As an example of why I think Lincoln was every bit as power hungry and dangerous as any Soviet leader, here are quotes from the man Lincoln put in charge of killing Southerners. (Surely Lincoln was well aware of these statements made by Sherman)
“The young bloods of the South; sons of planters, lawyers about towns, good billiard players and sportsmen, men who never did any work and never will. War suits them. They are splendid riders, first rate shots and utterly reckless. These men must all be killed or employed by us before we can hope for peace....”Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman
“The more Indians we can kill this year the fewer we will need to kill the next, because the more I see of the Indians the more convinced I become that they must either all be killed or be maintained as a species of pauper. Their attempts at civilization is ridiculous...” -Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman
“Look to the South and you who went with us through that land can best say if they have not been fearfully punished. Mourning is in every household, desolation written in broad characters across the whole face of their country, cities in ashes and fields laid waste, their commerce gone, their system of labor annihilated and destroyed. Ruin and poverty and distress everywhere, and now pestilence adding to the very cap sheaf of their stack of misery...Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, the man who left a 60 mile wide, 300 mile long path of death and desolation across GA and up through SC.
I have destroyed over 2,000 barns filled with wheat, hay and farming implements; over 70 mills filled with flour and wheat, and have driven in front of the Army over 4,000 head of stock and have killed and issued to the troops not less than 3,000 sheep.
Tomorrow I will continue the destruction down to Fisher’s Mill. When this is completed, the Valley from Winchester to Staunton, 92 miles, will have but little in it for man or beast.”..from an Oct. 7, 1864 report to Gen. Grant from Gen. Sheridan.
Certainly, This is exactly how crony capitalists (Fascists) punish agricultural states that refuse their rule and offer to sell their produce directly to their competitors in Europe.