Do a search “Kevin Gutzman” and see what his nationality is.
[ Do a search “Kevin Gutzman” and see what his nationality is. ]
I do not even know the nationality of the President..
his grade school grades and passport are closely guarded secrets..
Am not in the mood for cute “titles”.. or people defaming US historical figures..
Kevin should watch his six..
Uh ... Confederate? Or maybe just Idiot. Really, it says it on his passport.
For example, a popular film depicts a fictionalized Lincoln as having been opposed to slavery virtually from the cradle. His Confederate enemies, on the other hand, were minions of Satan. The reality was not so.
This is just a stupid straw man argument. Until not so long ago, Southerners learned a very romanticized view of the Confederacy in school and had a bitter, jaundiced take on Lincoln. To some extent that persists today. Even in the Northern states there was a lot more respect for Robert E. Lee than for abolitionists like Garrison or Radical Republicans like Stevens.
To the degree that things have changed since then, it hasn't been to Lincoln's benefit. Teachers and students who honor Fredrick Douglass and respect John Brown don't have much time for Lincoln or his Republican Party. Those left-wingers have much common ground with DiLorenzo and Gutzman. They share many of the same anti-Lincoln arguments and the same hypocrisy (since affection for the Confederacy and support for emancipation, like radical abolitionism and concern for the Constitution don't always go together easily and without contradictions).
Many people who write about Lincoln don't know or care who he was. That's because they use him as a stand-in for Wilson, or FDR, or LBJ, either to win support for those later presidents by appealing to Lincoln's enduring popularity or to damn them by damning Lincoln. Lincoln the conservative statesman gets lost in all the polemics.
Americans will generally have none of this. The typical American will accept only a Manichean world in which Good battles Evil endlessly. Not for him the refinement of tragedy, of things lost along the way. Lincoln, idolized as the Great Emancipator after his death, must never have done any wrong. None of his accomplishment involved any kind of cost.
What rock has this character been living under? Chances are, if you mention Lincoln on the Internet a good 40% of the posts will reflect his own biased and ignorant opinion. And aren't those union-haters very much "Manichean" believers in a struggle between pure good and pure evil? And how you can read Lincoln and come away with without a sense of loss or tragedy is beyond me. Gutzman may flatter Canadian readers, but I suspect a lot Americans have more of an understanding of the tragic than he thinks they do -- or than he does himself.
But in reality, life is not that simple. Before Lincoln's election in 1860, the central precept of the majority political party's creed was that the Federal Government had limited powers, while the states retained the rest. This was the chief quality distinguishing a federal system, such as in the USA, from a national one, like that of Great Britain. Lincoln's victory in the Civil War involved the destruction of this principle. Even before his election as president, Lincoln had in fact always stood for power in the central government beyond what the Constitution granted.
According to one of many interpretations of the Constitution, that was neither the only one nor the best grounded. We could argue about whether the federal government should have gotten involved in protective tariffs, or banking, or road-building, but that wasn't something that Washington or Hamilton or Adams would have objected to. It was what later conservative Republicans like McKinley, Taft, Harding, and Coolidge favored.