My thing is, I don’t really trust Lincoln. I still hold the opinion that he was acting nefariously to some degree.
Have you ever read “The Class of 1848?” One of my all time favorite books on the interesting inter-connectedness of the men who led the war, on both sides.
Last Sunday on the way home from church, we were listening to “With Lee in Virginia.” It got to the part where Gen. Lee is surrounded, right before he surrendered.
I turned the CD off, plugged my phone into the speakers and made the family listen to Levon Helm singing, “The Night They Drove ‘Ol Dixie Down” twice. (The Last Waltz version on YouTube.)
It got all quiet in the car. Then my 10 year old said, “play that one again mama.”
I’m not a fan of Lincoln, I was simply pointing out that as far as he was concerned he was waging war against fellow Americans. He never regarded the CSA as a separate nation, they were just Americans who deserved to be killed if they believed that they could secede.
Consider an analogy: if you or somebody tried to convince me that, oh, say, Hillary Clintoon was good and worthy to be our President, they'd be totally wasting their time.
There's just nothing someone might say to make me think she is anything other than Satan's spawn... metaphorically speaking, of course.
And so with Lincoln haters, there's apparently nothing to say, not that I've ever seen, which might make a difference.
In their minds, "Ape" Lincoln is guilty of tricking Jefferson Davis into starting the war, and then of pursuing unlimited war until Confederates surrendered unconditionally.
What could be more dastardly?
And yet, and yet, consider this: no part of the nation in 1932, 1936, 1940 and 1944 voted more solidly for Democrat Franklin Roosevelt than the "solid South".
In Deep South states, Roosevelt got over 90% of the vote.
And who was FDR?
Well, a socialist for one, political grandfather of Lyndon Johnson and Barak Obama.
But more to our point here: to the Japanese and Germans of his time, FDR was the United States' Abraham Lincoln.
It can be argued, and indeed has been argued (incorrectly I think) that Roosevelt first tricked them into starting war (at Pearl Harbor), then fought unlimited war until they surrendered unconditionally.
So, was Franklin Roosevelt nefarious?
Well, maybe, but do we hate him for it?
No, as relates to WWII, certainly not.
But what about Germans and Japanese, do they hate FDR?
I don't think so.
Yes, I think they try to block it out of their memories, and like Southerners refer to that as a time of "unpleasantness", but I don't think they've grown to loath and hate FDR in the same sense as some still hate Lincoln.
And, objectively speaking, Lincoln was much kinder to Confederates than Roosevelt was to Japanese or Germans.
No, I'm not comparing Confederates to Nazis, but I am relating average Southerners in the 1860s to average citizens of, say, Germany in the 1930s and 1940s.
So far as I know, average Germans today don't hate or blame Roosevelt in the same way some Southerners profess to hate and blame Lincoln.