Personally, I find Lincoln’s political and historical analysis to be the best of that era, most prominently in his 1858 “House Divided” speech, his two Inaugural Addresses, and the Gettysburg Address.
While certainly a partisan for Union, he was always statesmanlike and charitable towards his southern brethren, I think.
And I still believe that had he lived, the post-war era would have been vastly better for all involved than it turned out to be.
I tend to wonder how Lincoln fans would feel if a modern President were to decide to call up an army and lay waste to their neighbors over the most divisive political issue of their time. I doubt that they would be convinced of his good heart because of his pleasing rhetoric. Killing your opposition to force them to comply is something we abhor when we see it in other nations. Here, we build a temple to the culprit in a fashion that a Caesar deifying Roman would recognize.
President Lincoln supported colonization during the Civil War as a practical response to newly freed slaves. At his urging, Congress included text in the Second Confiscation Act of 1862 indicating support for Presidential authority to recolonize consenting Africans.[57] With this authorization, Lincoln created an agency to direct his colonization projects. At the suggestion of Lincoln, in 1862, Congress appointed $600,000 to fund and created the Bureau of Emigration in the U.S. Department of the Interior. To head that office Lincoln appointed the energetic Reverend James Mitchell, a leader of the American Colonization Party.[58][59] Lincoln had known Mitchell since 1853, when Mitchell visited Illinois. Mitchell’s Washington D.C.’s office was in charge of implementing Lincoln’s voluntary colonization policy of African Americans. In his annual December message to Congress that year (his second “State of the Union” Message), he reiterated his strong support for government expenditure on colonization for those who wanted to go, but he also noted that objections to free blacks remaining in the United States were baseless, “if not sometimes malicious.” [60] In 1862, Lincoln mentioned colonization favorably in his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. Much concerning the controversial Bureau of Emigration is unknown today, as Mitchell’s papers that kept record of the office were lost after his death in 1903.[59]