Just wait until the movie about Sherman comes out. There will be a tourist trap in Atlanta with a statue of the general holding a match.
Lincoln was a capable wartime leader. He rightly discerned the evil inn slavery. BUT he let his zeal overtake his responsibility to the Constitution. He “saved the union” at the expense of the Republic.
Civil rights for blacks became a reality in 1964.
When would civil rights for blacks have become a reality had Lincoln not launched war against the secessionist southern states?
When would the union have been restored, if at all, had Lincoln chosen to allow the secessionist states to go their own way?
Not this Virginian!
Lincoln’s approval of Gen Grant and Sherman’s “scorched earth” treatment of the South makes him culpable for more murder and destruction within the US than any other President in our history.
Any Freeper should be proud to be proud of Lincoln. As Dr. Guelzo puts it so eloquently:
“Lincoln is, both culturally and in terms of his economic thinking, firmly and immovably located in the center of what we can call liberal democratic thought in the 19th century. He is very much market oriented, with tremendous confidence in the power of a capitalist society to transform for the better, and he believes in opening the possibilities of that society to as many as possible. To him, that’s what’s coterminous with liberty. If you have to put him in company, he would belong with John Stuart Mill, whom he seriously admired. Shortly before he was assassinated, Lincoln was asked by a journalist what books had been most influential for him. One of the two books he indicated is Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. Put him in that context of the upwardly aspiring bourgeoisie—that’s Lincoln.”
You can’t have free men rise who have to compete with agrarian, aristocratic slaveholders. (Not to mention firstly the incredible injustice to the slaves).