Posted on 07/20/2018 8:55:10 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
President Trump has once again drawn the sneers and condescension of the Leftist establishment media with his claim that “I am the most popular person in the history of the Republican Party—92 percent. Beating Lincoln. I beat our Honest Abe.” Lincoln, sniffed Newsweek, “died a decade before the telephone, which is used for polling, was even invented, and about 80 years before job approval polls for presidents started.” CNN intoned magisterially, “That’s a hard claim to back up.”
But lost in the media contempt was the salient fact that Lincoln, as revered as he has been since his death, was a wildly unpopular President in his day, even within his own party. As Trump continues to receive relentlessly negative media coverage despite a booming economy and outstanding success against ISIS and with North Korea, this is good to keep in mind.
Just before Lincoln took office, the Salem Advocate from his home state of Illinois editorialized that “he is no more capable of becoming a statesman, nay, even a moderate one, than the braying ass can become a noble lion.” Lincoln’s “weak, wishy-washy, namby-pamby efforts, imbecile in matter, disgusting in manner, have made us the laughing stock of the whole world.” The Salem Advocate argued, just as Trump’s critics do today, that the President embarrassed Americans before the world: “the European powers will despise us because we have no better material out of which to make a President.”
The Salem Advocate wasn’t alone; the most respected pundits in the nation agreed that Lincoln was an embarrassment as President. Edward Everett, a renowned orator, former Senator and Secretary of State, and 1860 Vice Presidential candidate for the Constitutional Union Party, wrote that Lincoln was “evidently a person of very inferior cast of character, wholly unequal to the crisis.” Congressman Charles Francis Adams, the son of one President and grandson of another, sneered that Lincoln’s “speeches have fallen like a wet blanket here. They put to flight all notions of greatness.”
Critics decided what they saw as Lincoln’s despotic tendencies, often denouncing the very things for which Lincoln is revered as great today. When he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, the Chicago Times decried it as “a monstrous usurpation, a criminal wrong, and an act of national suicide.” The Crisis of Columbus Ohio sounded the alarm as hysterically as John Brennan crying treason after Trump’s press conference with Vladimir Putin: “We have no doubt that this Proclamation seals the fate of this Union as it was and the Constitution as it is.…The time is brief when we shall have a DICTATOR PROCLAIMED, for the Proclamation can never be carried out except under the iron rule of the worst kind of despotism.”
On the day the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, January 1, 1863, former Supreme Court Justice Benjamin R. Curtis said that Lincoln was “shattered, dazed and utterly foolish. It would not surprise me if he were to destroy himself.”
The Gettysburg Address didn’t go over any better. Edward Everett spoke for two hours just before Lincoln, and was showered with accolades. One man who was in the crowd, Benjamin French, recounted: “Mr. Everett was listened to with breathless silence by all that immense crowd, and he had his audience in tears many times during his masterly effort.” One of the reporters present, John Russell Young, praised Everett’s “antique courtly ways, fine keen eyes, the voice of singular charm.”
The Harrisburg Patriot & Union, by contrast, in its account of the commemoration at Gettysburg wrote: “We pass over the silly remarks of the President. For the credit of the nation we are willing that the veil of oblivion shall be dropped over them and that they shall be no more repeated or thought of.”
Everett himself, an experienced speaker who knew good oratory when he heard it, thought otherwise, writing to Lincoln: “I should be glad, if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.” In response, Lincoln was grateful but self-deprecating: “I am pleased to know that, in your judgment, the little I did say was not entirely a failure.”
Lincoln did not even command much respect within his own party. The poet and lawyer Richard Henry Dana wrote to Charles Francis Adams in 1863 that “the most striking thing” about “the politics of Washington” was “the absence of personal loyalty to the President. It does not exist. He has no admirers, no enthusiastic supporters, none to bet on his head. If a Republican convention were to be held to-morrow, he would not get the vote of a State.”
In 1864, Lincoln was indeed renominated, but in a way that left Attorney General Edward Bates disgusted: “The Baltimore Convention,” he wrote, “has surprised and mortified me greatly. It did indeed nominate Mr. Lincoln, but…as if the object were to defeat their own nomination. They were all (nearly) instructed to vote for Mr. Lincoln, but many of them hated to do it.”
This is not to say that Trump is a new Lincoln, or that he will be as heralded after his administration as a distant memory the way Lincoln has been. But the lesson is clear: contemporary opinion doesn’t always line up with historical assessment. A notably unpopular President in his day, Abraham Lincoln, has become one of the iconic heroes of the Republic. It could happen again, and likewise the reverse could happen: the near-universal accolades and hosannas that today greet Barack Obama may one day, in the harsh light of history, appear to have been naïve, wrongheaded, and foolish in the extreme – at best.
Ah yes, the ever popular "That darned Lincoln forced us to start the war" defense. I've heard it all from you time and time and time...and time and time again, but I was curious as to what TheTimeofMan had to say.
So who hates him? You? The media? The crime syndicate in DC? The scum running the big cities?
Big efn deal. I could give a rats ass about it.
I have learned to look for underhanded motives regarding Lincoln. Putting your political enemies into positions of power beneath you, is one sure way to keep an eye on them, and somewhat control what they do.
William Seward was set to win the Republican nomination in 1860. Lincoln bused in (the way liberal democrats bus in people today) thousands of supporters to disrupt the convention, and sow chaos. After throwing the convention into upheaval, Lincoln's agents started bribing the delegates with promises of government jobs, threats, and anything else they could think of.
Lincoln won on the third ballot, and Seward was bribed with a prominent government position.
Lincoln routinely bribed people by offering them government positions or appointments. When he picked Edwin Stanton for the War Department, it was probably a bribe.
Lincoln was a wheeler dealer.
Agreed. The one thing I do hold against TR is his hubris in 1912 divided the Republican vote and helped put that megalomaniacal racist ba$tard into office. Taft may have been a tool of the Ohio machine wing of the party, but he wasn’t Wilson.
“Pretext” does not have to imply “pre-existing”. Consider “pretense”.
Who, if you were to somehow drop them back into 1861 would be screaming their heads off to get the hell out of there. Confederates. Losers then, losers now.
How is that people who venerate a bunch of treasonous Southern Democrats come to this site and called themselves Republicans?
And I have to get disgusted, because what the confederates did, didn't have a f***ing thing to do with what the Government of the US Constitution did.
The confederates were under no obligation to uphold the USA Constitution. Lincoln was under such an obligation.
Their behavior does not excuse Lincoln's abuses. His abuses must be looked at as damage to our existing system as well as the greater threat to our nation, because his constitutional abuses are still having consequences for us today.
It's not about Jeff Davis. It's about Lincoln.
Whatever Jeff Davis did does not justify what Lincoln did.
Agreed.
The word "rebellion" is a deliberate lie. The assertion that they fought against an invasion force solely to protect slavery is another lie.
Slavery was not under any threat from the Union. In fact the Union practiced slavery for the entire war, so stop trying to feed us the "It was about slavery" lie.
And stop trying to feed us the "Rebellion" lie. Lincoln was not the master of the South. They were free and independent men, and one does not "rebel" unless one is subjugated by another.
As equal independent states when the nation was founded, claiming they were "rebelling", makes as much sense as saying New York was "rebelling" against Massachusetts. No, you can't rebel if you are an equal. You can only "rebel" if you are a servant.
The South did no such thing. Lincoln sent a war fleet that was going to attack them. Lincoln launched the war. No war fleet, no war.
Lincoln also had a plan to start the war in Pensacola, and but for the intervention of Captain Meigs, he would have succeeded in starting the war there.
The Lincoln war fleet was set to fire upon the Confederates. Lincoln shot first, but they hit first.
Lincoln fired the first shot of the war when he sent those warships out on April 8th, 1861. That was the first attack.
True. Their own constitutional violations and government excesses were done under their own regime. But if you want to blame big government on a president or presidents then even you would have to admit that Wilson, LBJ, Carter, Clinton, and the Bush's would have to bear much of the blame. Or maybe you wouldn't admit it.
LOL! Have you now?
Only a fool would rather live in 1861 than now. Comfort was far harder to obtain, and Life was in far more peril back in that age, and from all causes.
I certainly wouldn't want to try and defend Davis either.
Independent states had a right to be free. That was the foundation of our own country, and it should have been recognized back in 1860.
I have probably written far more about blaming big government on Wilson, Roosevelt, LBJ, Carter, Clinton and Obama than I have ever written about Lincoln.
I also throw Teddy Roosevelt in there, because he instituted a lot of big government policies leading up to Wilson. But yes, Wilson was one of the early worst, followed by Roosevelt and LBJ. Carter was a piker, though he did create the massive Education bureaucracy, and Clinton and Obama rightfully deserve all the scorn which can be heaped upon them.
But Lincoln set us on this path of big, unwieldy government concentrating money in Washington to engage in government picking winners and losers among industry, and creating the lucrative influence peddling organizations we see today.
Lincoln did everything he could to save the Union and try to restore America to its original intent. His actions are debatable. Emancipation in hindsight should have included repatriation. At any rate, the Northern Democrats fought everything that came to a vote in regards to the relief of former slaves. We have to remember the left is now writing the history and text books and the political labels on Lincoln and Democrats are obtuse. A Southerner was not what we see as Conservative today. Lincoln was not by any stretch a “Progressive”. Comparing the Civil War era to today is rather silly. The North now is a liberal atrocity and the South holds traditionalism and Conservatism. I do believe Lincoln was a great man even if he was flawed/mortal/imperfect like all Presidents. If I were living during the era and volunteers would be called to fight for the Union, I would. Today, I am a US Army Vet and have an absolute kinship to the modern day South and not necessarily the North besides its Revolution roots and my birthplace in Pennsylvania.
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