Well, to all of you Lincoln haters, what can I say? I guess it all depends on what criteria you use to judge him. I can only say I’m not familiar with some of the criteria being used here.
If you dive deep and read first hand accounts, newspapers and letters from the era you will get an entirely different perspective on the Civil War. History is written by the victor.
If you do your own research on Lincoln one of the first things you will discover about him is that he was a racist. A KKK type of racist to the nth degree.
I’d recommend reading the old book, “Gangs of New York” to get the sentiment and reality of 1850-1865 in New York City— where the city itself, the population and much of the intelligentsia were pro-Confederate (that would be to say, the moneyed class and Wall Street, had been making millions off the cotton trade, indigo, commodities for export to Great Britain and the Far East)whose northern kinfolk and industry had been making millions off the slave trade (black and white slaves/indentured servants by the merchant class)for generations. Lincoln and his railroad buddies were outsiders to this old clique.
Lincoln isn’t to be hated, but rather put in the correct political perspective as to why he got into office and who put him there. Because, if instead John Breckenridge of KY had won... there never would have been a war, and within a generation with industrial revolution at hand, slavery would have become uneconomical, as it was already becoming.
It is important to see Lincoln in a world view the mainly untold alliance between Lincoln and Tsar Alexander II, which by many scholarly accounts was key to the North winning the Civil War, preventing and sealing the defeat of the British strategic design(yet another attempt to peal off a few of the original colonies and get them back in the Empire). Many have no idea about the Russian Eastern Fleet anchored in San Francisco and NY harbors in 1863. The Tsar had “freed his serfs” and was the Tsar Liberator friend of the the Great Emancipator.
Interesting discussion here:http://services.rbth.ru/arts/2013/09/12/when_the_russian_navy_sailed_into_new_york_29761.html