Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the United States from 1861 to 1865.Whitehouse.gov official biography Before entering politics, Lincoln worked as a rural lawyer. A Republican (the Democrats were a pro-slavery party and the Republicans were an anti-slavery partyhttp://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/w/Southern_Democratic_Party) from Illinois, he is most remembered for making the South angry enough to secede upon his victory, triggering the American Civil War (1861–1865), his successful attempts to reunite the nation, ban slavery, free the enslaved people in the south, and for his fondness for railways. However, we here remember him as the President with the most pet goats.Inside the whitehouse
==One of these is not like the other==
There are two interpretations of Abraham Lincoln's presidency, depending on what historian you're talking to.
===President Lincoln was one of our greatest leaders===
The first and most popular view is that Lincoln was one of the greatest (if not the greatest) presidents in American history. He managed to preserve the Union cause during the Civil War (perhaps not doing the best possible job at first during the early stages of the Civil War, but still not bad, especially when compared with other political figures at the time; his corrupt predecessor as POTUS, James Buchanan, is "considered one of America’s worst presidents"),https://www.history.com/news/why-is-james-buchanan-considered-one-of-americas-worst-presidents restored a divided nation, and almost singlehandedly made abolition a politically palatable reality. He was instrumental in signing the Emancipation Proclomation that declared freedom of the slaves in the South and prevented France and England from interfering with the war, and was successful into doing everything he can to persuade Congress to pass the Thirteenth Amendment that banned slavery. As a testament to these successes, he was also the first president since Andrew Jackson to win re-election for a second term of office, and during a civil war no less. Indeed, the fact that the election of 1864 was held at all is nothing short of incredible. "No other democratic nation had ever conducted a national election during times of war. And while there was some talk of postponing the election, it was never given serious consideration, even when Lincoln thought that he would lose."https://millercenter.org/president/lincoln/campaigns-and-elections Even though his own party told him that his re-election was "an impossibility",https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/lincolngrant.htm Lincoln was adamant: "We can not have free government without elections; and if the rebellion could force us to forego or postpone a national election, it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us."https://www.nytimes.com/1864/11/11/archives/congratulating-the-president-a-serenade-by-the-clubs-and-a-speech.html 
Talk about integrity.
Lincoln is also remembered by WWEAbraham Lincoln: president ... and wrestler?, WWE for being an absolutely fantastic wrestler and has a place in the wrestling hall of fame.Honoree: Abraham Lincoln, National Wrestling Hall of Fame Seriously, his wrestling exploits were often used during his political campaign, and after beating the leader of a gang by outright choke slamming him, thereby inventing that particular move, he earned their respect, and they became some of his earliest political supporters. What have you done lately?
===President Lincoln abused and overstepped his presidential powers===
The second, less popular view is that Lincoln grossly abused the United States' executive branch's power.Indeed, some said he was little more than a big government socialist. In particular, he suspended the writ of habeas corpus (Lincoln wrote that "more rogues than honest men find shelter under it"), spent money without the approval of Congress, and imprisoned thousands of suspected Confederate sympathizers (as well as people who simply opposed the war) without trial. "Historians do not know exactly how many people the [federal] government arrested for antiwar protests during the Civil War, although estimates vary from just over 13,000 to as many as 38,000."https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/arrest-arbitrary-during-civil-war This included newspaper reporters and editors, who "were arrested without due process for opposing the draft, discouraging enlistments in the Union army, or even criticizing the income tax"https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1059/civil-war-u-s (not to mention just making shit up, like "a false and spurious proclamation purporting to be signed by the President");https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/executive-order-arrest-and-imprisonment-irresponsible-newspaper-reporters-and-editors although Lincoln "often learned about such cases only after the fact" and "usually regretted their occurence", he nonetheless "publicly defended a policy that permitted suppressing disloyal papers." In total, more than "300 newspapers were shut down, most of them Democratic papers that were sympathetic to the Confederacy."https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08821127.2009.10677743 Not even politicians were spared. Congressmen Henry May of Maryland and Clement Vallandigham of Ohio were arrested, as was former Governor of Kentucky Charles S. Morehead, Baltimore Mayor George William Brown, and even Washington D.C. Mayor James G. Berret. All of these men were later released without charge except for Vallandigham, who was found guilty by a military tribunal of "declaring disloyal sentiments"https://ohiohistorycentral.org/w/Clement_Vallandigham before being exiled to the Confederacy. 
In 1861, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Roger B. Taney (who infamously argued in the Dred Scott case of 1857 that African Americans "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect")https://www.acslaw.org/expertforum/no-rights-which-the-white-man-was-bound-to-respect/ "issued a ruling that President Lincoln did not have the authority to suspend habeas corpus",https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/president-lincoln-suspends-the-writ-of-habeas-corpus-during-the-civil-war and claimed that such action "was unconstitutional".https://reason.com/volokh/2021/11/02/no-noah-feldman-lincoln-did-not-ignore-taney/ Taney argued "that only Congress could suspend"https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/lincoln-and-taneys-great-writ-showdown habeas corpus, and that he could see "no ground whatever for supposing that the President in any emergency or in any state of things can authorize the suspension of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus, or arrest a citizen except in aid of the judicial power". Lincoln's friend and bodyguard, Ward Hill Lamon, later alleged that the president had planned to place Taney under arrest, and even issued a warrant to that effect, although it was never delivered; however, "Lamon's story was never confirmed by Lincoln's principal biographers, and it stretches credulity to believe that Lincoln would approve such a grand provocation [...] In fact, Taney was never molested by any official of the federal government". Lincoln eventually "received approval from Congress in March 1863 to suspend the writ for the duration of the conflict". 
While there are legitimate criticisms to be made of Lincoln here (like any president, or, hell, any person ever), an entire cottage industry of pseudohistories demonizing Lincoln has popped up, mostly pushing the Lost Cause of the South narrative (see also Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War).
It is true that such actions would be unconstitutional and inexcusable in a time of peace. However, it is also essential to note that Lincoln was president during a brutal conflict which was tearing the United States apart, circumstances in which the Constitution explicitly allows for the suspension of habeas corpus."The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it." If there is any better "national security" excuse, we'd like to hear one.
Of course, Lost Causers who castigate Lincoln over this issue conveniently ignore the fact that the Confederate government also suspended habeas corpus on multiple occasions.https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a27447/civil-war-habeas-corpus-022014/ Despite shitting on Lincoln in his inaugural address for being a tyrant and claiming that "there has been no act on our part to impair personal liberty or the freedom of speech",https://jeffersondavis.rice.edu/archives/documents/jefferson-davis-second-inaugural-address President of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis would go on to do the exact same thing as the meddling Yankees "just five days"https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/425122-jefferson-davis-inauguration-and-why-it-must-be-taught after being sworn in! "This was the first of three such periods of suspension Davis signed, along with additional periods he requested from the Confederate Congress but did not receive."https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/14/the-great-writ-north-and-south/
Similarly, it's humorous that many of Lincoln's biggest detractors are libertarians given the Confederacy was anything but a freedom loving nation. " Throughout the Confederacy's short-lived existence, there were increasingly vocal and widespread calls for it to abandon liberal democracy and free-market capitalism in favor of adopting a more authoritarian political system (such as a military dictatorship or an absolute monarchy) and much stronger government intervention in economic matters (with some going so far as to call for something akin to a command economy)," one source notes.Late Modern Age » Dated History TV Tropes
==Soft on slavery!==
When running for Illinois' seat in the U.S. Senate in 1858, Lincoln was tarred as a "closet abolitionist" (the political equivalent of being called "soft on terrorism" today) by his Democratic opponent Stephen Douglas. Douglas also accused Lincoln of supporting "negro equality",https://www.history.com/news/5-things-you-may-not-know-about-lincoln-slavery-and-emancipation and claimed that he would allow for such terrible things as voting rights, jury duty rights, and (horror of horrors) interracial marriage rights for blacks. Lincoln got around this by expressing what would today be considered horrifyingly racist things. In Lincoln's own words:
His anti-abolitionist credentials cleverly secured, Lincoln promptly turned around and stated that blacks deserved the same right to freedom, the "right to eat the bread without the leave of anybody else which his own hand earns,"https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-lincoln-bested-douglas-in-their-famous-debates-7558180/Smithsonian magazine's article (page 4) on the Lincoln-Douglas debates. as he put it. He went on to say that "there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man."https://www.nytimes.com/1986/08/17/opinion/the-editorial-notebook-the-lincoln-botha-debate.html
This was actually a very calculated move; Lincoln, himself a lifelong opponent of slavery and an abolitionist early in his life, knew the actual abolitionists had no one else to go with but him. He needed to woo the moderates and wingnuts of the time to get elected, so he tried to play to both sides as a way to preserve the Union. (Southerners were straight-up calling him a "Black Republican," for Christ's sake.Election of 1860, Dickinson College (He played a very similar game in his as a last effort to persuade the South not to secede; the Civil War began the day after, and the Emancipation Proclamation was conceived the next year.)) 
Historian Eric Foner has addressed the issue of Lincoln's views on race. "Which was the real Lincoln, the racist or the opponent of slavery? The unavoidable answer is both. [...] [I]t was possible in 19th century America to share the racial prejudices of the time and yet simultaneously believe that slavery was a crime that ought to be abolished."https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-apr-09-bk-17473-story.html During his debate with Douglas, Lincoln also remarked: "I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position the negro should be denied everything." It is true that "[f]or much of his career, Lincoln believed that colonization—or the idea that a majority of the African American population should leave the United States and settle in Africa or Central America—was the best way to confront the problem of slavery. His two great political heroes, Henry Clay and Thomas Jefferson, had both favored colonization; both were enslavers who took issue with aspects of slavery but saw no way that Black and white people could live together peaceably."https://www.history.com/news/5-things-you-may-not-know-about-lincoln-slavery-and-emancipation Jefferson had argued "that the freed slave had to be literally "removed beyond the reach of mixture" or he would soon be "staining the blood of his master"."https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/03/what-jefferson-helps-to-explain/376800/ 
Lincoln "became a member of the American Colonization Society in 1856";https://www.essentialcivilwarcurriculum.com/lincoln-and-colonization.html the ACS encouraged African Americans to emigrate to Liberia, and plans were also made involving colonies in Panama and Belize during Lincoln's presidency, but the project was a complete failure, and abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips ridiculed the whole idea. Novelist Ralph Ellison later described the ACS as "the product of a free-floating irrationality."https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/what-america-would-be-like-without-blacks/ As late as 1862, Lincoln was telling a group of free blacks whom he had invited to the White House that "[y]our race suffers greatly, many of them by living among us, while ours suffers from your presence. If this is admitted, it affords a reason why we should be separated." After hearing about this incident, Frederick Douglass derided Lincoln as someone who "assumes the language and arguments of an itinerant colonization lecturer, shows all his inconsistencies, his pride of race and blood, his contempt for Negroes and his canting hypocrisy."http://www.ericfoner.com/reviews/02052007nation.html 
Although from a modern perspective the idea of colonization is abhorrent, at the time it was seen as a practical solution to the problems of slavery and race relations in America. "Abraham Lincoln was a man of his times and limited by some of the less worthy thinking of his times. This is demonstrated [...] by his involvement in a plan of purging the nation of blacks as a means of healing the badly shattered ideals of democratic federalism." However, historians such as Barbara Fields have rejected the argument that Lincoln's limitations in this area were "excusable or even praiseworthy. It is not true that it was impossible in that time and place to look any higher."https://subslikescript.com/series/The_Civil_War-98769/season-1/episode-3-Forever_Free
Lincoln eventually abandoned colonization altogether "sometime in 1864 because he realized that it was an impractical plan",http://www.abraham-lincoln-history.org/colonization/ and because he had been persuaded by men like Douglass that the whole thing was an absurd idea to begin with.
The South promptly left the Union anyway, leading to the Civil War. Frederick Douglass said that Lincoln's victory in the election of 1860 "demonstrated the possibility of electing, if not an Abolitionist, at least an anti-slavery reputation to the Presidency of the United States."https://www.whitehousehistory.org/frederick-douglass-and-abraham-lincoln Although he had no need to placate slaveowners anymore, Lincoln was nonetheless reluctant to risk antagonizing the Union border states, namely Kentucky, Maryland and Missouri, in which slavery existed. Lincoln therefore set about waging war on secession rather than on slavery. 
Lincoln's letter to abolitionist campaigner Horace Greeley (who complained that the president was "unduly influenced by the counsels, the representations, the menaces, of certain fossil politicians hailing from the Border Slave States")https://www.americanantiquarian.org/Freedmen/Manuscripts/greeley.html is often quoted in order to demonstrate that he didn't actually oppose slavery. In it he writes: 
However, Lincoln ended the letter with the following line: 
In the summer of 1862, Lincoln decided to emancipate the slaves and, on September 22nd, 1862, exactly one month after he wrote Greeley the above letter, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which would come into force on January 1st, 1863, and would eventually lead to the ending of slavery in the United States. Technically, the proclamation "didn’t actually free all of the approximately 4 million men, women and children held in slavery in the United States";https://www.history.com/topics/american-civil-war/emancipation-proclamation that would have to wait until the 13th Amendment was passed in 1865. "The document applied only to enslaved people in the Confederacy, and not to those in the border states that remained loyal to the Union. But although it was presented chiefly as a military measure, the proclamation marked a crucial shift in Lincoln’s views on slavery. Emancipation would redefine the Civil War, turning it from a struggle to preserve the Union to one focused on ending slavery, and set a decisive course for how the nation would be reshaped after that historic conflict." Lincoln also made the South's readmission into the Union conditional on its emancipation of self-freed slaves who had crossed the border, and its permanent abolition of slavery. During the war, he ordered the Union Army to protect freed slaves, made sure they treated freed slaves as equals while in the Union Army and encouraged the border states to free their slaves. In addition to this, Special Field Order No. 15, which set aside "400,000 acres of confiscated Confederate land for freed slaves"Sarah McCammon, Sarah. (January 12, 2015). "The Story Behind '40 Acres And A Mule'." NPR (a plan which later became known by the signature phrase "40 acres and a mule") was specifically "approved"https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/the-truth-behind-40-acres-and-a-mule/ by Lincoln, although after his assassination the whole idea was quickly abandoned by President Andrew Johnson (hardly surprising for a Southerner and former slave owner).https://nfu.org/2020/06/19/juneteenth-and-the-broken-promise-of-40-acres-and-a-mule/ When Lincoln was about to go to sleep after re-election, he noticed a crowd of black D.C. natives who had been waiting patiently outside the White House to congratulate him. He went outside and spent several more sleepless hours personally shaking every one of their hands.
When the Confederates threatened to re-enslave or murder black Union troops, Lincoln retaliated with a promise to execute rebel prisoners of war for every black Union soldier that was re-enslaved or murdered.Lincoln’s Promise: We’ll Take an Eye for an Eye to Protect Our Black Troops During the war, Lincoln pushed for equal pay for Black soldiers, legalized black witnesses in federal courts, was the first president to invite a black man, Frederick Douglass, to the White House, dropped his plan to colonize freed blacks outside the Union after Douglass persuaded him to do so,Black Lives Certainly Mattered to Abraham Lincoln, Smithsonian Magazine and desegregated services in the US Mail and D.C. streetcars. 
He established the Freedman's Bureau to help freed slaves to get on their feet and make decent lives for themselves. He appointed his power-hungry and politically treacherous Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase, to Chief Justice because he knew the man would support and protect cases and laws dealing with freed slaves and equality (luckily for Lincoln, his nemesis, Chief Justice Taney, had died in 1864). 
The reason he was killed by actor John Wilkes Booth? Lincoln suggested, as the hallmark of Reconstruction, equality of suffrage, and civil rights for blacks. To Booth, that meant one thing: "Nigger citizenship [...] That is the last speech he will ever make."https://americanhistory.si.edu/lincoln/booth-and-lincoln
"Soft" indeed.
==Modern political symbolism==
Many modern politicians have, either directly or indirectly, drawn analogies between themselves and Abraham Lincoln. President Barack Obama, while balking at outright equivalencies, often subtly encourages surrogates and fans to do the same: he opened his bid for the presidency at the Illinois State House (Lincoln's old stomping grounds), dined on china patterned after Mary Todd Lincoln's directly after his inauguration, was sworn in on Lincoln's Bible, and openly sought to create a "team of rivals," historian Doris Kearns Goodwin's phrase to describe Lincoln's cabinet in a book Obama had announced himself a fan of on multiple occasions.Doris Kearns Goodwin on life, death and the presidency The Washington Post
But Obama was by no means the first. Because Abraham Lincoln was America's first Republican president, some Republicans attempt to trace a "continuity of political thought and philosophy from Lincoln, the country’s first Republican president, to the era of George W. Bush.""Old School - Greenberg remembers" at Halfway There However, the two men share little more than the same party name: Lincoln was a social progressive, fighting intensely for, and building his reputation on, opposition to the quite status quo institution of slavery.A Southern GOP Can't Be the Party of Lincoln, New York Magazine He imposed the US's first ever progressive tax to pay for the war, (Indeed, throughout his political career he was very willing to soak the rich.) was responsible for the creation of the National Academy of Sciences,Founding and Early Work, National Academy of Sciences and historian Merrill Peterson even called him "the best friend labor ever had in the White House."Lincoln's Prophecy, Snopes And Lincoln was at least a deist,Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals, ch. 3., but nowhere close to the Baptist fundie-speak of the time. (His law partner, William Herndon, even called him a pantheist. )Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, Teach US History one of only three presidents that did not join any church.The Religious Affiliations of U.S. Presidents, Pew Research
Furthermore, the Republican Party has reinvented itself three times since the 1860s — first to become the anti-Southern, freedmen's rights party after Lincoln's death, second to become the deregulation party in the 1930s, and finally to place social conservatism above fiscal conservatism in the Reagan era; the bastions of the Union now drenched in blue. Clearly, the fact that Lincoln and modern Republicans share a party name does not mean they share anything more than that.
Keep scrolling down if that's tl;dr.
==Too many awesome quotes==
 
=== ...and what he didn't really say ===
==See also==
*Lincoln assassination conspiracy theories
*Mexican-American War
==External links==
*The Gettysburg Address - All 272 words of it. Possibly the most remarkable homage to fallen veterans ever written.
*Lincoln’s Most Devastating Question
==References==
Category:Classical liberalism
Category:Deists
Category:Former United States Representatives
Category:Frequently misquoted people
Category:Human rights
Category:Lawyers
Category:Presidents of the United States
Category:Racists
Category:United States politicians