There's a lot about Pres. Lincoln to admire, he was a decent God-fearing man, but he got the Framers wrong and what the Union should be, in my humble opinion.
Despite Pres. Lincoln's many attributes and wisdom on so many other matters regarding Federal governance, he got the core things wrong, freedom of association, the First Amendment and 9th and 10th.
How can the spirit of freedom be upheld by the crushing power of the Federal government over-riding the will of the voters of those states?
I may be a far-North yankee, but on purely constitutional considerations, Pres. Lincoln was in the wrong.
The Federal Government can pretend that people are "free" when they have the people at gunpoint/bayonets.
Sorry to wander off topic a bit, but most people then and now just generally want the government to leave them and their property the hell alone
Doubtful. Lincoln knew the Bible and could quote it. But his closest friends strongly insisted that he was a mocker and skeptic like themselves.
"On the evening of Friday, December 12, 1873, William Herndon rose to address a public meeting at the courthouse in Springfield. Undaunted by the bad weather, the people of the Illinois state capital had turned out in good numbers, enticed by the speaker’s reputation and his advertised subject: Lincoln’s religion.
"Expecting a forthright lecture from Lincoln’s former associate, Herndon’s hearers were not disappointed, for he did not mince his words as he sought to show that his sometime law partner had lived and died “an unbeliever.” “Mr. Lincoln,” he declared, “was simply a Theist—an unbeliever in Christianity.” The president had died as he had lived: “an infidel ... in the orthodox sense of the term.” It was “twaddle” to argue that he had ever been a Christian.
"Those hero-worshipping biographers who had turned him into a declared follower of Christ had indulged in self-deluding romantic fiction. Herndon’s propositions and the trenchancy with which he advanced them threw Springfield into a fever of excitement. Spread countrywide as a broadside, and in the newspaper press, Lincoln’s Religion drew down onto Herndon’s head a storm of obloquy. His black treachery, snorted the New York Herald, revealed “the heart of Judas beating beneath an exterior of friendship.
more here:
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jala/2629860.0035.204/--simply-a-theist-herndon-on-lincolns-religion?rgn=main;view=fulltext