From the time of his death in 1865 to the 200th anniversary of his birth, February 12, 2009, there has never been a decade in which Abraham Lincoln’s influence has not been felt. Yet it has not been a smooth, unfolding history, but a jagged narrative filled with contention and revisionism. Lincoln’s legacy has shifted again and again as different groups have interpreted him. Northerners and Southerners, blacks and whites, East Coast elites and prairie Westerners, liberals and conservatives, the religious and secular, scholars and popularizers—all have recalled a sometimes startlingly different Lincoln.
He has been lifted up by both sides of the Temperance Movement; invoked for and against federal intervention in the economy; heralded by anti-communists, such as Senator Joseph McCarthy, and by American communists, such as those who joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the fight against the fascist Spanish government in the 1930s. Lincoln has been used to justify support for and against incursions on civil liberties, and has been proclaimed both a true and a false friend to African-Americans. Was he at heart a “progressive man” whose death was an “unspeakable calamity” for African-Americans, as Frederick Douglass insisted in 1865? Or was he “the embodiment...of the American Tradition of racism,” as African-American writer Lerone Bennett Jr. sought to document in a 2000 book?
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/lincolns-contested-legacy-44978351/#EFuy3fbBjT3xcW7R.99
Well I guess I’m in that group in the sense that my opinion of Lincoln and the Civil War has changed.
IMO, the South jumped the gun when they ceded from the Union without first going through certain necessary steps as outlined persuasively and authoritatively in the Declaration of Independence. The South should have first notified the feds of why certain acts were unconstitutional. But instead, the South ceded in anticipation of acts of the feds that hadn’t even taken place yet. I believe Lincoln was right to put down the unconstitutional rebellion of the South.