The murder made him one of our greatest Presidents.
No, before that he was spoken of thusly. You are invited to find positive comments by contemporaries while Lincoln was alive. I expect you can only dig up eulogies after his death.
LINCOLN VIEWED BY HIS CONTEMPORARIES
In his History of the United States, Vol. IV., page 520, Rhodes makes the sweeping assertion that --
"Lincoln's contemporaries failed to perceive his greatness."
Other Republican writers make the same statement. Yet none attempted to explain why those who best knew Mr. Lincoln failed to esteem or respect him. Chase, while in his Cabinet, had every opportuity to know Lincoln well. Tarbell says:
"Mr. Chase was never able to realize Mr. Lincoln's greatness."
McClure says:
"Chase was the most irritating fly in the Lincoln ointment."
In their voluminous life of Lincoln, Nicolay and Hay have this:
"Even to complete strangers Chase could not write without speaking slightingly of President Lincoln. He kept up this habit till the end of Lincoln's life. Chase's attitude toward the President varied between the limits of active brutality and benevolent contempt."
Of a bill to create offices in 1864, Chase wrote in his diary:
"If this bill becomes a law, Lincoln will most certainly put men in office from political considerations."
On this, page 448, Rhodes comments thus:
"A President who selected unfit generals for the reason that they represented phases of public opinion, would hardly hesitate to name postmasters and collectors who could be relied upon as a personal following."
Rhodes further says:
"In conversation, in private correspondence, in the confidence of his diary, Chase dealt censure unrestrained on Lincoln's conduct of the war."
Morse says:
"Many distinguished men of his own party distrusted Mr. Lincoln's character."
On an official trip to Washington, February 23, 1863, Richard H. Dana wrote Thomas Lathrop as follows:
"I see no hope but in the army; the lack of respect for the President in all parties is unconcealed. The most striking thing is the absence of personal loyalty to the President. It does not exist. He has no admirers. If a convention were held tomorrow he would not get the vote of a single State. He does not act or talk or feel like the ruler of an empire. He seems to be fonder of details than of principles, fonder of personal questions than of weightier matters of empire. He likes rather to talk and tell stories with all sorts of people who come to him for all sorts of purposes, than to give his mind to the many duties of his great post. This is the feeling of his Cabinet. He has a kind of shrewd common sense, slip-shod, low-leveled honesty that made him a good Western lawyer, but he is an unutterable calamity to us where he is. Only the army can save us."
According to Lamon:
"The Rev. Mr. Collier, sharing the prevailing sentiment in regard to the incapacity and inefficiency of Lincoln's government, chanced to pass through the White House grounds. ... "
Charles Francis Adams wrote:
"When Lincoln first entered upon his functions as President, he filled with dismay all those brought in contact with him."
"When Lincoln entered upon his duties as President he displayed moral, intellectual and executive incompetency."
On August 1, 1862, Wendell Phillips said to his audience:
"As long as you keep the present turtle (Lincoln) at the head of affairs you make a pit with one hand and fill it with the other. I know Mr. Lincoln. I have been to Washington and taken his measure. He is a first-rate second-rate man; that is all of him. He is a mere convenience and is waiting, like any other broomstick, to be used."
In a speech made at Music Hall, New Haven, 1863, Phillips said:
"Lincoln was badgered into emancipation. After he issued it he said it was the greatest folly of his life. It was like the Pope's bull against the comet."
In Tremont Temple, Boston, Phillips said:
"With a man for President we should have put down the rebellion in ninety days."
At a Republican meeting in Boston, Phillips said:
"President Lincoln, with senile, lick-spittle haste, runs before his is bidden, to revoke the Hunter proclamation. The President and the Cabinet are treasonable. The President and the Secretary of War should be impeached."
In 1864, at Cooper Institute, Phillips said:
"I judge Mr. Lincoln by his acts, his violation of the law, his overthrow of liberty in the Northern States. I judge Mr. Lincoln by his words and deeds, and so judging, I am unwilling to trust Abraham Lincoln with the future of this country. Mr. Lincoln is a politician; politicians are like the bones of a horse's fore shoulder; not a straight one in it. I am a citizen watchful of constitutional liberty. Are you willing to sacrifice the constitutional rights of seventy years? A man in the field (the army) said: 'The re-election of Lincoln will be a national disaster.' Another said: 'The re-election of Lincoln will be national destruction.' I want free speech. Let Abraham Lincoln know that we are stronger than Abraham Lincoln; that he is the servant to obey us."
August 5, 1864, Henry Winter Davis and Senator Wade of Ohio issued this:
"A more studied outrage on the legislative authority of the people than was ever before perpetrated."
When Lincoln was asked if he had seen a speech of Phillips and the Winter Davis-Wade manifesto against him, he replied:
"I have seen enough to satisfy me that I am a failure, not only in the opinion of the people in the rebellion, but of many distinguished politicans of my own party." -- Lamon's Recollections, page 187.
In McClellan's Life, a number of letters to his wife are published, in which McClellan speaks of Stanton's visits.
McClellans writes:
"The most disagreeable thing about Stanton is the extreme virulence of his abuse of President Lincoln, his whole administration, as well of all the Republican party. I am often shocked."
McClellan writes:
"Stanton never speaks of the President in any way other than as "that original gorilla." he often says: "Du Chaillie was a fool to wander all the way to Africa in search of what he could have found in Springfield, Illinois."
McClellan writes:
Nothing can be more bitter than Stanton's words and manner when speaking of the President and his administration. He gives them no credit or honesty of purpose or patriotism, and very seldom for ability. He often advised the propriety of my seizing the government and taking power in my own hands."
McClellan writes:
"Stanton often speaks of the painful imbecility of the President."
In McClure's Life of Lincoln, page 150, is this:
"Before Stanton was appointed Secretary of War he was an open and malignant opponent of the Lincoln administration. He often spoke to public men, military and civil, with withering sneers of Lincoln. I have hard him speak thus of Lincoln, and several times to him in the same way."
Hapgood's Lincoln, page 164 tells of Stanton saying:
"I met Lincoln at the bar and found him a low, cunning clown."
A.K. McClure says (Lincoln and Men of the War Time, p. 51) of Lincoln:
"If he could only have commanded the hearty co-operation of the leaders of his own party, his task would have been greatly lessened, but it is due to the truth of history to say that few, very few, of the Republicans of national fame had faith in Lincoln's ability for the trust assigned to him. I could name a dozen men, now [1892] idols of the nation, whose open distrust of Lincoln not only seriously embarrassed, but grievously pained and humiliated him."
Ida Tarbell in McClures Magazine, July 1899, calls Senator Sumner, Ben Wade, Henry Winter Davis, and Secretary Chase "Malicious foes of Lincoln," and makes the remarkable and comprehensive concession that "about all the most prominent leaders . . . were actively opposed to Lincoln," and mentions Greeley as their chief."
"Fremont, who eight years before had received every Republican vote for President, charged Lincoln (Holland's Abraham Lincoln, p. 259, p. 469, and p 471) with "incapacity and selfishness," with "disregard of personal rights," with "violation of personal liberty and liberty of the press," with "feebleness and want of principle"; and says, "The ordinary rights under the Constitution and laws of the country have been violated," and he further accuses Lincoln of "managing the war for personal ends."
Dr. Holland shows (Abraham Lincoln, p. 469, et seq.) that Fremont, Wendell Phillips, Fred Douglass, and Greeley were leaders in a very nearly successful effort to defeat Lincoln's second nomination, and quotes as follows, action of the convention for that purpose held in Cleveland, May 21, 1864, that "the public liberty was in danger"; that its object was to arouse the people, "and bring them to realize that, while we are saturating Southern soil with the best blood of the country in the name of liberty, we have really parted with it at home."
Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, in a speech at Grand Rapids, September 8, 1900, said that in 1864, "on every hand Lincoln was denounced as a tyrant, a shedder of blood, a foe to liberty, a would-be dictator, a founder of an empire...."
Ida Tarbell, McClure's Magazine, March 1899, recorded the opinion of Secretary of State Seward:
"[Seward] believed, as many Republicans did, that Lincoln was unfit for the presidency, and that some one of his associates would be obliged to assume leadership...."
A.K. McClure writes:
"After Stanton's retirement from the Buchanan cabinet, when Lincoln was inaugurated, he maintained the closest confidential relations with Buchanan, and wrote him many letters expressing the utmost contempt for Lincoln ... These letters, ... given to the public in Curtis's Life of Buchanan, speak freely of the painful imbecility of Lincoln, the venality and corruption which ran riot in the government," and McClure goes on: "It is an open secret that Stanton advised the revolutionary overthorw of the Lincoln government, to be replaced by General McClellan as Military Dictator."
Schouler says of Stanton (History of the United States, Vol VI, p. 159)
"He denounced Lincoln in confidential speeches and letters as a coward and a fool."
The Lincoln monument was unveiled on April 14, 1876. Frederick Douglass said:
Truth is proper and beautiful at all times and in all places, and it is never more proper and beautiful in any case than when speaking of a great public man whose example is likely to be commended for honor and imitation long after his departure to the solemn shades, the silent continent of eternity. It must be admitted, truth compels me to admit, even here in the presence of the monument we have erected to his memory, Abraham Lincoln was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our man or our model. In his interests, in his associations, in his habits of thought, and his prejudices, he was a white man. He was preeminently the white man's President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men (FD 4:312, italics added)
Donn Piatt travelled with Lincoln when he was making his campaign speeches and knew him intimately.
Donn Piatt said:
"When a leader dies all good men go to lying about him. From the moment that covers his remains to the last echo of the rural press, in speeces, in sermons, eulogies, reminiscences, we hear nothing but pious lies."
Donn Piatt continues:
"Abraham Lincoln has almost disappears from human knowledge. I hear of him, I read of him in eulogies and biographies but I fail to recognize the man I knew in life."
"It is usual today, [says George Fort Milton in his Age of Hate], to depict the death of Lincoln as having occasioned an universal outburst of grief throughout the North and particularly amoung the leaders of the Republican party, by whom "the Great Emancipator" has since been made a party god. When a searcher for the truth examines the private records of the time, he can scrace repress a feeling of surprise, for the fact is that the Radical leadership of the Republican party, while not pleased with the sacrifice of Lincoln, the individual, almost rejoiced that Lincoln, the merciful executive, had been removed from the helm of state."
Julian, one of these Radical leaders, boldly stated that the accession of Andrew Johnson to the presidency would prove a blessing to the country. In this sentiment he was not alone. On April 15, only a few hours after Lincoln's death, a caucus of Republican leaders was held, at which the tragedy was described as a gift from Heaven, and it was decided to get rid of Lincolnism. Ben Butler was chosen to be Secretary of State. Unfortunately for that plan, Seward's injuries were not fatal, and his position did not become vacant. Blunt Senator Wade told the new President, "Johnson, we have faith in you. By the gods, there will be no trouble now in running the government!" Johnson had been ranting for weeks past that secession was treason, that treason must be made odious, and that all Confederates should be hanged.
From the pulpit, the Radical sentiments poured forth with astounding frankness. "I accept God's action as an indication that Lincoln's work as an instrument of Providence ended here," said the Reverend Martin R. Vincent, in the First Presbyterian church of Troy, New York, "and that the work of retribution belonged to other and doubtless fitter instruments. I will not positively assert that his policy toward traitors was so much too lenient that God replaced him by a man, who, we have good reasons to think, will not err in this direction. Yet I say this may be and it looks like it."
The Reverend Warren E. Cudsworth, in Boston, also expressed his satisfaction, "His [Lincoln's] death under God will do as much for the cause he had at heart as did his life. We know that already several of the leading supporters of his administration had taken issue with him on Reconstruction in the rebel states."
The Reverend Mr. Crane was convinced that the assassination was the work of Providence. "Abraham Lincoln's work is done," he stated solemnly. "From the fourteenth of this April his work was done. From that time God had no further use for him ..."
It is remarkable how closely the wishes of the Radicals and the ways of Providence chanced to meet on "the fourteenth of this April." ... An attempt had also been made on the life of Seward, the only other prominent Republican who was lenient and conciliatory.