While serving in Congress, Lincoln was an outspoken supporter of the Marxist/socialist revolutions in Europe going on at the time. In 1861, Honest Abe sought to free the South from itself. Four years, billions of dollars in property loss and debt, and 600,000 lost lives later, Lincoln got his wish and our modern day federal government in Washington is the fruit of his labor. Don't everybody cheer at once. --MATTHEW CHANCEY
"The Gettysburg speech was at once the shortest and the most famous oration in American history... the highest emotion reduced to a few poetical phrases. Lincoln himself never even remotely approached it. It is genuinely stupendous. But let us not forget that it is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it. Put it into the cold words of everyday. The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination -- that government of the people, by the people, for the people, should not perish from the earth. IT IS DIFFICULT TO IMAGINE ANYTHING MORE UNTRUE. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves." --H.L. Mencken on Lincoln's Clintonian lie
"Surrender means that the history of this heroic struggle will be written by the enemy; that our youth will be trained by Northern school teachers; learn from Northern school books their version of the war; will be impressed by all the influences of history to regard our gallant dead as traitors, and our maimed veterans as fit subjects for derision." --General Pat Cleburne, CSA