On Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln was actually a pretty terrible president.

Sure, he got the States through the Civil War. Sure, he freed the slaves, liberating the thousands of enslaved African Americans to take their rightful place in- oh, no; wait, he didn't. Slaves were not freed as a result of Lincoln's famous Emancipation Proclamation, as it only applied to slaves in rebelling states not under Union control, which ignored it, and not to the 800,000 slaves in the Union's slave-holding border states of Missouri, Kentucky, West Virginia, Maryland or Delaware. It was a purely political move: he turned the war from a dispute between the slaveholding and free states about land to a righteous war for the liberty of blacks.

Besides this misconception, most American's don't really have any other reason why the President was all that. What they don't know is that, at the beginning of the war, Lincoln assumpted presidential power and deliberately violated the United States Constitution in several ways. He suspended habeas corpus. He called the militia to suppress any domestic uprising, forming a state of martial law. He instituted a blockade, an act of war. All of these things were done without congressional approval.

In Stephen Carter's book 'The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln', he depicts a world in which John Wilkes Booth's bullet missed its mark by an inch, severely injuring but not killing the President, who went on to implement controversial methods for Reconstruction and, eventually, be called before Congress for impeachment. This is merely the background for a larger plotline, but I think Carter raises a good point: If Lincoln had not been murdered, becoming a Christ-like martyr in the eyes of history, he would most certainly not be the beloved figure he is today.

Even the Emancipation Proclamation is of questionable legality. Although its morality is secure, he was, in effect, stripping away the personal property of thousands of American slave-holders. This