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Abraham Lincoln wrote the letter, an election year paean to the Methodist church, in 1864, at the height of his rhetorical powers, after the Gettysburg Address and before his second inaugural speech. Yet to the modern eye, the letter suffers from some all-too human flaws.

City Room readers were given the chance on Tuesday to inspect the letter, which resurfaced this week when federal agents found it in the dorm room of a Drew University freshman since charged with stealing treasures from the school archives.

As elegant as it is short, the letter appears to contain at least one glaring grammatical gaffe, and readers were invited to weigh in. More than 100 obligingly pointed out questions of grammar, punctuation, usage and style.

Many readers found fault with Lincoln’s seeming failure (the handwriting is smudgy) to insert an apostrophe in the word “nations” to signal the possessive case, and with his inclusion of an apostrophe in the phrase “it’s greater numbers,’’ which calls for the possessive pronoun “its,” rather than “it’s,” a word more commonly read as a contraction for “it is.”

Some readers thought the phrase “I would utter nothing which” ought to be “I would utter nothing that.” Some argued that the opening sentence and the one that begins “nobly sustained” contained dependent clauses that failed to modify their subjects.

And some thought Lincoln improperly omitted the word “to” after the word “attest” and before the words “endorse” and “thank” in the first sentence.

Still others quibbled with one of the more striking sentences in the letter, Lincoln’s statement that the Methodist church “sends more soldiers to the field, more nurses to the hospitals and more prayers to Heaven than any.” These readers complained that the sentence is nonsensical, since it implies that the Methodist church does more than whatever it, in fact, does. They recommended adding the words “others” or “other churches’’ at the end of the sentence to correct the faulty comparison.

None of which make the letter any less dazzling to Harold Holzer, a leading authority on Lincoln and the chairman of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission. “Listen,’’ he said, “Lincoln was not the best speller in the world.”

Mr. Holzer described how the president wrote, without the aid of secretaries, about 10 letters a day, filling out much of an eight-volume set of his collected writings, and how he struggled with words like “inaugural,” which he often spelled the way he pronounced it, and “shadow,” which he tended to give an extra “d.”

Perhaps, because he had the unity of a divided nation on his mind, Lincoln did not notice that he had spelled his own name wrong in one letter, according to Mr. Holzer.

“If President Abraham Lincoln had a spell checker, he never would have written the Gettysburg Address,’’ Mr. Holzer added, noting that electronic spell checkers typically flag the back-to-back usage of “that,” which appears in at least one rendition of the speech in the phrase “as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live,” as a no-no.

Patricia T. O’Conner, the author of “Woe is I,” a much-respected guide to proper English, sided with those readers who cut Lincoln some slack.

“I assume you’re referring to Lincoln’s use of ‘it’s’ as a possessive instead of ‘its,’” she told On the Records, when approached for assistance in judging the reader challenge. “Although this is a clear error in our day, it wasn’t always so. The possessive of ‘it’ was originally ‘it’s.’ And that was the most common form in print in the 17th and 18th centuries. For much of this time, however, ‘its’ was also used as the possessive, and even grammarians couldn’t agree on what was correct. The two forms fought it out in the early 19th century. The writings of Thomas Jefferson, Adam Smith and Jane Austen all have examples of the possessive ‘it’s.’ But by the time Lincoln wrote that letter, the unapostrophized ‘its’ was the predominant form. So yes, Lincoln was a bit behind the times on this one.”

She also said that “the distinction we now observe between ‘that’ and ‘which’ is largely a late 19th and early 20th-century invention. The two words, she reported, “were used interchangeably by many distinguished writers in Lincoln’s time.’’

As for the talk of misplaced modifiers in both the opening sentence and in the one that begins “nobly sustained,’’ she dismissed it. They are perfectly correct, as written, she said.

She also came to Lincoln’s defense over his omission of the word “to” in three spots in the opening sentence and on other lesser issues raised by readers. She said, “The verb ‘attest’ does not require the preposition ‘to.’ And when Lincoln writes ‘to attest,’ he need not repeat the infinitive marker ‘to’ before the other infinitives in the series, ‘endorse’ and ‘thank.’ Finally, punctuation conventions were different in the mid-19th century.’’

She did conclude that the concern about the nonsensical construction in the sentence about the Methodists’ impact on the battlefield, in hospitals and in Heaven, raised by Readers No. 7, No. 26, No. 35, No. 48 and No. 51, “appears to be valid.”

“Lincoln should have written ‘any other’ or ‘any other churches,’” she concluded.

To Reader No. 67, meanwhile, who spotted an erroneous date in the prosecutors’ news release about the criminal case, in a mention of another letter by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Reader No. 60, who spotted an extra comma in my transcription of Lincoln’s closing sentence, well done.

To them and all our other readers, thanks for keeping Honest Abe – and the rest of us – honest.