to reduce my mother to tears and got her all sorts of disappointed. You might as well have dropped an atomic bomb on me. Suffice it to say, that was enough to teach me never, ever to do that again. 

It was third grade and I fancied myself to be the little Einstein. Except that I got to be a bit too cocky and snarky, having just mastered the English language, and I decided that I didn't need to study all that hard. All that miss-know-it-all nonsense, however, got me three B's on my report card. Clearly, these were B's that didn't belong anywhere on my near perfect ledger. And so I did what I thought was absolutely ingenious: I took a black permanent marker and changed all the B's to A's (with a few being A minuses, for good measure). No mind that back then report cards came in quadruplicate and this was only the second grade sheet in a series of four. I thought that I would deal with the other copies as they arose in the future. I proudly announced to my mother that my teacher had made a mistake, that I alerted her to it, and that she promptly made the changes for me. My poor mother bought the entire story.  Everything was smooth sailing until the middle of next quarter when my guilty conscience began to literally eat me alive. I just couldn't handle it. I broke down crying and told her the entire story. What ensued was a nightmare. I would have seriously preferred the bottom thrashing. Instead, I got real live mother tears--tears no child ever wants to see or worse, to cause. That was enough for me. I learned my lesson that honesty would always be the best policy.

It's this poignant memory of my inner moral compass running amok because of what I did that I simply can't believe there are people out there who can do something similar to me, on a larger, public scale, and simply not be eaten up by this thing called conscience. In fact, I'm left wondering: is there even such a thing anymore as one's conscience?

Dr. Thomas Lowry's conscience appears to be buried six feet under along with his ethics. Lowry altered the date on an original pardon written by Abraham Lincoln for the sole purpose of promoting his book, making it appear that the pardon was essentially one of Lincoln's final historic acts before his murder. The date, 1864, became 1865 with the single stroke of Lowry's Pelikan pen, a pen he "snuck" into the National Archives.

Lowry, a 78-year-old Virginian psychiatrist who leafed through hundreds of untapped Lincoln  documents and then wrote/published "Don't Shoot That Boy: Abraham Lincoln and Military Justice" appears to have thought that by making the alteration, he would have found fame and recognition within various intellectual circles. In fact, after his "discovery," he was hailed for uncovering one of the biggest findings of Lincoln memorabilia in the 20th century. He essentially became a focal player in the Lincoln expert world.

Too bad he's now nothing more than a fraudster. All his hard work, admittedly some of it with intellectual merit and value, is now cast under a heavy cloud of suspicion and stigma. His name as any authority is permanently sullied and virtually meritless. Was this cost worth it? Did it really matter whether Abraham Lincoln pardoned someone one year before or after? Honestly, in the larger scheme of things, it's irrelevant. There is so much more to the study of the President than a date on a pardon.

With all this dust finally settling, it's become painfully apparent that  Lowry's confession came only after the expiration of the ten year statute of limitations passed for any potential criminal prosecution for his alteration. My suspicion is that Lowry,  becoming virtually a nobody, again tried to catapult himself into the spotlight, albeit this time for his admission of his forgery instead of its commission. As Lowry wrote in his book: “Fame comes to men in many strange ways.”

Obviously, at least for Lowry, conscience took the back seat on his road to fame.