Lincoln was a great President but not necessarily Christian. He had great respect as Jesus as a moral leader and believed God guided the nation.

Every known speech, letter, and official paper from Lincoln has been collected in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (edited by Roy Basler). This phrase does not appear anywhere in those volumes.

It also doesn’t appear in the Collected Works digital archive maintained by the University of Michigan, which contains a searchable database of his writings.

Historians trace the line about a “dark cloud from Rome” to late 19th and early 20th century anti-Catholic polemics, not to Lincoln himself.

It became popular during periods of strong nativist and anti-Catholic sentiment in the U.S., when figures like Lincoln were sometimes misquoted or fabricated to lend authority to those causes.