Abraham Lincoln

In his company I was never in any way reminded of my humble origin, or of my unpopular color. Lincoln becomes the American solar myth, the chief butt of American credulity and sentimentality. Washington, of late years, has been perceptibly humanized; every schoolboy now knows that he used to swear a good deal, and was a sharp trader, and had a quick eye for a pretty ankle. But meanwhile the varnishers and veneerers have been busily converting Abe into a plaster saint, thus making him fit for adoration in the Y.M.C.A.’s. Dear Nat: I think well of the President. He has a face like a Hoosier Michelangelo, so awful ugly it becomes beautiful, with its strange mouth, its deep-cut crisscross lines, and its doughnut complexion. I do not dwell on the supposed failures of his government. He has shown an almost supernatural tact in keeping the ship afloat at all. I more and more rely upon his idiomatic western genius.

Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the United States from 1861 to 1865. 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 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), and for his fondness for railways. However, we here remember him as the President with the most pet goats.

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 initially, but still not bad, especially when compared with other political figures at the time; his immediate predecessor as POTUS, James Buchanan, is "considered one of America’s worst presidents"), restored a divided nation, and almost singlehandedly made abolition a politically palatable reality. 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." Even though his own party told him that his re-election was "an impossibility", 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."

Talk about integrity.

Lincoln is also remembered by WWE for being an absolutely fantastic wrestler and has a place in the 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. 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." 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" (not to mention just making shit up, like "a false and spurious proclamation purporting to be signed by the President"); 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." 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" 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") "issued a ruling that President Lincoln did not have the authority to suspend habeas corpus", and claimed that such action "was unconstitutional". Taney argued "that only Congress could suspend" 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. 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. 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", President of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis would go on to do the exact same thing as the meddling Yankees "just five days" 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."

Soft on slavery!
Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined. 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", 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:

I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, [...] that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.

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," 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."

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. )

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." 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." 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"."

Lincoln "became a member of the American Colonization Society in 1856"; 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." 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."

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."

Lincoln eventually abandoned colonization altogether "sometime in 1864 because he realized that it was an impractical plan", 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." 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") is often quoted in order to demonstrate that he didn't actually oppose slavery. In it he writes: My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.

However, Lincoln ended the letter with the following line: I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free.

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"; 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" (a plan which later became known by the signature phrase "40 acres and a mule") was specifically "approved" 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). 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. 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, 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."

"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.

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." 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. He imposed the US's first ever progressive tax to pay for the war, was responsible for the creation of the National Academy of Sciences, and historian Merrill Peterson even called him "the best friend labor ever had in the White House." And Lincoln was at least a deist,  one of only three presidents that did not join any church.

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
A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become lawful in all the States, old as well as new — North as well as South. In your hands, my dissatisfied countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you...you have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to preserve, protect and defend it. Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose, and you allow him to make war at pleasure. As a nation, we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except Negroes." When the Know Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except Negroes, foreigners, and Catholics." When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty — to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy. Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it. The severest justice may not always be the best policy. I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors; and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views. The Bible says somewhere that we are desperately selfish. I think we would have discovered that fact without the Bible. The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in want of one. We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others, the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men's labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name — liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names — liberty and tyranny. Already the liberal part[ies] throughout the world, express the apprehension "that the one retrograde institution in America, is undermining the principles of progress, and fatally violating the noblest political system the world ever saw." This is not the taunt of enemies, but the warning of friends. Is it quite safe to disregard it — to despise it? ... In our greedy chase to make profit of the Negro, let us beware, lest we "cancel and tear to pieces" even the white man's charter of freedom. Passion has helped us; but can do so no more. It will in future be our enemy. Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason, must furnish all the materials for our future support and defence. And, once more let me tell you, it is indispensable to you that you strike a blow. I am powerless to help this. You will do me the justice to remember I always insisted, that going down the Bay in search of a field, instead of fighting at or near Manassas, was only shifting, and not surmounting, a difficulty—that we would find the same enemy, and the same, or equal, intrenchments, at either place. The country will not fail to note—is now noting—that the present hesitation to move upon an intrenched enemy, is but the story of Manassas repeated...I beg to assure you that I have never written you, or spoken to you, in greater kindness of feeling than now, nor with a fuller purpose to sustain you, so far as in my most anxious judgment, I consistently can. But you must act. I do not like that man. I must get to know him better. In relation to the principle that all men are created equal, let it be as nearly reached as we can. If we cannot give freedom to every creature, let us do nothing that will impose slavery upon any other creature. You say you are conservative — eminently conservative — while we are revolutionary, destructive, or something of the sort. What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried? We stick to, contend for, the identical old policy on the point in controversy which was adopted by "our fathers who framed the government under which we live;" while you with one accord reject, and scout, and spit upon that old policy, and insist upon substituting something new. True, you disagree among yourselves as to what that substitute shall be. You are divided on new propositions and plans, but you are unanimous in rejecting and denouncing the old policy of the fathers. When I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.

...and what he didn't really say
I have two great enemies, the southern army in front of me and the financial institutions in the rear. Of the two, the one in the rear is the greatest enemy.

You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot help little men by tearing down big men. You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot establish sound security on borrowed money. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.