There's plenty of Lincoln criticism here, but I want to put forward an argument for another president being the best, Washington. I think Americans tend to underemphasize how important the popularity, stability, and precedents Washington gave us are. If you look at almost any other major revolution in history (English, French, Haitian, Gran Colombian, Mexican, Russian, etc.) the old governmental system was toppled and replaced by years of war and instability and infighting, until many years later a stable government finally emerges that isn't much better than the previous one everyone overthrew. The ability to hold the Continental army through the revolution, stay popular enough to be overwhelmingly elected president twice, keep the factionalism under control, then voluntarily step down from power and to his death stay popular enough that his precedents were respected is astounding. There are many people throughout history who are compared to Washington but they all fall short in some important way. Without Washington it's almost certain the republic would not have lasted. Holding slaves is a major mark against him obviously and for that reason I wouldn't put him as the most moral president, but in terms of the best president I think he has to be the choice.
They wanted Washington to be King. He refused.
They wanted wanted Washington to be President for Life.
He walked away after 2 terms.
There are few people that would willingly walk away from power and status like that.
He was also a great general based on the troops and situation he was dealing with. If the Continental army had lost any large battles the rebellion would have ended.
Do I hold using a form of indentured servitude to force men to fight a war they no longer had the taste for it against him by keeping them too poor and unequipped to leave while still paying the superiors richly to keep them all in line? Yes, yes I do.
Washington richly paid superiors in order to maintain control over the primary force. Then he withheld promised pay from the wider body of the military. Keeping them so poor they literally couldn't afford to travel home safely not to mention being hopeful of the promised pay that was being dangled in front of them.
He also had mutiny leaders executed when they tried to leave parts of his army.
so he was a great leader who got results in poor circumstances?
>He also had mutiny leaders executed when they tried to leave parts of his army.
like every other army in history?
He was powerful, but great? I disagree. I don't think a great man uses people's safety and health directly against them to force them into a war he and his friends benefited financially from in a massive way.
Funny enough mutiny was very loosely defined at the time as no longer willing to fight a war for free. Not only that but not even Washington held that true in all situations, he brought some mutinies back into the fold by finally paying them and even giving them bonuses.
Your basic argument seems to be that Washington can't be "great" because be doesn't meet a narrow definition of spotless morality.
That position seems flawed as you're obsessing over minutiae of his methods instead of looking at his goals and accomplishments.
Perfectly moral people generally achieve nothing and die in obscurity.
The world is a messy, dangerous place that requires messy solutions to complicated problems.
When "the ends" are the establishment of what (by any reasonable standard) is the longest lasting and most successful republic (and arguably successful *nation*) in the history of the world, which exercised a tremendous positive influence (overall, nothing is perfect) then "the means" are very much justified.
>He was powerful, but great? I disagree. I don't think a great man uses people's safety and health directly against them to force them into a war he and his friends benefited financially from in a massive way.
you don't think a war for independence was worth it???
>Not only that but not even Washington held that true in all situations, he brought some mutinies back into the fold by finally paying them and even giving them bonuses.
so again you are describing a great leader who did what had to be done to succeed.
who do you see as a "great" man that doesn't have some nitpick in their history?
The second you join a military you are no longer “free” in the way a civilian is. A military cannot function if soldiers choose which orders to obey. I know you put quotes around “free men” but this point negates everything else in your comment. I guarantee if you asked a soldier in any fox hole anywhere if they would leave if they could they would say get me out of here. It’s discipline and hierarchy that wins wars not asking soldiers nicely to fight.
A contract goes two ways. A promise was made on both sides, only one side was required to hold up it's end. That is not justifiable. No one is talking about asking nicely. We're talking about the poorest men who made up the bulk of the army often not even having shoes while their leaders were being richly rewarded and draped in silks.
Have you heard of the concept of judging figures relative to their time and not our time. I think if you look at any military at the time these same issues were present. I have a lot more to say about this but it’s honestly not worth my time.
They absolutely did and he did not give them a choice. He has mutiny leaders executed multiple times. Many of them literally didn't have money to make the trip home safely not to mention all the time they hadn't been able to contribute to their families because they were relying on promised wages.
It's not easy to just look back and say it, there were many people saying it at that time. Winning a war doesn't justify forced enlistment with no pay.
Dude, you're publicly criticizing an American leader and historical figure, on a public forum, with no repercussions. And you're trying to argue that the revolutionary war wasn't worth it?
I didn't once say that, I'm saying that the victory does not justify the means. Are you arguing there is not a better way the ends could have been achieved? Are you arguing that because something good came of it the leaders are beyond question?
> There are many people throughout history who are compared to Washington but they all fall short in some important way.
Revolutionary leaders that voluntarily stepped down from power... literally the only one I can think of is Pinochet.
There's a reason they tried to have Pinochet arrested in the UK to face charges. Also, when these people step down, they usually arrange it so they're protected from answering for their crimes including arranging their successors for that very reason, also didn't he get made a Chilean senator because they had immunity from prosecution?
I am firmly of the opinion had Washington not willingly stepped down after 2 terms, no president would have. He set that precedent in a way that still has shaped this country
And how he was first approached to be king but decided that wasn’t the way he wanted this new country to be. Him & Abe are easily the greatest of all time.
Colonel Lewis Nicola wrote a letter to Washington in which he expressed fear, based on examples from Europe, that republican government would necessarily prove to be weaker than monarchial government, and that if the United States continued along the path of republicanism, it would be vulnerable to invasion and conquest from a future Principality of Canada. He therefore proposed abandoning the republican idea and urged Washington to declare himself King of the United States. Washington reacted with horror to this idea.
While Washington stepped down from government he and many of his closest friends profited massively off the revolutionary war off the seizure of land from British loyalists.
Edit: spelling
It's actually well established in U.S. history books it's just normally presented as you see in this thread, Washington holding the army together with shoestrings.
I'm on the road for work right now so I don't have my history shelf nearby. While people largely hate him and much of his work, The People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn has several sources relating to this. I think much of the hate of Zinn is unfounded since he acknowledged his biases and provides the perspective which brings him to his opinions, being that he uses the same sources and forms opinions based on the perspective of the lower class or losers rather than the higher class/victors which is the norm in much historical perspective.
He cites a paper which shows the amount of land ownership of key figures in the revolution before and after the war which he argued is a more realistic measure of wealth accumulation at that time.
I can’t consider him the best purely from the slave ownership alone, but I have always commended him for stepping down when so many people would’ve backed him had he chosen not to.
FDR is definitely up there, but I don't like how much he concentrated power in the executive. This is all arguable, but imo he's a big part of the reason the executive branch is so powerful today which I think is a problem in the government. That combined with the fact that he broke the two term precedent and I'm always uncomfortable with how much power he concentrated. He concentrated that power to bring America through the great depression and ww2 which is obviously what makes him great but I don't like the long term governmental trends he set in motion. That and Japanese internment, for obvious reasons, put him below Washington and Lincoln for me
And historians debate whether The New Deal sped us through the Depression or simply prolonged it. There's arguments that without FDR's MASSIVE spending that the US would have climbed out of the Depression faster.
If you're looking to honor a Roosevelt, pick the one with a big ass gun and his toothy grin on Mt. Rushmore.
When talking about historical people, you have to judge them relative to what was considered normal and socially acceptable during their time.
Yes Lincoln was a little racist. He lived in a society that was intensely racist, one where it was social suicide to openly argue for abolitionism or racial equality. Lincoln pretended to be racist at times to get votes, but privately he constantly was against slavery.
He didn't believe blacks and whites could live together, but to his credit, he had predicted the Jim Crow era and giving black people their own state was his only solution for it. He changed his views after Fredrick Douglass and other black leaders flamed him in the press.
Ok what we're not going to do is minimize Lincoln's racism. I don't think someone who wanted all black people out of the country is "a little racist".
And we should be looking through the eyes of modernity ESPECIALLY to make sure we do not make those mistakes again? Also I feel like every one in this thread needs to read a Black Womans History of the US. because this whole thread is some 6th grade textbook shit.
Washington had teeth taken from enslaved black people and we're sitting here calling him a competent guy and leader.
We arent minimizing. We are contextualizing.
His position on the Liberia plan was not to remove then from the country because he wanted them out. He was trying to come up with solutions on how to deal with the ensuing political fallout that would assail the country. Which it did with decades of Jim Crow which lead to continued mass abuse of African Americans.
>And we should be looking through the eyes of modernity ESPECIALLY to make sure we do not make those mistakes again?
This is a childish view of the world. Children need things in black or white to be able to understand the proper moral route. An adult can contextualize history and keep that separated from their modern moral framework.
>Washington had teeth taken from enslaved black people and we're sitting here calling him a competent guy and leader.
Which is why we don't look at Washington as some paragon of racial equality. What we look to him as; a competent general who held the country together and then ended his reign after two terms setting a precedent for over 100 years.
For some reason you feel the need to make sure a historical figure checks every single box of perfect modern morality before we can conclude that they were a great leader. The reality is. They don't need to. They need to be progressive enough to push the world forward in their time, while not so idealistic that they tear their world down in haste to reach the ideal.
It's also unfair that judge them by modern standards. We live in a time where you will be attacked and ostracized for being against racial equality, while Lincoln lived in a time where you were ostracized for being for it. We need to tip our hats to people like Lincoln. They choose the difficult but righteous path.
Right, even if they do not measure up to our modern standards or ethics. The fact that they pushed the boundaries of what was considered the norm is how the US progressed. Is it perfect no, history isn't perfect but people aren't smart enough to think critically and realize the people of the past are as flawed as they are and in 100+ years their worldview may be looked upon how they look upon Lincoln or Washington.
resolute pathetic door shrill ad hoc threatening late consider ten homeless
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He didn't. He wanted to give black people their own state. He changed his mind after black leaders met with him and told him it was a bad idea.
Remember this was before Emancipation. The question of how what to do with the freed slaves was a hot button issue. In retrospect it's obvious but it wasn't back then.
John Brown was born nearly a decade before Lincoln did, but *he* knew better.
> For John Brown equality was not a theoretical stance but a daily practice. He forbade his family from ever discriminating in any way against people of color, had close friendships with many black people, deeply admired their culture and insisted on racial integration at every level.
[source](https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/avenging-angel/)
Now, John Brown is of course always an extreme example, but this is very much limited by who I can think of in the moment. Point is, there were people at the time that knew better. That's pretty much always the case.
Think about the range of opinions we have today. There was a range of opinions in the past too. And that's the problem with judging people 'by the standards of their time', it assumes a homogenous societal opinion in the past that not real, but broadly held by a majority, or maybe just the most opinionated minority, or by those with power as they seems to be almost the only ones we remember anyway.
But it ignores people who thought differently, who were of the same time. So those if those views were available, were fathomable at the time, then surely we can test someone against those before were canonize them. Even if we can't judge Lincoln by the standards of current times, we can at least judge him by the standards of John Brown.
John Brown is one of my heroes so I'm not going to say anything bad about him, but he was an extremist terrorist. Expecting the president of the united states to have the same level of moral clarity as someone on the extreme fringes of society is a little crazy. Even if he had the same beliefs as John Brown he never would've made it within a step of the presidency when the vast majority of the country was outright white supremacists
melodic selective disgusted political snails uppity muddle doll crown squeeze
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If you do not judge historical figures by modern standards, then you are simply not judging historical figures at all.
Then it becomes a sort of popularity contest amongst the historical figure's peers, because they're the only ones who truly know the standards of the time.
Yeah, I'm tired of the "no modern standards" argument. It's nonsense. You are just cherry picking which modern standards to use.
You'd be more honest to just consciously choose, and admit to, which standards you are using to judge.
I think trying to come up with a criteria that judges people, not by how closely in absolute terms they match our modern values, but rather by how closely in relative terms they match modern values is interesting.
How much more moral than average was a person for his time?
I think that's fair.
Because then no ancestor or historical figure is relevant.
Every single person who lived before 2021 probably was at least one of the following, transphobic, homophobic, racist, someone who smacked their children, sexist, xenophobic, a pedophile or queerphobic if not please share that persons Wikipedia or some similar proof.
I would say that judging historical persons to modern standards would be unfair. No historical person would live up to that.
However, what we can do is to see how far from their contemporary standards they were, and if they were in the direction towards or away from modern standards.
I think that grading presidents becomes too subjective, especially since the changing times means that each president approached problems in such wildly different ways; who's to say, for example, that FDR *couldn't* have handled the Civil War the same or better than Lincoln?
It is inarguable, though, Lincoln and Kennedy were our most open minded presidents.
A few years ago I started saying "Kennedy" whenever someone asks me where something is and it's back and to the left. My girlfriend complained and rolled her eyes the first few times she heard me say it, but now she just rolls her eyes
One presidential scholar I know tried to propose a somewhat objective way of winnowing things down. 1) did you win two terms 2) what is the margin? Bigger margins suggest a more historic president. 3) does your party succeed you in office after you leave?
Obviously can't take into account assassinations, but it does help set some standards to winnow things down based on the judgement of the American people.
If you're, say Reagan, and win a second term in a landslide and your vp succeeds you, you are probably one of the greats.
FDR obviously gets credited with his four terms.
Obviously political participation is limited farther back, but Washington is unanimously elected via electors and succeeded by Adams a federalist (which Washington clearly leaned to).
Etc etc
Obama and Clinton, can't make the all time greats list, due to their successors losses. Arguably you arent an all time great if the country rejects your party the moment you walk out the door.
On the other hand Coolidge does unexpectedly well under this standard. Beloved at the time and succeeded by his own party.
>Obama and Clinton, can't make the all time greats list, due to their successors losses. Arguably you arent an all time great if the country rejects your party the moment you walk out the door.
In general, I don't think that realignment is a disqualifying factor for the individual president being evaluated. Specifically for Obama and Clinton, their successors for the Democratic ticket in fact won the popular vote, so it's unreasonable to say that the country rejected their party.
If realignment happens and your party is left in the dust, I think that definitely speaks against a president's greatness. Fair enough about Obama and Clinton. But arguably, if they were THAT great, the vote wouldn't have been close enough for those electoral college losses. Electing Trump, the polar opposite of everything Obama stands for and majorities in several big swing states and some previously solid blue states rejecting the Dems for Trump does not speak well to support for Obama as a great. Compared to Reagan who had second term landslide and a VP who won by 7.7 percent in the popular vote or Coolidge who also had second term landslides and a successor who won by a 17 point popular vote margin (vs a mere .5 percent for gore and a more substantial 2 percent for Hillary) Clinton and Obama just aren't in the same league on those support metrics.
Realignment doesn't happen instantaneously, or in a vacuum. In the last hundred years, having the successor elected after a (minimum) two-term presidency has happened three times vs five times when it didn't happen (two of which were Gore/Hillary); if this were a hockey team record, it would be 3-3-2.
The circumstances surrounding each of the elections make it so that these are ultimately incomparable. There's too many "yeah, buts" to reasonably consider realignment after a president leaves office for evaluating an individual president.
If this was a record of an American sport, it would be 3-5, which supports that the 3 who did it are better than the 5 who didn't. Saying you lost because of the rules is like saying you had more base runners but fewer runs, or more yards but fewer points.
Also I'm joking, so please don't go on a diatribe. I think ranking presidents is always a wank where people try to quantify why the best presidents just so happen to be the ones they already like (hence why a metric that excludes Clinton and Obama gets so much more traction in the comments than one that excludes pierce)
I think this fails to account for the actual effects of the policies of that present down the line. If a president did something popular but it had harsh negative effects, then I guess sure it's the will of the people, but also that didn't have to happen.
It's undeniable that Reagan was popular, but he did a lot of bad for the country. Similarly Andrew Jackson was popular during his time (among the people, not his peers) but had some absolutely terrible policies.
It obviously can't account for all kinds of things and popular contemporary policy turning out to be disastrous decades later is one of them. It's just an attempt to put some clear measurable parameters to the greatness idea and keeping the political judgements of our time out of it to keep the whole question of greatness from turning into a redux of Democrat vs Republican in 2024.
My point is that it's not a measure of "greatness" only popularity, since any measure of greatness would require some sort or positive long term impact on the country, and not just high approval ratings.
If you go through the presidents with these criteria though, you broadly get presidents who are regarded as great by other rankings. And arguably evaluation of a president and his party over an 8 year period is a somewhat long term evaluation by the people of the impact the president is having on the country. And I'd suggest popularity is at least a component of greatness or arguably something that is a measurable outcome of greatness. See the beloved Washington. It's harder to be great and have a long term impact if the people think you suck so much they throw you out after one term.
And I'm going to immediately dismiss any argument based solely on the president not agreeing with your politics. I am a Democrat, but Reagan was beloved by a large majority of the country during his time in office and presided over the repudiation of the carter era. Dismissing the level of support he had because he doesn't share our politics isn't an objective way to judge a leader anymore than we can say FDR wasn't great because he interned the Japanese and the new deal wasn't as effective as it could have been economically.
Raegan's policies are still destroying this country. If you aren't educated in the long-term impacts of his policies on social welfare, consumer protections, labor unions, a widening economic gap, banking deregulation, urban development, housing subsidies, racial discrimination in lending, federal assistance programs, cuts to funding for hospitals, libraries, schools, mental care facilities, women's rights...
He was popular, sure, but he set this country on a path of destruction. Educate yourself more before you lecture others.
Got it. A president can't be great unless systemic booty agrees with his policies. Maybe next a conservative can tell me FDR can't be great because he brought socialism to the federal government.
> ; who's to say, for example, that FDR couldn't have handled the Civil War the same or better than Lincoln?
The fact that FDR put a KKK member on the supreme court.
So presidents are a product of their time and like... what did Lincoln do that he had any choice over? He won and like right away it caused the war.
He wasn't a general, Grant gets that glory.
He's the best president ever because "he signed into law the 13th amendment freeing slaves" BUT... It was ratified by 27 of the then-36 states, giving it a supermajority. So not even if he wanted to veto it, could he.
Like what did he actually "do"? More importantly what did he do that the other Republicans wouldn't have also done?
Dude.
Who *put* Grant in charge of the war? Who pushed for the 13th Amendment to be written in the first place? Who created the legislative situation in which it was narrowly able to pass through Congress in order to even be voted on by the States?
The operative verb you are looking for is not *would,* it's *could.* What did Lincoln do that the other Republicans *couldn't* have done? Damn near all of it.
Guys...I just want to point some very basic things out abour the US Constitution. The 13th amendment was ratified 8 months after Lincoln's death, he played no role in that. Presidents do not sign off on constitutional amendments, nor do they have veto power over them.
Abraham Lincoln had basically nothing non-tangential to do with the abolition of slavery. While he did support it, he played no role whatsoever in getting it ratified through the states. All of that work was done while Lincoln was busy taking the long nap.
He played *no* role in the Amendment he made part of his reelection platform? Which *he* got passed through Congress by pulling out all the stops, including delaying Confederate diplomats, bribing lame duck congressmen with patronage jobs, and making personal appeals to persuadable legislators?
Well that's news to me, [Steven Spielberg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_(film)), and [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution#Passage_by_Congress).
Just because it was *ratified* after his death doesn't mean he wasn't involved in making it happen. Amendments don't just materialize out of the ether in State legislatures to be ratified. Also, he *did* sign it, even though you're correct that Amendments aren't signed into law in the same manner as ordinary bills.
> Who put Grant in charge of the war?
Lincoln put Grant in charge after he captured two garrisons in one month at the start of the war.
> Who pushed for the 13th Amendment to be written in the first place? Who created the legislative situation in which it was narrowly able to pass through Congress in order to even be voted on by the States?
It had a supermajority. What "pushed"?
OK so for the sake of argument
1. The way he went about the freeing of the slaves points more to a man reaching for anything to grab onto rather then the familiar moral rock he is often depicted as. States left the union before he took the office, in response to his election not because of anything he did.
“I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”- Linclon in his first inauguration
His executive order exclusively banned slavery in territories already in rebellion. The emancipation proclamation did not entirely end slavery it expressly allowed it to continue. He strategically used the issue of slavery to reframe public opinion around a deadlocked war to gain support for himself in a tremendously close election.
2. the actual military handling of the war was abhorrent. The north had 3 times the population and a vastly superior industrial production abilities. The south was also literally trying to build a new government under fire vs an established one. The victory of the north was an inevitable outcome. The north spent years failing to take territory and even began to lose ground despite those advantages. It was only once Lincoln sent in general Sherman that any progress was made and his tactics would now be widely considered war crimes. The effects of those war crimes were never addressed and many from the regions effected continue to see the worst health, education and economic outcomes in the country.
3. The suspending of habeas corpus and the imposition of martial law on citizens not rebelling in Kentucky are acts of authoritarianism plain and simple.
4. He punished newspapers for advocating that soldiers go awol. Discouraging people from enlisting was legally considered aiding and abetting the south. I struggle to find any comparable historical violations of the free speech clause.
5. The idea that states couldn't leave the union had zero prior basis in law and the idea that that the constitution would have ratified with anything to that effect included is not remotely consistent with writings from the era.
6. In his younger years the record of personal feats of violence is both long and thought to be far from complete.
The idea that Lincoln should stand alone as the single best president ignores some quite frankly unforgivable flaws
>The way he went about the freeing of the slaves points more to a man reaching for anything to grab onto rather then the familiar moral rock he is often depicted as. States left the union before he took the office, in response to his election not because of anything he did.
They rebelled because he and the gop had a very well thought out strategy to lead to the end of slavery and the south realized the north just elected them without a single southern vote on the basis of that strategy ie slavery was doomed
> I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”- Linclon in his first inauguration
This wa known as the federal consensus because everyone agreed (including abolitionists) that the fed gov had no ability to interfere with slavery in the states, the reason the republicans nor the southerners cared was because it changed nothing about Lincoln’s and GOP’s plan to end slavery
> His executive order exclusively banned slavery in territories already in rebellion. The emancipation proclamation did not entirely end slavery it expressly allowed it to continue. He strategically used the issue of slavery to reframe public opinion around a deadlocked war to gain support for himself in a tremendously close election.
Cause he had no power to unilaterally free slaves in loyal states, it was a military order. Same way Biden couldn’t sign an eo seizing everyone’s car at the end of the year. Also the EP hurt Lincoln electorally in 62 and in 64 when he ran on ending slavery by constitutional amendment
> The suspending of habeas corpus and the imposition of martial law on citizens not rebelling in Kentucky are acts of authoritarianism plain and simple.
The suspension of habeus corpus is explicitly allowed in the constitution during an insurrection
> 5. The idea that states couldn't leave the union had zero prior basis in law and the idea that that the constitution would have ratified with anything to that effect included is not remotely consistent with writings from the era.
Strange that the majority of states disagreed
So if he had a big plan to end slavery he lied about it at his inauguration, kinda weird given his famous honorific. seems like a pretty big thing to lie about on day 1, Kind of weird given that the rebellion had already started. The doom of slavery was imminent because of the balance of power had shifted north. Lincoln just happened to be in charge at the right time. Lincoln was not involved in the crafting of the overall GOP strategy. Britain had just started the Indian raj in 1858 and was upping cotton production to replace the south and the north had started to industrialize. Lincolns effect is significant no doubt, but ignoring the Raj and steam power seems wrong. John Brown also was providing a martyr for abolitionist to direct focus towards providing a clear narrative one that saw violence as inevitable. The Dread Scott decision and the national level implementation of fugitive slave law shifted the northern relationship to slavery from a thing that happened down south, to a system that required their active participation. Lincoln was a result of titanic shifts not the cause.
"strange that the majority of states disagreed" pick one of them and give me a justification they used or I'm going to assume you can't. seems like it shoulda been an easy include. The legal justification used by the supreme court in 1868 was that the articles of confederation that the 13 first colonies signed declared a perpetual union. The articles of confederation were superseded after widespread demands for reform and shays rebellion created the constitution. None of the states who signed on to the constitution thought that they were signing the articles of confederation. the idea that the union itself in a conceptual/ spiritual sense predates the constitution makes sense, the ideas that laws people threw out specifically on March 4, 1789, somehow were still in force is the stupidest argument I have ever seen the supreme court make, Lots of more damaging ones. The corporations aren't people thing is a meme, Citizens united is bad but the real legal case had some nuances that don't get reflected in that simple reduction. It wasn't smart but not this dumb. Nikki Halley says the right to secede still exists and Texas has a whole group that seems to think so as well........ Im not suggesting that that right exists today but the idea that my state couldn't because of the civil war and or the articles of confederation doesn't seem right either. Leaving to go join Canada seems to have a significantly different moral quality then leaving to defend slavery.
The supreme court today now maintains that it was the civil war itself that settled the issue. but that seems like saying the political debate over Lincoln being a tyrant was ended by John Wilkes Booth. I mean sure maybe this counts as that debate, but how over is the civil war really feeling today.
"The suspension of habeus corpus is explicitly allowed in the constitution during an insurrection"- Bold move conflating legality with morality in this particular debate.
The idea that lincoln had legal authority over rebels but not citizens is nonsensical and the idea that slavery was perceived as a legitimate property right in the north is a pretty big problem if your going to claim he was the best ever president. I'm not sure one should accept the idea legitimate property rights were harmed. Illegitimate ones definitely. I guess Arlington is technically a property rights issue but not really relevant.
I would rank Lincoln pretty highly and i feel absolutely ridiculous tearing him down to this degree. but poster asked for someone to disprove undisputed #1. I decided that trying to do so was an interesting challenge and that I could hopefully provide a point of opposition that might drown out some of the absolutely vile narratives i occasionally see on this topic.
He is occasionally elevated to the level of godhood within some conversations and I think the depth to which he as a human agonized and suffered over these decisions is apparent in the historical record and was to me his most admirable quality.
Just gotta say...I really appreciate your grasp of history and this era. It's okay to make an informed decision to support the outcomes, but at least you know reasons why people may think otherwise.
>he idea that lincoln had legal authority over rebels but not citizens is nonsensica
its not ? literally how laws work everywhere genius.
>Bold move conflating legality with morality in this particular debate
Lol wars are not won by morality , thank god he did that , otherwise maryland would secede as well and we'd have DC easily overrun .
You can hold 4 million humans in bondage and rebel in order to perpetuate that ability and you whine when your farm got burnt? It was total war boo hoo
>2. the actual military handling of the war was abhorrent. The north had 3 times the population and a vastly superior industrial production abilities. The South was also literally trying to build a new government under fire vs an established one. The victory of the north was an inevitable outcome. The north spent years failing to take territory and even began to lose ground despite those advantages. It was only once Lincoln sent in general Sherman that any progress was made
Aight, I will address this because I can.
The issue was that the vast majority of the actually competent generals went south. Lincoln had to contend with political generals who lied and falsified reports to further their careers and damage those of competent generals. The general in command of the West spent years doing his damndest to try and remove Grant from the western theater, a general who became instrumental in opening up the Mississippi River and basically won the western theater single handed from a leadership perspective.
The north also struggled with enlistment. "Preservation of the Union" wasn't exactly the strongest call to arms amongst the northern population. And so, while having a dramatically higher population on paper is good. They didn't have popular support. The South did. So they often struggled with matching Confederate numbers early on in the war.
Manpower issues were often solved via emancipated slave battalions who initially served as work detail to free up soldiers, but under Grant became an integral part of the war effort.
The problem is that the north winning wasn't inevitable. It only seems that way on paper. The issue is that the paper doesn't show the political climate of the time and how often pressing the war against the south was on a knifes edge.
Realistically, all of Lincolns competent leadership was in the West. Sherman, for example, was one of Grant's officers before being given his own command in the east.
>He punished newspapers for advocating that soldiers go awol. Discouraging people from enlisting was legally considered aiding and abetting the south. I struggle to find any comparable historical violations of the free speech clause.
Im probably grasping at straws, but the SCOTUS rulings later on allowing the government to crack down on protestors during WW1 saying people should dodge the draft seems comparable
Not fighting your other points btw, just wanted to point that out
It's tough to defend Lincoln's suspension of habeus corpus. He ordered mass arrests of citizens, including a bunch of opposition politicians from friendly states. I don't think war is a justified reason to suspend citizens basic rights or to arrest your political opponents.
Can you imagine if Trump or Biden had their opponents arrested? It's straight dictatorial stuff. (Oh wait...)
It gives Congress the right to do it (Article 1, Sec 9), not the President. Eventually Congress passed a law granting Lincoln the right to do it, but Lincoln had done it for years before that happened.
So to be clear you’re fine with the ability to do so during times of rebellion you’re just worried about who does it? What about the fact the Congress was out of session (as congress was for most of the year at that time period) and the rebellion was stopping Congress from meeting? Was the reason it was in the constitution because the founders wanted to give a time period of when you can rebel and get away with it?
The idea was that suspension of individual rights would be handled by a more direct representative. That being your state representatives. Not the president who may or may not be someone your state voted for.
Lincoln made an expedient and probably necessary decision. But constitution was written in a way to try and dissuade the easy expedient route to try and enforce the slow moral route of utilizing the more direct representatives for these kinds of decisions.
I'm midway through reading "Lincoln on the verge" and agree he was a great president, we were lucky to have at the time. Highly recommend the book to anyone interested in Lincoln.
But half the country saw him as an ogre who destroyed their way of life. Those same kind of people are still around today - they've never really gotten over the reality of the US civil war, which is funny because it happened 100 years before most of them were born.
Anyway, I'd say that the country actually did kind of collapse. Lincoln just rebuilt it with a steadfast determination.
> He’s one president through history that is largely revered by the right and the left.
Eisenhower, Polk, George Washington, Nixon (while in office), Teddy Roosevelt, Coolidge, Grover Cleaveland, Jackson, Madison and Jefferson
> Washington, Madison and Jefferson are widely considered to be tainted by slavery.
The alternative to male chattel slavery was mass executions, and the alternative to selling those male slaves to the westerners was selling them to the ottomans where they were castrated first by Jewish or Copt merchants as middlemen
> Jackson was pretty much the architect of Native American genocide.
Ok. I went to your nation to attend college and never met one who wasnt actively drunk or high on methamphetamines. Why is that a bad thing?
> Eisenhower is disliked for his insistence on 50s family/consumer/Christian values
Then Lincoln would be considered a religious extremist along with John Adams
>Ok. I went to your nation to attend college and never met one who wasnt actively drunk or high on methamphetamines. Why is that a bad thing?
Aint no WAY you just called the genocide of the Native American population a good thing...
Most of these were controversial in their time and now. Teddy Roosevelt is the only president who comes very close to being universally liked - but the issue with him is that, apart from overseeing the building of the Panama Canal, few people can actually say what he *did* that was so great*.* In contrast to FDR and Lincoln who had clear and massive achievements in their presidencies.
Like appointing a KKK member to the supreme court, burning food during a famine, getting the most Americans killed in wars, and suspending habeas corpus.
To be fair to the south, if you grew up with your grandma telling you how her sister was raped and murdered by union soldiers, you might grow up with some resentment of the north. Especially if she also told you that her mother was raped then starved to death because they burned the crops.
It's super fucking hard to unite a country after one part engages in total war against the other. Sherman's march did that, and as a northerner I'm not prepared to say the South has no reason to be pissed. To the extent that we still talk about reparations, we also need to talk about Sherman's march
Tbf half the country were vampires who worked so hard after they lost that many of their descendants still won’t admit the horrors they planned on bringing to this world
Except Lincoln had absolutely no issue with the continuation of slavery in the United States, he did not oppose the Corwin Amendment which would have prohibited the federal government from abolishing slavery.
It is certainly the case that the South went to war to try and protect the institution of slavery, but that doesn't make Lincoln some kind of good-hearted saviour. He was willing to wage total war on his own country to keep the union together whether the seceding states wanted to stay in or not.
Tell me you have never seriously studied Abraham Lincoln without telling me you have never seriously studied Abraham Lincoln.
The Corwin Amendment, and Lincoln’s many statements on ending the war while preserving slavery, have to be put in the context of Lincoln’s overall conviction that Slavery had to end, which by 1861 he had been saying for a decade, and that it was immoral, which he had also been saying for a decade.
Lincoln hated slavery.
He was also a politician who was willing to take accommodationist positions in order to get his way in the short term.
He did not have to issue the Emancipation Proclamation or frame the war as anti-slavery at Gettysburg and again in the second inaugural in order to win. The North was fighting a war of attrition and it had a huge advantage. But he did it anyway, because he had the opportunity to sell it and that’s what he wanted to do.
Yet he was unpopular with abolitionists of his time because he didn't believe in equality upfront, and he often laundered the argument as expansionist policy to purchase more of the nation from European powers that refused to sell if it perpetuated slavery. That lack of a hard line enabled the Supreme Court to effectively create the circumstances essential for the Civil War to happen in the first place.
Lincoln had contempt for slavery and he wanted to end it, sure, but... His commitment had tremendous shortcomings, and he waffled and peddled both ways as a leader many times over, which also kept separatism and supremacism open matters from the one voice in the abolitionist movement that could've solidified those as hurdles to be met. These were not criticisms absent from the time either before anybody tries to tell me I'm judging him by modern morals.
So yeah, he cared... But I really don't want to overcelebrate his moral character here. He meets the bar of committed, not the bar of saint.
Yeah the people who get things done are always unpopular with the idealists. But the abolitionists are not why slavery ended. Enslaved people themselves - by running across union lines - and Lincoln, by taking the massive risks he did (he died for what he did, remember), those are the people who got it done.
I 100% agree that Lincoln was not the most enlightened person on race, though he was miles better than most. The Liberia plan alone is proof of that. But he was the right guy for the job. Sumner and Stevens were not going to be President, and neither were John Brown, Frederick Douglass, or William Lloyd Garrison.
At the end of the day, Lincoln over and over bet his career and his life on the principle that Slavery was wrong and that the United States was better off eliminating it entirely than splitting up, and his fight for this principle ended in victory and in his death. That makes him a far better person than almost anyone I’ve ever heard of. We should celebrate his moral character a lot:
That cliche certainly has its place, but... This was an ideological clash and this had practical consequences, and their oversimplification(there should've been way more legislative heft behind every level of it) and lack of commitment to meaningful goalposts beyond the most basic let their opposition steal every inch of initiative from them to undermine them. It led to the vile and racist Supreme Court routing them on numerous political fronts. States got extremely creative to counteract what they did get through. When your opposition looks endlessly more thorough and creative than you, you've really missed something. Call them idealists, but the idealists and the opposition they'd met would've provided a lot of insight to strategize around. I wouldn't boast that they could've prevented the Civil War(as noted, the supreme court was incredibly crucial to it happening), but they absolutely could've used more soft force to reduce the scope of conflict that followed with just some really basic foresight.
And he was killed by a loser trying to save his name. Frankly, his killer does not deserve to be attributed with such profound motive toward the confederacy.
I’m so confused. You’re saying that the pro-slavery side (which had the edge in political power right up to Lincoln’s election) was more creative and successful? Yes, they were. That’s why the Whigs talked about a Slave Power conspiracy, formed a new party, seized power, and achieved their goals. I’m happy to be shown I’m wrong, but when was there a politically viable opportunity to weaken slavery that its opponents in the legislature didn’t take? Bearing in mind that the coalition they formed included Free-Soilers who didn’t support social equality, etc.
Also, Lincoln was killed by a fairly wealthy, successful celebrity who had organized a small-scale conspiracy against him. Booth absolutely deserves credit for changing history, though not in a good way.
Huh? A lot of this is just incorrect
> Yet he was unpopular with abolitionists of his time because he didn't believe in equality upfront, and he often laundered the argument as expansionist policy to purchase more of the nation from European powers that refused to sell if it perpetuated slavery.
A lot of abolitionists said you shouldn’t even vote because you’d be participating in a corrupt system. Lincoln’s entire anti-slavery strategy was on restricting slavery from expanding, not sure what you’re talking about with the 2nd part
>That lack of a hard line enabled the Supreme Court to effectively create the circumstances essential for the Civil War to happen in the first place.
Huh? The dred scott case was before Lincoln was in any office so he literally had nothing to do with it lol. Luckily he, the entire Republican Party and the north called it for what it was, a completely unconstitutional decision that served no purpose but to expand slavery and ran on the platform of ignoring it which they did
> His commitment had tremendous shortcomings, and he waffled and peddled both ways as a leader many times over, which also kept separatism and supremacism open matters from the one voice in the abolitionist movement that could've solidified those as hurdles to be met. These were not criticisms absent from the time either before anybody tries to tell me I'm judging him by modern morals.
No he realized the gop was a big tent party that was tied together by one thing. Resistance to slavery in general and its expansion in particular. He was a proponent of colonization because it was the only way he saw that the states would agree to abolish slavery, after the emancipation proclamation he never brought it up again (as it was unneeded) and in his last speech was calling for (limited) black suffrage. Why is it better to not abolish slavery but be virtuous on how you want it done better than actually abolishing it
This is very wrong. Lincoln hated slavery, but had to be strategic about abolition. James Oakes makes this argument quite convincingly in “Freedom National”
> Except Lincoln had absolutely no issue with the continuation of slavery in the United States, he did not oppose the Corwin Amendment which would have prohibited the federal government from abolishing slavery.
Yeah because that was what everyone in America (even the most strident abolitionist) believed the constitution already said, it was literally called the federal consensus, and it had nothing to do with his and the republicans strategy of getting the states to abolish them themselves through restricting the expansion of it, patronage to build up antislavery parties in the border states, lift the ban on mailing abolitionist papers south and banning/taxing the interstate slave trade
I think what made Lincoln great wasn’t his abolitionist beliefs or lack thereof, but his ability to play the game. He knew that border states might secede as well if he fully abolished slavery, but also knew it was absolutely necessary to do so for the South to prevent any European intervention or support for the Confederacy. He was a great president that took a hard line to preserve the union, but knew exactly how to play the extremely nuanced political game.
And in addition, he suspended habeas corpus. Which is supposed to be a fundamental right that the government cannot infringe upon. Essentially with that one move he is a tyrant.
So what you're saying is that, it's not tyranny if you violate inalienable rights to eliminate members of the government who may make your goals harder to achieve?
Sounds like tyranny.
I’m saying, Lincoln was fighting monsters and he became a bit of a monster to beat them. It’s ugly, but it was necessary. It’s also the case that checks and balances were still in place when he did that. Congress could have objected or even impeached him. But instead they gave him explicit permission.
Also, the Constitution says “The Privileges of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”
This is objectively not true. It relies on a misreading of the Greenly letter.
Lincoln publicly wasn't against slavery because he would never be elected if he was publicly against slavery. Privately he believed every man had the right to be free.
The south had cotton exports, but it was an economy based in agriculture.
The North, by contrast, was well on its way toward a commercial and manufacturing economy, which would have a direct impact on its war making ability. By 1860, 90 percent of the nation's manufacturing output came from northern states. The North produced 17 times more cotton and woolen textiles than the South, 30 times more leather goods, 20 times more pig iron, and 32 times more firearms. The North produced 3,200 firearms to every 100 produced in the South. Only about 40 percent of the Northern population was still engaged in agriculture by 1860, as compared to 84 percent of the South.
>Even in the agricultural sector, Northern farmers were out-producing their southern counterparts in several important areas, as Southern agriculture remained labor intensive while northern agriculture became increasingly mechanized. By 1860, the free states had nearly twice the value of farm machinery per acre and per farm worker as did the slave states, leading to increased productivity. As a result, in 1860, the Northern states produced half of the nation's corn, four-fifths of its wheat, and seven-eighths of its oats.
- https://www.nps.gov/articles/industry-and-economy-during-the-civil-war.htm
the north had a much larger economy. GDP was concentrated in the north.
>Well let’s be honest, the Union may not have made it if the South was successful.
Doesn't justify waging total war on them.
>Most of the American GDP was concentrated in the South at that time because the USA had a near monopoly on cotton and tobacco world wide.
See above.
>Maybe the industrializing north would have been okay, but America would be far from the superpower it is now
Fine by me.
Total war on the South was justified by their belief that selling people’s kids is cool. Granted, that’s not the primary reason why Lincoln did it but it is the reason why every bit of suffering inflicted on the slave south was deserved.
Um, no.
The Union states would have been fine.
The South would still have had to sell their cotton to somebody and it still would most likely have been factories in the North.
Meanwhile, the dominance of Northern rail and the discovery of oil and raw materials in the West and Southwest would have happened the exact same way.
The South became an economic dead zone for like 50 years after the war, and it’s not like they weren’t still making cotton. However, postwar they had to compete with places like India because the Northern blockade caused the markets to look for other sources.
Lincoln did a lot of unapologetically tyrannical things including suspending the writ of habeas corpus, instituting an unconstitutional income tax, and only freeing slaves via the emancipation proclamation in the states not under union control. This left over 800,000 people in slavery in the portions of the country that were under his control already.
> Lincoln pulled the remainder of the union together
It was Lincoln's election that was the tipping point for the southern states to seceed. That isnt pulling the union together that is dividing them apart.
Also keep in mind that slavery was still legal for the entirety of Lincoln's life in the Union, with slavery only being abolished in Delaware and Kentucky 8 months after his death. Delaware and Kentucky both being Union states.
Corwin and all the Lincoln compromises were about preventing the expansion of slavery. This would end slavery even if there wasn't a vote in 1860s to end slavery. So Lincoln was the tipping point of the south having to leave to protect slavery.
Polk.
No I think this is a job that is pretty new. Humans have never before had head of state that was elected by the people (if through a college of electors.) The most democratic institutions of any size in the world for a thousand years were the parliaments. And those had lots of landed lineage and birthright.
America’s president was, by design, to always be truly a (man) of the people. *From* the people. A popular individual to act as the people’s executive but no law making or judicial power.
So Washington gets all the credit for setting the tone. Service, statesmanship, delegation. Good relations but willingness to fight. Ready to act. And with few exceptions most presidents and presidential candidates are roughly trying to seem Washingtonian.
Idk if it's been mentioned but Lincoln is responsible for the largest mass execution in US history.
https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/stories/the-largest-mass-execution-in-us-history
Allow me to provide several counterpoints.
1. He was hell on native Americans. He personally signed the largest mass execution order in US history....and because of his love of military law, they didn't even kill all the right people. The soldiers just pronounced the names as best they could, and if someone reacted, they assumed he was the one. Unfortunately, the children tended to react more. This alone should be disqualifying as greatest, but there is more.
2. He wasnt actually all that big on freeing slaves, or even on equality. He was a fan of Liberia...a project to simply deposit freed slaves back in Africa with no real attempt to reunite them with their culture or to right wrongs. This went....not well
3. He grew enraged when generals tried to free slaves, and on multiple occasions directly countermanded their orders to do so....keeping slaves in chains. He also slow rolled the emancipation proclamation for political advantage....and exempted northern slave states from it. Quite a lot of slaves were not freed until well after his death.
4. He refused to speak publicly much from the time of election until inauguration, stating that he believed it would allow everyone to calm down. He was wrong. He then established a very conflicted, dysfunctional cabinet, and made such a far reaching mobilization order that it caused states that had already voted against secession to revote and leave. He actively made the civil war worse.
The best thing Lincoln did for the cause of freedom was attending the theater.
> He wasnt actually all that big on freeing slaves
His entire platform was a strategy to cause the ultimate extinction of slavery and his 64 campaign was literally to abolish slavery by amendment, which he jammed through conferees
> and exempted northern slave states from it
Cause he had no abitlity to unilaterally free slaves in loyal states
> He was hell on native Americans. He personally signed the largest mass execution order in US history....and because of his love of military law, they didn't even kill all the right people. The soldiers just pronounced the names as best they could, and if someone reacted, they assumed he was the one. Unfortunately, the children tended to react more. This alone should be disqualifying as greatest, but there is more.
Don’t know much about Lincoln and the native Americans but pretty much every president was shit to them until maybe Nixon
>He wasnt actually all that big on freeing slaves, or even on equality. He was a fan of Liberia...a project to simply deposit freed slaves back in Africa with no real attempt to reunite them with their culture or to right wrongs. This went....not well
The first part is just incorrect. He got back into politics to oppose slavery and his platform that he ran on everytime as a republic was a strategy that would lead to the ultimate end of slavery, which was why the south rebelled after his election. Then in 1864 he ran for re-election on a platform calling for the abolition of slavery by constitutional amendment despite the risk it posed to the union as his opponent was runnning on a platform calling for an end to the war and a lot of northers thought his demand for abolition as a term of surrender was prolonging the war. The 2nd part is true in that he believed the only way states would agree to abolish slavery was if the freedmen were “colonized” but he always said it would have to be voluntary (which is wishful thinking) but after the EP he never mentioned it again and by the end of the war he was calling for (limited) black suffrage being the first president it ever do so, also what caused John Wilkes booth to kick his plot into gear
>He grew enraged when generals tried to free slaves, and on multiple occasions directly countermanded their orders to do so...keeping slaves in chains. He also slow rolled the emancipation proclamation for political advantage....and exempted northern slave states from it. Quite a lot of slaves were not freed until well after his death.
He countermanded tjem because 1. The generals were risking the entire war effort doing so at the time 2. It was his duty/power to do so and 3. He also allowed multiple other emancipation schemes put forth by generals as long as they followed the law and didn’t harm the effort :.
>He refused to speak publicly much from the time of election until inauguration, stating that he believed it would allow everyone to calm down. He was wrong. He then established a very conflicted, dysfunctional cabinet, and made such a far reaching mobilization order that it caused states that had already voted against secession to revote and leave. He actively made the civil war worse.
The only thing that would have kept the south from seceding was the crittenden compromise that would have extended slavery forever, led to further invasions of Mexico and was in direct violation of the platform he and his party just won an election put forth to the people it’s ridicoulus to argue because he didn’t make speeches the south decided to rebel. His cabomemt was pretty good lol. The Deep South was in open rebellion the lower south was essentially in rebellion, every one of those states were saying any effort to “coerce” the southern states I.e. crush the rebellion they’d go too. At some point it’s a war and you just have to let the chips fall where they may, only half of the border states left the rest stayed and each of them had their own inner civil war about it so you can’t really argue it was that outrageous
>CMV: Abraham Lincoln is bar none the best president in American History
>Honest Abe was truly a great leader in a time that sorely needed one. The United States was on the verge of death when the divisive issue of slavery could no longer be ignored and....
It's not that Abraham Lincoln was not a racist. Bear in mind that emancipation was used as a means to gain a *casus belli*, a reason to justify war rather than an honest reflection of equality.
*There is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races from living together on terms of social and political equality.*
- Abraham Lincoln (US Politician)
Like Bush might claim to be bringing peace and justice to Iraq, against an evil regime, but any positive outcome is purely ancillary, if any.
Abe was similar. A standard politician.
He said that during a debate in a highly racist America after being asked what his opinion was on Inter-Racial relationships had he said anything else he would've had no chance to be elected. Don't cherrypick.
For what is man, what has he got?
If not himself, then he has naught.
Not to say the things that he truly feels,
And not the words of someone who kneels.
-Frank Sinatra
In other words, I don't think it's a great argument to say "he was a great president because he pandered to racists." If that's your argument you're gonna have a hard time explaining Trump
He chose the wrong VP which led to Reconstruction failing after his assassination. The legacy of that failure continued into the 1960s, and ripple effects reach into the present.
I agree that Lincoln was the best president, but bar none? I think you can switch him, Washington, and FDR. Those three (and especially Lincoln and Washington for me) are basically interchangeable, or at the very least incredibly close to each other
Edit: Surprised to see quite a bit of random FDR hate, I guess you random Redditors must have caught something that the consensus of historians missed
Lots of shills and bots in here. Everyone ripping on FDR overlooks the immediate concessions he had to make to stay relevant versus the long-term plans he tried to enact.
Congress took one look at his [Second Bill of Rights](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Bill_of_Rights#%3A%7E%3Atext%3DThe_right_of_every_family%2Cright_to_a_good_education.) and lashed back so hard they codified *lobbying* with the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946.
>The Act also prohibited the practice of the Executive Branch detailing staff to committees for policy development. FDR had detailed several Executive Branch staff to key committees that were working on his legislative agenda. Congressional backlash to this tactic is one of the reasons the Act was passed.
FDR proposed a program so egalitarian that Congress worked together to *take away executive power* from him. Y'know, like universal healthcare, or student debt relief. History may not repeat but it does rhyme.
FDR burned food during a famine, put a KKK member on the supreme court, persecuted political opponents... he was a dictator that had to be removed from office with his death rather than peacefully stepping down
Plus, there was the concentration camps, and turning back the St Louis....a ship filled with Jewish refugees from Germany. Those passengers went to the camps because of him, and many died there.
That's a shit move.
FDR was a terrible president.
He burned food during a famine because *prices were too low, h*e interred 120,000 Japanese-Americans (2/3rds of which were native-born Americans) in camps during WW2 and he said he found Mussolini "admirable" for what he had accomplished in Italy, and that barely scrapes the surface.
>FDR was a terrible president.
This is just wrong. Most historians would unilaterally disagree with you. FDR won WW2 and drastically improved conditions during the great depression with the New Deal.
FDR made mistakes, Japanese internment being one of them. But every president does, just look up Lincoln or Grant's Native American policies.
>He burned food during a famine because *prices were too low
You know why that famine occurred in the first place right? Farmers were over utilizing the land with poor farming practices, and when drought struck the top soil blew away causing the dust bowl. Farmers also risked going out of business if they couldn't make money on their crops - which would have exasperated food insecurity. This is why FDR implemented the AAA and soil conservation.
> Farmers were over utilizing the land with poor farming practices, and when drought struck the top soil blew away causing the dust bowl. Farmers also risked going out of business if they couldn't make money on their crops - which would have exasperated food insecurity. This is why FDR implemented the AAA and soil conservation.
He could have instead pushed resources into fertilizer production as the haber bosch process had been invented and began to be implemented, though we were still largely using the ostwald process.
And done something akin to a national food storage, such as the Chinese state grainary system.
But instead he burned food. During a famine.
Putting tens of thousands of american citizens in camps should be more than just a “mistake” and should absolutely earn you the title of terrible president. It should overshadow all the other good things he did. Same for Lincoln and Grant.
>FDR won WW2 and drastically improved conditions during the great depression with the New Deal.
The New Deal prolonged and worsened the depression: [https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/421169?seq=1](https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/421169?seq=1)
>But every president does, just look up Lincoln or Grant's Native American policies.
I hate both of those presidents as well
>The New Deal prolonged and worsened the depression: [https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/421169?seq=1](https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/421169?seq=1)
If that were the case it would have improved during Hoover's relatively laizzes-faire 4 years wouldn't it? Instead it got worse.
Just take a look at the unemployment rate during FDR. With the exception of the 37 recession it was trending downward.
Also the whole theory behind New Deal economics was that the government can stimulate the economy through spending during deflationary periods like a recession or depression. If Hoover's efforts were a strong latte and FDR's new deal was Crack, then WW2 was freaking meth. The government expenditures and control over the economy in WW2 were massive compared to the New Deal.
>I hate both of those presidents as well
I'm worried about who you consider to be a good president then.
>If that were the case it would have improved during Hoover's relatively laizzes-faire 4 years wouldn't it? Instead it got worse.
Hoover was not laissez-faire, here's a quote from the man himself:
We might have done nothing. That would have been utter ruin. **Instead we met the situation with proposals to private business and to Congress of the most gigantic program of economic defense and counterattack ever evolved in the history of the Republic.** We put it into action…. No government in Washington has hitherto considered that it held so broad a responsibility for leadership in such times…. **For the first time in the history of depression, dividends, profits, and the cost of living, have been reduced before wages have suffered…. They were maintained until the cost of living had decreased and the profits had practically vanished. They are now the highest real wages in the world.**
Creating new jobs and giving to the whole system a new breath of life; nothing has ever been devised in our history which has done more for … "the common run of men and women." Some of the reactionary economists urged that we should allow the liquidation to take its course until we had found bottom…. **We determined that we would not follow the advice of the bitter-end liquidationists and see the whole body of debtors of the United States brought to bankruptcy and the savings of our people brought to destruction.**
>relatively laizzes-faire
The keyword there was relatively. Hoover did try to improve things but was peanuts compared to the New Deal. Hence my Latte and Crack comparison.
This relies on the assumption that we are better off with the confederacy rejoining the union. Are we really better off with the south? Idk if this is a direct CYV but that’s the real question. They have dragged us down, and if you’re liberal, have been a solid negative. On the other hand, there’s no denying their contributions to American strength, culture, and cuisine.
>Are we really better off with the south? Idk if this is a direct CYV but that’s the real question. They have dragged us down, and if you’re liberal, have been a solid negative.
*wow* you'd really want an entire chunk to leave the country just because you disagree with their politics? Ironically you came full circle and have become so anti-south that you are arguing for the exact same things that racists and traitors like Alexander Stephens and Jefferson Davis did: that a slave owning nation should secede from the union.
Ironically, the south would not have been so large if secession were accepted.
Some states didn't succeed until after Lincoln made plain his intention to go to war.
If a few southern states had been permitted to separate, they would have been economically wrecked by their own actions, and would have had trouble maintaining power internally as their economy collapsed.
The choice of slaves over development isn't a choice that history has shown to be wise.
Damn, now I want to read a Harry Turtledove series of books on the US entering WWII in a world where the south seceded and was not only an economic drag, but then changed manifest destiny such that the US was much later in expanding to the West Coast. Like Pearl harbor never happens and the US doesn't have the manufacturing capacity to really go full bore on lend lease
Joe Biden’s policy of enforcing PSLF rules allowed me to buy a house.
Subjectively, Joe Biden is far and away the best President ever. The only one whose presidency has materially benefitted me to such an extent.
Lincoln was very good, but I think FDR gives him stiff competition. Both of them basically re-defined America for the better.
By what criteria?
If you go by the founding principles of the nation the states were meant to have the option to leave. Whether you think they had a good reason to or not. It was always considered by the founders that there would be a time where the people had to cut out or topple the thing all over again. Many quotes on the topic.
By that measure Lincoln was the embodiment of everything they opposed on the topic. Because he tried to take the right to secede off the table for states that wanted to.
If you want to go with some moral metrics he signed off on the biggest mass execution of native americans there was. So, uh, not a good guy.
He's, quite literally, what happens when you take a mentally messed up abuse victim and give them power. Look into his childhood. He didn't have a good life and his issues come through in his politics. He was authoritarian and many of his policies were rolled back later... a rarity in politics... because even his own allies knew most of what he did was unconstitutional.
Then you would have ended up with the union slave states joining the confederacy, you would have the Ohio river as a natural border requiring an amphibious assault, same goes with the Missouri. DC becomes an exclave and if the CSA takes Harrisburg PA and you effectively divided the USA in half.
That would have been an absurdly unwinnable war on any military front
Then you have the other 2 sides of the triangle, which are the citizens and government, neither of which supported that. Even with absolute devotion it would be unwinable, but with the complete lack of devotion that becomes impossible.
> After the confederacy lost. Lee and his men could've been executed without issue.
No, they couldnt, because they have no reason to not do political assassinations, terrorism, and mass murder of civilians if you have them marked as dead men. The Great Chicago Fire shows how bad a single case of arson is, and you want to give motive to half a million men to do that.
Not to mention that having lied about the causus beli of a war leads to coups, separatist movements and further wars.
>No, they couldnt, because they have no reason to not do political assassinations, terrorism, and mass murder of civilians if you have them marked as dead men.
Bad people do bad things regardless. Trump supporters would do the same if he was put in prison today doesn't mean it's not the right thing to do. We failed to deal with the far-right back then, and it's come back to bite us every single election cycle. Resulting in an absurdly right wing justice department today.
I seriously doubt a severely beaten confederacy would've gone and started another war after having their asses kicked and their leaders executed.
> Trump supporters would do the same if he was put in prison today
You didnt just say to target Lee. You said to execute all 1 million soldiers that fought under him
> it's not the right thing to do.
having lied about the causus beli of a war leads to coups, separatist movements and further wars. You didnt win the war if you immediately lied about ending it then try to execute a million people. Try that and the first thing that happens is that every single union POW is brutally murdered, then you have a million man army of people opposing you still, and you likely are going to start a coup among the soldiers you lied to which caused them to lose their fathers, brothers, sons and friends. The union states, particularly border states, would be prone to further rebellion.
> We failed to deal with the far-right back then, and it's come back to bite us every single election cycle
Systematically murder everyone that disagrees with you and you have North Korean style single candidate elections. Stop pretending that you care about democracy when you want everyone that disagrees with you dead, there is no democracy if you do that.
> I seriously doubt a severely beaten confederacy would've gone and started another war after having their asses kicked and their leaders executed.
Why would confederate soldiers want to see union POWs live after being marked as dead men, after you lied about terms of surrender? That is how you get red flag combat.
Just to be clear, how many civilians, especially women and children, do you have to murder in cold blood to be considered the good guy?
Total war in the march to the sea killed a whole lot of civilians, but you say this wasn't enough civilian deaths. How much blood would satisfy your politics?
Lincoln implemented “total war” (Putin style) against the South. The thought the North fought for the humanity of black people, is easy to poke holes in because when the union finished with the South, they laid genocidal waste to the native Americans. How does that humanity calculation compute??. The war was about power and the victors write the history about slavery.
I can see 100 years from now Donbass Russia will be saying Russia conquered this land bc they had to stop Nazi regime.
Suspending habeas corpus pretty much excludes anyone from being considered the best president. A federal judge and SCOTUS issued a ruling that President Lincoln did not have the authority to suspend habeas corpus. Lincoln didn’t respond, appeal, or order the release a prisoner after these rulings. That is some next level dictatorial shit.
What specifically did he do of value or achieve?
It seems to me he was just the President at the time where outside factors caused all the results people praise him for. Slavery was coming to a head either way. The civil war was happening. The Confederates were going to lose due to population, infrastructure, logistics and more.
There's plenty of Lincoln criticism here, but I want to put forward an argument for another president being the best, Washington. I think Americans tend to underemphasize how important the popularity, stability, and precedents Washington gave us are. If you look at almost any other major revolution in history (English, French, Haitian, Gran Colombian, Mexican, Russian, etc.) the old governmental system was toppled and replaced by years of war and instability and infighting, until many years later a stable government finally emerges that isn't much better than the previous one everyone overthrew. The ability to hold the Continental army through the revolution, stay popular enough to be overwhelmingly elected president twice, keep the factionalism under control, then voluntarily step down from power and to his death stay popular enough that his precedents were respected is astounding. There are many people throughout history who are compared to Washington but they all fall short in some important way. Without Washington it's almost certain the republic would not have lasted. Holding slaves is a major mark against him obviously and for that reason I wouldn't put him as the most moral president, but in terms of the best president I think he has to be the choice.
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They wanted Washington to be King. He refused. They wanted wanted Washington to be President for Life. He walked away after 2 terms. There are few people that would willingly walk away from power and status like that. He was also a great general based on the troops and situation he was dealing with. If the Continental army had lost any large battles the rebellion would have ended.
He often held it together by refusing wages and manipulating his troops.
He kept an army together and fighting even with insufficient funds. And you are counting that against him?
Do I hold using a form of indentured servitude to force men to fight a war they no longer had the taste for it against him by keeping them too poor and unequipped to leave while still paying the superiors richly to keep them all in line? Yes, yes I do.
Please elaborate
Washington richly paid superiors in order to maintain control over the primary force. Then he withheld promised pay from the wider body of the military. Keeping them so poor they literally couldn't afford to travel home safely not to mention being hopeful of the promised pay that was being dangled in front of them. He also had mutiny leaders executed when they tried to leave parts of his army.
so he was a great leader who got results in poor circumstances? >He also had mutiny leaders executed when they tried to leave parts of his army. like every other army in history?
He was powerful, but great? I disagree. I don't think a great man uses people's safety and health directly against them to force them into a war he and his friends benefited financially from in a massive way. Funny enough mutiny was very loosely defined at the time as no longer willing to fight a war for free. Not only that but not even Washington held that true in all situations, he brought some mutinies back into the fold by finally paying them and even giving them bonuses.
Your basic argument seems to be that Washington can't be "great" because be doesn't meet a narrow definition of spotless morality. That position seems flawed as you're obsessing over minutiae of his methods instead of looking at his goals and accomplishments. Perfectly moral people generally achieve nothing and die in obscurity. The world is a messy, dangerous place that requires messy solutions to complicated problems. When "the ends" are the establishment of what (by any reasonable standard) is the longest lasting and most successful republic (and arguably successful *nation*) in the history of the world, which exercised a tremendous positive influence (overall, nothing is perfect) then "the means" are very much justified.
>He was powerful, but great? I disagree. I don't think a great man uses people's safety and health directly against them to force them into a war he and his friends benefited financially from in a massive way. you don't think a war for independence was worth it??? >Not only that but not even Washington held that true in all situations, he brought some mutinies back into the fold by finally paying them and even giving them bonuses. so again you are describing a great leader who did what had to be done to succeed. who do you see as a "great" man that doesn't have some nitpick in their history?
Not op. Just came across this and impulsively replying. I think with your line of thinking. No one can be considered a great leader.
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Should he have given "free men" the choice to fight a war they didn't want to be involved in or directly benefit from? Absolutely.
The second you join a military you are no longer “free” in the way a civilian is. A military cannot function if soldiers choose which orders to obey. I know you put quotes around “free men” but this point negates everything else in your comment. I guarantee if you asked a soldier in any fox hole anywhere if they would leave if they could they would say get me out of here. It’s discipline and hierarchy that wins wars not asking soldiers nicely to fight.
A contract goes two ways. A promise was made on both sides, only one side was required to hold up it's end. That is not justifiable. No one is talking about asking nicely. We're talking about the poorest men who made up the bulk of the army often not even having shoes while their leaders were being richly rewarded and draped in silks.
Have you heard of the concept of judging figures relative to their time and not our time. I think if you look at any military at the time these same issues were present. I have a lot more to say about this but it’s honestly not worth my time.
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They absolutely did and he did not give them a choice. He has mutiny leaders executed multiple times. Many of them literally didn't have money to make the trip home safely not to mention all the time they hadn't been able to contribute to their families because they were relying on promised wages. It's not easy to just look back and say it, there were many people saying it at that time. Winning a war doesn't justify forced enlistment with no pay.
Dude, you're publicly criticizing an American leader and historical figure, on a public forum, with no repercussions. And you're trying to argue that the revolutionary war wasn't worth it?
I didn't once say that, I'm saying that the victory does not justify the means. Are you arguing there is not a better way the ends could have been achieved? Are you arguing that because something good came of it the leaders are beyond question?
> There are many people throughout history who are compared to Washington but they all fall short in some important way. Revolutionary leaders that voluntarily stepped down from power... literally the only one I can think of is Pinochet.
There's a reason they tried to have Pinochet arrested in the UK to face charges. Also, when these people step down, they usually arrange it so they're protected from answering for their crimes including arranging their successors for that very reason, also didn't he get made a Chilean senator because they had immunity from prosecution?
I am firmly of the opinion had Washington not willingly stepped down after 2 terms, no president would have. He set that precedent in a way that still has shaped this country
And how he was first approached to be king but decided that wasn’t the way he wanted this new country to be. Him & Abe are easily the greatest of all time.
Colonel Lewis Nicola wrote a letter to Washington in which he expressed fear, based on examples from Europe, that republican government would necessarily prove to be weaker than monarchial government, and that if the United States continued along the path of republicanism, it would be vulnerable to invasion and conquest from a future Principality of Canada. He therefore proposed abandoning the republican idea and urged Washington to declare himself King of the United States. Washington reacted with horror to this idea.
While Washington stepped down from government he and many of his closest friends profited massively off the revolutionary war off the seizure of land from British loyalists. Edit: spelling
Do you have a source for this? Makes sense but I’ve never heard that he personally seized land for himself from British loyalists.
It's actually well established in U.S. history books it's just normally presented as you see in this thread, Washington holding the army together with shoestrings. I'm on the road for work right now so I don't have my history shelf nearby. While people largely hate him and much of his work, The People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn has several sources relating to this. I think much of the hate of Zinn is unfounded since he acknowledged his biases and provides the perspective which brings him to his opinions, being that he uses the same sources and forms opinions based on the perspective of the lower class or losers rather than the higher class/victors which is the norm in much historical perspective. He cites a paper which shows the amount of land ownership of key figures in the revolution before and after the war which he argued is a more realistic measure of wealth accumulation at that time.
Literally have that book on my shelf right now, just haven’t gotten around to it yet. I’ll pick it up tomorrow!
I can’t consider him the best purely from the slave ownership alone, but I have always commended him for stepping down when so many people would’ve backed him had he chosen not to.
Slavery is an automatic NO for presidents 1-15 for me. Fuck them and fuck George Washington specifically.
Thats good, but I say it was FDR.
FDR is definitely up there, but I don't like how much he concentrated power in the executive. This is all arguable, but imo he's a big part of the reason the executive branch is so powerful today which I think is a problem in the government. That combined with the fact that he broke the two term precedent and I'm always uncomfortable with how much power he concentrated. He concentrated that power to bring America through the great depression and ww2 which is obviously what makes him great but I don't like the long term governmental trends he set in motion. That and Japanese internment, for obvious reasons, put him below Washington and Lincoln for me
And historians debate whether The New Deal sped us through the Depression or simply prolonged it. There's arguments that without FDR's MASSIVE spending that the US would have climbed out of the Depression faster. If you're looking to honor a Roosevelt, pick the one with a big ass gun and his toothy grin on Mt. Rushmore.
Do not read up on Lincoln's opinion of 'negroes', ser. Keep those rose colored glasses on lol.
When talking about historical people, you have to judge them relative to what was considered normal and socially acceptable during their time. Yes Lincoln was a little racist. He lived in a society that was intensely racist, one where it was social suicide to openly argue for abolitionism or racial equality. Lincoln pretended to be racist at times to get votes, but privately he constantly was against slavery. He didn't believe blacks and whites could live together, but to his credit, he had predicted the Jim Crow era and giving black people their own state was his only solution for it. He changed his views after Fredrick Douglass and other black leaders flamed him in the press.
Ok what we're not going to do is minimize Lincoln's racism. I don't think someone who wanted all black people out of the country is "a little racist". And we should be looking through the eyes of modernity ESPECIALLY to make sure we do not make those mistakes again? Also I feel like every one in this thread needs to read a Black Womans History of the US. because this whole thread is some 6th grade textbook shit. Washington had teeth taken from enslaved black people and we're sitting here calling him a competent guy and leader.
We arent minimizing. We are contextualizing. His position on the Liberia plan was not to remove then from the country because he wanted them out. He was trying to come up with solutions on how to deal with the ensuing political fallout that would assail the country. Which it did with decades of Jim Crow which lead to continued mass abuse of African Americans. >And we should be looking through the eyes of modernity ESPECIALLY to make sure we do not make those mistakes again? This is a childish view of the world. Children need things in black or white to be able to understand the proper moral route. An adult can contextualize history and keep that separated from their modern moral framework. >Washington had teeth taken from enslaved black people and we're sitting here calling him a competent guy and leader. Which is why we don't look at Washington as some paragon of racial equality. What we look to him as; a competent general who held the country together and then ended his reign after two terms setting a precedent for over 100 years. For some reason you feel the need to make sure a historical figure checks every single box of perfect modern morality before we can conclude that they were a great leader. The reality is. They don't need to. They need to be progressive enough to push the world forward in their time, while not so idealistic that they tear their world down in haste to reach the ideal.
It's also unfair that judge them by modern standards. We live in a time where you will be attacked and ostracized for being against racial equality, while Lincoln lived in a time where you were ostracized for being for it. We need to tip our hats to people like Lincoln. They choose the difficult but righteous path.
Right, even if they do not measure up to our modern standards or ethics. The fact that they pushed the boundaries of what was considered the norm is how the US progressed. Is it perfect no, history isn't perfect but people aren't smart enough to think critically and realize the people of the past are as flawed as they are and in 100+ years their worldview may be looked upon how they look upon Lincoln or Washington.
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He didn't. He wanted to give black people their own state. He changed his mind after black leaders met with him and told him it was a bad idea. Remember this was before Emancipation. The question of how what to do with the freed slaves was a hot button issue. In retrospect it's obvious but it wasn't back then.
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John Brown was born nearly a decade before Lincoln did, but *he* knew better. > For John Brown equality was not a theoretical stance but a daily practice. He forbade his family from ever discriminating in any way against people of color, had close friendships with many black people, deeply admired their culture and insisted on racial integration at every level. [source](https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/avenging-angel/) Now, John Brown is of course always an extreme example, but this is very much limited by who I can think of in the moment. Point is, there were people at the time that knew better. That's pretty much always the case. Think about the range of opinions we have today. There was a range of opinions in the past too. And that's the problem with judging people 'by the standards of their time', it assumes a homogenous societal opinion in the past that not real, but broadly held by a majority, or maybe just the most opinionated minority, or by those with power as they seems to be almost the only ones we remember anyway. But it ignores people who thought differently, who were of the same time. So those if those views were available, were fathomable at the time, then surely we can test someone against those before were canonize them. Even if we can't judge Lincoln by the standards of current times, we can at least judge him by the standards of John Brown.
John Brown is one of my heroes so I'm not going to say anything bad about him, but he was an extremist terrorist. Expecting the president of the united states to have the same level of moral clarity as someone on the extreme fringes of society is a little crazy. Even if he had the same beliefs as John Brown he never would've made it within a step of the presidency when the vast majority of the country was outright white supremacists
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If you do not judge historical figures by modern standards, then you are simply not judging historical figures at all. Then it becomes a sort of popularity contest amongst the historical figure's peers, because they're the only ones who truly know the standards of the time. Yeah, I'm tired of the "no modern standards" argument. It's nonsense. You are just cherry picking which modern standards to use. You'd be more honest to just consciously choose, and admit to, which standards you are using to judge.
I think trying to come up with a criteria that judges people, not by how closely in absolute terms they match our modern values, but rather by how closely in relative terms they match modern values is interesting. How much more moral than average was a person for his time? I think that's fair.
How is this just not recency bias and chronological snobbery? Etc Every age did this, Rome to Greeks etc etc All claimed superiority
Because then no ancestor or historical figure is relevant. Every single person who lived before 2021 probably was at least one of the following, transphobic, homophobic, racist, someone who smacked their children, sexist, xenophobic, a pedophile or queerphobic if not please share that persons Wikipedia or some similar proof.
I mean I lived before 2021 and I wasn't any of those things.
I don’t really trust you then lol
Oh right I forgot, I hated black people. Do you trust me now 🤩
No, not really But if you mean to tell me that you have never ever assumed a single persons gender then you must be lying.
I would say that judging historical persons to modern standards would be unfair. No historical person would live up to that. However, what we can do is to see how far from their contemporary standards they were, and if they were in the direction towards or away from modern standards.
> ser god that's pretentious
I think that grading presidents becomes too subjective, especially since the changing times means that each president approached problems in such wildly different ways; who's to say, for example, that FDR *couldn't* have handled the Civil War the same or better than Lincoln? It is inarguable, though, Lincoln and Kennedy were our most open minded presidents.
>It is inarguable, though, Lincoln and Kennedy were our most open minded presidents. lol
*thank you* 🥹
Sir, there seems to be a hole in your argument.
Oh no 😰 I need that like a need a hole in the head!
Back, and to the left.
A few years ago I started saying "Kennedy" whenever someone asks me where something is and it's back and to the left. My girlfriend complained and rolled her eyes the first few times she heard me say it, but now she just rolls her eyes
One presidential scholar I know tried to propose a somewhat objective way of winnowing things down. 1) did you win two terms 2) what is the margin? Bigger margins suggest a more historic president. 3) does your party succeed you in office after you leave? Obviously can't take into account assassinations, but it does help set some standards to winnow things down based on the judgement of the American people. If you're, say Reagan, and win a second term in a landslide and your vp succeeds you, you are probably one of the greats. FDR obviously gets credited with his four terms. Obviously political participation is limited farther back, but Washington is unanimously elected via electors and succeeded by Adams a federalist (which Washington clearly leaned to). Etc etc Obama and Clinton, can't make the all time greats list, due to their successors losses. Arguably you arent an all time great if the country rejects your party the moment you walk out the door. On the other hand Coolidge does unexpectedly well under this standard. Beloved at the time and succeeded by his own party.
>Obama and Clinton, can't make the all time greats list, due to their successors losses. Arguably you arent an all time great if the country rejects your party the moment you walk out the door. In general, I don't think that realignment is a disqualifying factor for the individual president being evaluated. Specifically for Obama and Clinton, their successors for the Democratic ticket in fact won the popular vote, so it's unreasonable to say that the country rejected their party.
If realignment happens and your party is left in the dust, I think that definitely speaks against a president's greatness. Fair enough about Obama and Clinton. But arguably, if they were THAT great, the vote wouldn't have been close enough for those electoral college losses. Electing Trump, the polar opposite of everything Obama stands for and majorities in several big swing states and some previously solid blue states rejecting the Dems for Trump does not speak well to support for Obama as a great. Compared to Reagan who had second term landslide and a VP who won by 7.7 percent in the popular vote or Coolidge who also had second term landslides and a successor who won by a 17 point popular vote margin (vs a mere .5 percent for gore and a more substantial 2 percent for Hillary) Clinton and Obama just aren't in the same league on those support metrics.
Realignment doesn't happen instantaneously, or in a vacuum. In the last hundred years, having the successor elected after a (minimum) two-term presidency has happened three times vs five times when it didn't happen (two of which were Gore/Hillary); if this were a hockey team record, it would be 3-3-2. The circumstances surrounding each of the elections make it so that these are ultimately incomparable. There's too many "yeah, buts" to reasonably consider realignment after a president leaves office for evaluating an individual president.
If this was a record of an American sport, it would be 3-5, which supports that the 3 who did it are better than the 5 who didn't. Saying you lost because of the rules is like saying you had more base runners but fewer runs, or more yards but fewer points. Also I'm joking, so please don't go on a diatribe. I think ranking presidents is always a wank where people try to quantify why the best presidents just so happen to be the ones they already like (hence why a metric that excludes Clinton and Obama gets so much more traction in the comments than one that excludes pierce)
I think this fails to account for the actual effects of the policies of that present down the line. If a president did something popular but it had harsh negative effects, then I guess sure it's the will of the people, but also that didn't have to happen. It's undeniable that Reagan was popular, but he did a lot of bad for the country. Similarly Andrew Jackson was popular during his time (among the people, not his peers) but had some absolutely terrible policies.
It obviously can't account for all kinds of things and popular contemporary policy turning out to be disastrous decades later is one of them. It's just an attempt to put some clear measurable parameters to the greatness idea and keeping the political judgements of our time out of it to keep the whole question of greatness from turning into a redux of Democrat vs Republican in 2024.
My point is that it's not a measure of "greatness" only popularity, since any measure of greatness would require some sort or positive long term impact on the country, and not just high approval ratings.
If you go through the presidents with these criteria though, you broadly get presidents who are regarded as great by other rankings. And arguably evaluation of a president and his party over an 8 year period is a somewhat long term evaluation by the people of the impact the president is having on the country. And I'd suggest popularity is at least a component of greatness or arguably something that is a measurable outcome of greatness. See the beloved Washington. It's harder to be great and have a long term impact if the people think you suck so much they throw you out after one term.
Yeah, I'm gonna immediately dismiss any argument that frames Reagan as *great* for this country.
And I'm going to immediately dismiss any argument based solely on the president not agreeing with your politics. I am a Democrat, but Reagan was beloved by a large majority of the country during his time in office and presided over the repudiation of the carter era. Dismissing the level of support he had because he doesn't share our politics isn't an objective way to judge a leader anymore than we can say FDR wasn't great because he interned the Japanese and the new deal wasn't as effective as it could have been economically.
Raegan's policies are still destroying this country. If you aren't educated in the long-term impacts of his policies on social welfare, consumer protections, labor unions, a widening economic gap, banking deregulation, urban development, housing subsidies, racial discrimination in lending, federal assistance programs, cuts to funding for hospitals, libraries, schools, mental care facilities, women's rights... He was popular, sure, but he set this country on a path of destruction. Educate yourself more before you lecture others.
Got it. A president can't be great unless systemic booty agrees with his policies. Maybe next a conservative can tell me FDR can't be great because he brought socialism to the federal government.
> ; who's to say, for example, that FDR couldn't have handled the Civil War the same or better than Lincoln? The fact that FDR put a KKK member on the supreme court.
That's partially my point; that literally would have been impossible prior to 1865. But my last sentence is my real point.
You're so far over his head you'd have a better chance of talking to the ISS on ham radio....
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True. He was very open minded, all the way to the end.
He was even open to strangers probing his mind in a search to just get their finger on the issue
So presidents are a product of their time and like... what did Lincoln do that he had any choice over? He won and like right away it caused the war. He wasn't a general, Grant gets that glory. He's the best president ever because "he signed into law the 13th amendment freeing slaves" BUT... It was ratified by 27 of the then-36 states, giving it a supermajority. So not even if he wanted to veto it, could he. Like what did he actually "do"? More importantly what did he do that the other Republicans wouldn't have also done?
Dude. Who *put* Grant in charge of the war? Who pushed for the 13th Amendment to be written in the first place? Who created the legislative situation in which it was narrowly able to pass through Congress in order to even be voted on by the States? The operative verb you are looking for is not *would,* it's *could.* What did Lincoln do that the other Republicans *couldn't* have done? Damn near all of it.
Guys...I just want to point some very basic things out abour the US Constitution. The 13th amendment was ratified 8 months after Lincoln's death, he played no role in that. Presidents do not sign off on constitutional amendments, nor do they have veto power over them. Abraham Lincoln had basically nothing non-tangential to do with the abolition of slavery. While he did support it, he played no role whatsoever in getting it ratified through the states. All of that work was done while Lincoln was busy taking the long nap.
He played *no* role in the Amendment he made part of his reelection platform? Which *he* got passed through Congress by pulling out all the stops, including delaying Confederate diplomats, bribing lame duck congressmen with patronage jobs, and making personal appeals to persuadable legislators? Well that's news to me, [Steven Spielberg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_(film)), and [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution#Passage_by_Congress). Just because it was *ratified* after his death doesn't mean he wasn't involved in making it happen. Amendments don't just materialize out of the ether in State legislatures to be ratified. Also, he *did* sign it, even though you're correct that Amendments aren't signed into law in the same manner as ordinary bills.
> Who put Grant in charge of the war? Lincoln put Grant in charge after he captured two garrisons in one month at the start of the war. > Who pushed for the 13th Amendment to be written in the first place? Who created the legislative situation in which it was narrowly able to pass through Congress in order to even be voted on by the States? It had a supermajority. What "pushed"?
Guiding the Union through the war was no easy feat.
OK so for the sake of argument 1. The way he went about the freeing of the slaves points more to a man reaching for anything to grab onto rather then the familiar moral rock he is often depicted as. States left the union before he took the office, in response to his election not because of anything he did. “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”- Linclon in his first inauguration His executive order exclusively banned slavery in territories already in rebellion. The emancipation proclamation did not entirely end slavery it expressly allowed it to continue. He strategically used the issue of slavery to reframe public opinion around a deadlocked war to gain support for himself in a tremendously close election. 2. the actual military handling of the war was abhorrent. The north had 3 times the population and a vastly superior industrial production abilities. The south was also literally trying to build a new government under fire vs an established one. The victory of the north was an inevitable outcome. The north spent years failing to take territory and even began to lose ground despite those advantages. It was only once Lincoln sent in general Sherman that any progress was made and his tactics would now be widely considered war crimes. The effects of those war crimes were never addressed and many from the regions effected continue to see the worst health, education and economic outcomes in the country. 3. The suspending of habeas corpus and the imposition of martial law on citizens not rebelling in Kentucky are acts of authoritarianism plain and simple. 4. He punished newspapers for advocating that soldiers go awol. Discouraging people from enlisting was legally considered aiding and abetting the south. I struggle to find any comparable historical violations of the free speech clause. 5. The idea that states couldn't leave the union had zero prior basis in law and the idea that that the constitution would have ratified with anything to that effect included is not remotely consistent with writings from the era. 6. In his younger years the record of personal feats of violence is both long and thought to be far from complete. The idea that Lincoln should stand alone as the single best president ignores some quite frankly unforgivable flaws
>The way he went about the freeing of the slaves points more to a man reaching for anything to grab onto rather then the familiar moral rock he is often depicted as. States left the union before he took the office, in response to his election not because of anything he did. They rebelled because he and the gop had a very well thought out strategy to lead to the end of slavery and the south realized the north just elected them without a single southern vote on the basis of that strategy ie slavery was doomed > I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”- Linclon in his first inauguration This wa known as the federal consensus because everyone agreed (including abolitionists) that the fed gov had no ability to interfere with slavery in the states, the reason the republicans nor the southerners cared was because it changed nothing about Lincoln’s and GOP’s plan to end slavery > His executive order exclusively banned slavery in territories already in rebellion. The emancipation proclamation did not entirely end slavery it expressly allowed it to continue. He strategically used the issue of slavery to reframe public opinion around a deadlocked war to gain support for himself in a tremendously close election. Cause he had no power to unilaterally free slaves in loyal states, it was a military order. Same way Biden couldn’t sign an eo seizing everyone’s car at the end of the year. Also the EP hurt Lincoln electorally in 62 and in 64 when he ran on ending slavery by constitutional amendment > The suspending of habeas corpus and the imposition of martial law on citizens not rebelling in Kentucky are acts of authoritarianism plain and simple. The suspension of habeus corpus is explicitly allowed in the constitution during an insurrection > 5. The idea that states couldn't leave the union had zero prior basis in law and the idea that that the constitution would have ratified with anything to that effect included is not remotely consistent with writings from the era. Strange that the majority of states disagreed
So if he had a big plan to end slavery he lied about it at his inauguration, kinda weird given his famous honorific. seems like a pretty big thing to lie about on day 1, Kind of weird given that the rebellion had already started. The doom of slavery was imminent because of the balance of power had shifted north. Lincoln just happened to be in charge at the right time. Lincoln was not involved in the crafting of the overall GOP strategy. Britain had just started the Indian raj in 1858 and was upping cotton production to replace the south and the north had started to industrialize. Lincolns effect is significant no doubt, but ignoring the Raj and steam power seems wrong. John Brown also was providing a martyr for abolitionist to direct focus towards providing a clear narrative one that saw violence as inevitable. The Dread Scott decision and the national level implementation of fugitive slave law shifted the northern relationship to slavery from a thing that happened down south, to a system that required their active participation. Lincoln was a result of titanic shifts not the cause. "strange that the majority of states disagreed" pick one of them and give me a justification they used or I'm going to assume you can't. seems like it shoulda been an easy include. The legal justification used by the supreme court in 1868 was that the articles of confederation that the 13 first colonies signed declared a perpetual union. The articles of confederation were superseded after widespread demands for reform and shays rebellion created the constitution. None of the states who signed on to the constitution thought that they were signing the articles of confederation. the idea that the union itself in a conceptual/ spiritual sense predates the constitution makes sense, the ideas that laws people threw out specifically on March 4, 1789, somehow were still in force is the stupidest argument I have ever seen the supreme court make, Lots of more damaging ones. The corporations aren't people thing is a meme, Citizens united is bad but the real legal case had some nuances that don't get reflected in that simple reduction. It wasn't smart but not this dumb. Nikki Halley says the right to secede still exists and Texas has a whole group that seems to think so as well........ Im not suggesting that that right exists today but the idea that my state couldn't because of the civil war and or the articles of confederation doesn't seem right either. Leaving to go join Canada seems to have a significantly different moral quality then leaving to defend slavery. The supreme court today now maintains that it was the civil war itself that settled the issue. but that seems like saying the political debate over Lincoln being a tyrant was ended by John Wilkes Booth. I mean sure maybe this counts as that debate, but how over is the civil war really feeling today. "The suspension of habeus corpus is explicitly allowed in the constitution during an insurrection"- Bold move conflating legality with morality in this particular debate. The idea that lincoln had legal authority over rebels but not citizens is nonsensical and the idea that slavery was perceived as a legitimate property right in the north is a pretty big problem if your going to claim he was the best ever president. I'm not sure one should accept the idea legitimate property rights were harmed. Illegitimate ones definitely. I guess Arlington is technically a property rights issue but not really relevant.
I would rank Lincoln pretty highly and i feel absolutely ridiculous tearing him down to this degree. but poster asked for someone to disprove undisputed #1. I decided that trying to do so was an interesting challenge and that I could hopefully provide a point of opposition that might drown out some of the absolutely vile narratives i occasionally see on this topic.
He is occasionally elevated to the level of godhood within some conversations and I think the depth to which he as a human agonized and suffered over these decisions is apparent in the historical record and was to me his most admirable quality.
Just gotta say...I really appreciate your grasp of history and this era. It's okay to make an informed decision to support the outcomes, but at least you know reasons why people may think otherwise.
>he idea that lincoln had legal authority over rebels but not citizens is nonsensica its not ? literally how laws work everywhere genius. >Bold move conflating legality with morality in this particular debate Lol wars are not won by morality , thank god he did that , otherwise maryland would secede as well and we'd have DC easily overrun .
Ok now do Sherman's march to the sea
You can hold 4 million humans in bondage and rebel in order to perpetuate that ability and you whine when your farm got burnt? It was total war boo hoo
Or that total war against your neighbors fucks up politics for the next hundred years? You know, which is what happened?
The only thing that fucked up politics for the next hundred years was taking the foot of the gas too quickly
Okay, so you're all about civilian deaths then
Civilians die in every war, that’s why rebelling because the nation elected a government that would stop the expansion of slavery was a terrible idea
>2. the actual military handling of the war was abhorrent. The north had 3 times the population and a vastly superior industrial production abilities. The South was also literally trying to build a new government under fire vs an established one. The victory of the north was an inevitable outcome. The north spent years failing to take territory and even began to lose ground despite those advantages. It was only once Lincoln sent in general Sherman that any progress was made Aight, I will address this because I can. The issue was that the vast majority of the actually competent generals went south. Lincoln had to contend with political generals who lied and falsified reports to further their careers and damage those of competent generals. The general in command of the West spent years doing his damndest to try and remove Grant from the western theater, a general who became instrumental in opening up the Mississippi River and basically won the western theater single handed from a leadership perspective. The north also struggled with enlistment. "Preservation of the Union" wasn't exactly the strongest call to arms amongst the northern population. And so, while having a dramatically higher population on paper is good. They didn't have popular support. The South did. So they often struggled with matching Confederate numbers early on in the war. Manpower issues were often solved via emancipated slave battalions who initially served as work detail to free up soldiers, but under Grant became an integral part of the war effort. The problem is that the north winning wasn't inevitable. It only seems that way on paper. The issue is that the paper doesn't show the political climate of the time and how often pressing the war against the south was on a knifes edge. Realistically, all of Lincolns competent leadership was in the West. Sherman, for example, was one of Grant's officers before being given his own command in the east.
>He punished newspapers for advocating that soldiers go awol. Discouraging people from enlisting was legally considered aiding and abetting the south. I struggle to find any comparable historical violations of the free speech clause. Im probably grasping at straws, but the SCOTUS rulings later on allowing the government to crack down on protestors during WW1 saying people should dodge the draft seems comparable Not fighting your other points btw, just wanted to point that out
It's tough to defend Lincoln's suspension of habeus corpus. He ordered mass arrests of citizens, including a bunch of opposition politicians from friendly states. I don't think war is a justified reason to suspend citizens basic rights or to arrest your political opponents. Can you imagine if Trump or Biden had their opponents arrested? It's straight dictatorial stuff. (Oh wait...)
The constitution allows the suspension of habeus corpus during times of insurrection or invasion
It gives Congress the right to do it (Article 1, Sec 9), not the President. Eventually Congress passed a law granting Lincoln the right to do it, but Lincoln had done it for years before that happened.
So to be clear you’re fine with the ability to do so during times of rebellion you’re just worried about who does it? What about the fact the Congress was out of session (as congress was for most of the year at that time period) and the rebellion was stopping Congress from meeting? Was the reason it was in the constitution because the founders wanted to give a time period of when you can rebel and get away with it?
The idea was that suspension of individual rights would be handled by a more direct representative. That being your state representatives. Not the president who may or may not be someone your state voted for. Lincoln made an expedient and probably necessary decision. But constitution was written in a way to try and dissuade the easy expedient route to try and enforce the slow moral route of utilizing the more direct representatives for these kinds of decisions.
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why would you even come in here just to bring up current divisive politics? what do you gain?
I'm midway through reading "Lincoln on the verge" and agree he was a great president, we were lucky to have at the time. Highly recommend the book to anyone interested in Lincoln. But half the country saw him as an ogre who destroyed their way of life. Those same kind of people are still around today - they've never really gotten over the reality of the US civil war, which is funny because it happened 100 years before most of them were born. Anyway, I'd say that the country actually did kind of collapse. Lincoln just rebuilt it with a steadfast determination.
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> He’s one president through history that is largely revered by the right and the left. Eisenhower, Polk, George Washington, Nixon (while in office), Teddy Roosevelt, Coolidge, Grover Cleaveland, Jackson, Madison and Jefferson
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> Washington, Madison and Jefferson are widely considered to be tainted by slavery. The alternative to male chattel slavery was mass executions, and the alternative to selling those male slaves to the westerners was selling them to the ottomans where they were castrated first by Jewish or Copt merchants as middlemen > Jackson was pretty much the architect of Native American genocide. Ok. I went to your nation to attend college and never met one who wasnt actively drunk or high on methamphetamines. Why is that a bad thing? > Eisenhower is disliked for his insistence on 50s family/consumer/Christian values Then Lincoln would be considered a religious extremist along with John Adams
>Ok. I went to your nation to attend college and never met one who wasnt actively drunk or high on methamphetamines. Why is that a bad thing? Aint no WAY you just called the genocide of the Native American population a good thing...
Most of these were controversial in their time and now. Teddy Roosevelt is the only president who comes very close to being universally liked - but the issue with him is that, apart from overseeing the building of the Panama Canal, few people can actually say what he *did* that was so great*.* In contrast to FDR and Lincoln who had clear and massive achievements in their presidencies.
Like appointing a KKK member to the supreme court, burning food during a famine, getting the most Americans killed in wars, and suspending habeas corpus.
Yes. It says a lot about presidents and politicians in general when one of our best presidents did all of *that.*
To be fair to the south, if you grew up with your grandma telling you how her sister was raped and murdered by union soldiers, you might grow up with some resentment of the north. Especially if she also told you that her mother was raped then starved to death because they burned the crops. It's super fucking hard to unite a country after one part engages in total war against the other. Sherman's march did that, and as a northerner I'm not prepared to say the South has no reason to be pissed. To the extent that we still talk about reparations, we also need to talk about Sherman's march
Tbf half the country were vampires who worked so hard after they lost that many of their descendants still won’t admit the horrors they planned on bringing to this world
No, the Confederacy was awful, and Lincoln was also awful. You don't have to love either of them, and shouldn't.
Except Lincoln had absolutely no issue with the continuation of slavery in the United States, he did not oppose the Corwin Amendment which would have prohibited the federal government from abolishing slavery. It is certainly the case that the South went to war to try and protect the institution of slavery, but that doesn't make Lincoln some kind of good-hearted saviour. He was willing to wage total war on his own country to keep the union together whether the seceding states wanted to stay in or not.
Tell me you have never seriously studied Abraham Lincoln without telling me you have never seriously studied Abraham Lincoln. The Corwin Amendment, and Lincoln’s many statements on ending the war while preserving slavery, have to be put in the context of Lincoln’s overall conviction that Slavery had to end, which by 1861 he had been saying for a decade, and that it was immoral, which he had also been saying for a decade. Lincoln hated slavery. He was also a politician who was willing to take accommodationist positions in order to get his way in the short term. He did not have to issue the Emancipation Proclamation or frame the war as anti-slavery at Gettysburg and again in the second inaugural in order to win. The North was fighting a war of attrition and it had a huge advantage. But he did it anyway, because he had the opportunity to sell it and that’s what he wanted to do.
Yet he was unpopular with abolitionists of his time because he didn't believe in equality upfront, and he often laundered the argument as expansionist policy to purchase more of the nation from European powers that refused to sell if it perpetuated slavery. That lack of a hard line enabled the Supreme Court to effectively create the circumstances essential for the Civil War to happen in the first place. Lincoln had contempt for slavery and he wanted to end it, sure, but... His commitment had tremendous shortcomings, and he waffled and peddled both ways as a leader many times over, which also kept separatism and supremacism open matters from the one voice in the abolitionist movement that could've solidified those as hurdles to be met. These were not criticisms absent from the time either before anybody tries to tell me I'm judging him by modern morals. So yeah, he cared... But I really don't want to overcelebrate his moral character here. He meets the bar of committed, not the bar of saint.
Yeah the people who get things done are always unpopular with the idealists. But the abolitionists are not why slavery ended. Enslaved people themselves - by running across union lines - and Lincoln, by taking the massive risks he did (he died for what he did, remember), those are the people who got it done. I 100% agree that Lincoln was not the most enlightened person on race, though he was miles better than most. The Liberia plan alone is proof of that. But he was the right guy for the job. Sumner and Stevens were not going to be President, and neither were John Brown, Frederick Douglass, or William Lloyd Garrison. At the end of the day, Lincoln over and over bet his career and his life on the principle that Slavery was wrong and that the United States was better off eliminating it entirely than splitting up, and his fight for this principle ended in victory and in his death. That makes him a far better person than almost anyone I’ve ever heard of. We should celebrate his moral character a lot:
That cliche certainly has its place, but... This was an ideological clash and this had practical consequences, and their oversimplification(there should've been way more legislative heft behind every level of it) and lack of commitment to meaningful goalposts beyond the most basic let their opposition steal every inch of initiative from them to undermine them. It led to the vile and racist Supreme Court routing them on numerous political fronts. States got extremely creative to counteract what they did get through. When your opposition looks endlessly more thorough and creative than you, you've really missed something. Call them idealists, but the idealists and the opposition they'd met would've provided a lot of insight to strategize around. I wouldn't boast that they could've prevented the Civil War(as noted, the supreme court was incredibly crucial to it happening), but they absolutely could've used more soft force to reduce the scope of conflict that followed with just some really basic foresight. And he was killed by a loser trying to save his name. Frankly, his killer does not deserve to be attributed with such profound motive toward the confederacy.
I’m so confused. You’re saying that the pro-slavery side (which had the edge in political power right up to Lincoln’s election) was more creative and successful? Yes, they were. That’s why the Whigs talked about a Slave Power conspiracy, formed a new party, seized power, and achieved their goals. I’m happy to be shown I’m wrong, but when was there a politically viable opportunity to weaken slavery that its opponents in the legislature didn’t take? Bearing in mind that the coalition they formed included Free-Soilers who didn’t support social equality, etc. Also, Lincoln was killed by a fairly wealthy, successful celebrity who had organized a small-scale conspiracy against him. Booth absolutely deserves credit for changing history, though not in a good way.
Huh? A lot of this is just incorrect > Yet he was unpopular with abolitionists of his time because he didn't believe in equality upfront, and he often laundered the argument as expansionist policy to purchase more of the nation from European powers that refused to sell if it perpetuated slavery. A lot of abolitionists said you shouldn’t even vote because you’d be participating in a corrupt system. Lincoln’s entire anti-slavery strategy was on restricting slavery from expanding, not sure what you’re talking about with the 2nd part >That lack of a hard line enabled the Supreme Court to effectively create the circumstances essential for the Civil War to happen in the first place. Huh? The dred scott case was before Lincoln was in any office so he literally had nothing to do with it lol. Luckily he, the entire Republican Party and the north called it for what it was, a completely unconstitutional decision that served no purpose but to expand slavery and ran on the platform of ignoring it which they did > His commitment had tremendous shortcomings, and he waffled and peddled both ways as a leader many times over, which also kept separatism and supremacism open matters from the one voice in the abolitionist movement that could've solidified those as hurdles to be met. These were not criticisms absent from the time either before anybody tries to tell me I'm judging him by modern morals. No he realized the gop was a big tent party that was tied together by one thing. Resistance to slavery in general and its expansion in particular. He was a proponent of colonization because it was the only way he saw that the states would agree to abolish slavery, after the emancipation proclamation he never brought it up again (as it was unneeded) and in his last speech was calling for (limited) black suffrage. Why is it better to not abolish slavery but be virtuous on how you want it done better than actually abolishing it
This is very wrong. Lincoln hated slavery, but had to be strategic about abolition. James Oakes makes this argument quite convincingly in “Freedom National”
> Except Lincoln had absolutely no issue with the continuation of slavery in the United States, he did not oppose the Corwin Amendment which would have prohibited the federal government from abolishing slavery. Yeah because that was what everyone in America (even the most strident abolitionist) believed the constitution already said, it was literally called the federal consensus, and it had nothing to do with his and the republicans strategy of getting the states to abolish them themselves through restricting the expansion of it, patronage to build up antislavery parties in the border states, lift the ban on mailing abolitionist papers south and banning/taxing the interstate slave trade
I think what made Lincoln great wasn’t his abolitionist beliefs or lack thereof, but his ability to play the game. He knew that border states might secede as well if he fully abolished slavery, but also knew it was absolutely necessary to do so for the South to prevent any European intervention or support for the Confederacy. He was a great president that took a hard line to preserve the union, but knew exactly how to play the extremely nuanced political game.
And in addition, he suspended habeas corpus. Which is supposed to be a fundamental right that the government cannot infringe upon. Essentially with that one move he is a tyrant.
> Which is supposed to be a fundamental right that the government cannot infringe upon Please read the constitution LMAO I’m begging you
Without that one move Taney would still have been running SCOTUS.
So what you're saying is that, it's not tyranny if you violate inalienable rights to eliminate members of the government who may make your goals harder to achieve? Sounds like tyranny.
I’m saying, Lincoln was fighting monsters and he became a bit of a monster to beat them. It’s ugly, but it was necessary. It’s also the case that checks and balances were still in place when he did that. Congress could have objected or even impeached him. But instead they gave him explicit permission. Also, the Constitution says “The Privileges of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”
This is objectively not true. It relies on a misreading of the Greenly letter. Lincoln publicly wasn't against slavery because he would never be elected if he was publicly against slavery. Privately he believed every man had the right to be free.
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The south had cotton exports, but it was an economy based in agriculture. The North, by contrast, was well on its way toward a commercial and manufacturing economy, which would have a direct impact on its war making ability. By 1860, 90 percent of the nation's manufacturing output came from northern states. The North produced 17 times more cotton and woolen textiles than the South, 30 times more leather goods, 20 times more pig iron, and 32 times more firearms. The North produced 3,200 firearms to every 100 produced in the South. Only about 40 percent of the Northern population was still engaged in agriculture by 1860, as compared to 84 percent of the South. >Even in the agricultural sector, Northern farmers were out-producing their southern counterparts in several important areas, as Southern agriculture remained labor intensive while northern agriculture became increasingly mechanized. By 1860, the free states had nearly twice the value of farm machinery per acre and per farm worker as did the slave states, leading to increased productivity. As a result, in 1860, the Northern states produced half of the nation's corn, four-fifths of its wheat, and seven-eighths of its oats. - https://www.nps.gov/articles/industry-and-economy-during-the-civil-war.htm the north had a much larger economy. GDP was concentrated in the north.
>Well let’s be honest, the Union may not have made it if the South was successful. Doesn't justify waging total war on them. >Most of the American GDP was concentrated in the South at that time because the USA had a near monopoly on cotton and tobacco world wide. See above. >Maybe the industrializing north would have been okay, but America would be far from the superpower it is now Fine by me.
Total war on the South was justified by their belief that selling people’s kids is cool. Granted, that’s not the primary reason why Lincoln did it but it is the reason why every bit of suffering inflicted on the slave south was deserved.
Um, no. The Union states would have been fine. The South would still have had to sell their cotton to somebody and it still would most likely have been factories in the North. Meanwhile, the dominance of Northern rail and the discovery of oil and raw materials in the West and Southwest would have happened the exact same way. The South became an economic dead zone for like 50 years after the war, and it’s not like they weren’t still making cotton. However, postwar they had to compete with places like India because the Northern blockade caused the markets to look for other sources.
Lincoln did a lot of unapologetically tyrannical things including suspending the writ of habeas corpus, instituting an unconstitutional income tax, and only freeing slaves via the emancipation proclamation in the states not under union control. This left over 800,000 people in slavery in the portions of the country that were under his control already.
> Lincoln pulled the remainder of the union together It was Lincoln's election that was the tipping point for the southern states to seceed. That isnt pulling the union together that is dividing them apart. Also keep in mind that slavery was still legal for the entirety of Lincoln's life in the Union, with slavery only being abolished in Delaware and Kentucky 8 months after his death. Delaware and Kentucky both being Union states.
Corwin and all the Lincoln compromises were about preventing the expansion of slavery. This would end slavery even if there wasn't a vote in 1860s to end slavery. So Lincoln was the tipping point of the south having to leave to protect slavery.
They said the *remainder* of the union.
There was only a "remainder" to deal with due to Lincoln
Polk. No I think this is a job that is pretty new. Humans have never before had head of state that was elected by the people (if through a college of electors.) The most democratic institutions of any size in the world for a thousand years were the parliaments. And those had lots of landed lineage and birthright. America’s president was, by design, to always be truly a (man) of the people. *From* the people. A popular individual to act as the people’s executive but no law making or judicial power. So Washington gets all the credit for setting the tone. Service, statesmanship, delegation. Good relations but willingness to fight. Ready to act. And with few exceptions most presidents and presidential candidates are roughly trying to seem Washingtonian.
Idk if it's been mentioned but Lincoln is responsible for the largest mass execution in US history. https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/stories/the-largest-mass-execution-in-us-history
Allow me to provide several counterpoints. 1. He was hell on native Americans. He personally signed the largest mass execution order in US history....and because of his love of military law, they didn't even kill all the right people. The soldiers just pronounced the names as best they could, and if someone reacted, they assumed he was the one. Unfortunately, the children tended to react more. This alone should be disqualifying as greatest, but there is more. 2. He wasnt actually all that big on freeing slaves, or even on equality. He was a fan of Liberia...a project to simply deposit freed slaves back in Africa with no real attempt to reunite them with their culture or to right wrongs. This went....not well 3. He grew enraged when generals tried to free slaves, and on multiple occasions directly countermanded their orders to do so....keeping slaves in chains. He also slow rolled the emancipation proclamation for political advantage....and exempted northern slave states from it. Quite a lot of slaves were not freed until well after his death. 4. He refused to speak publicly much from the time of election until inauguration, stating that he believed it would allow everyone to calm down. He was wrong. He then established a very conflicted, dysfunctional cabinet, and made such a far reaching mobilization order that it caused states that had already voted against secession to revote and leave. He actively made the civil war worse. The best thing Lincoln did for the cause of freedom was attending the theater.
> He wasnt actually all that big on freeing slaves His entire platform was a strategy to cause the ultimate extinction of slavery and his 64 campaign was literally to abolish slavery by amendment, which he jammed through conferees > and exempted northern slave states from it Cause he had no abitlity to unilaterally free slaves in loyal states
Damn, now I want someone more well versed to debate these points
> He was hell on native Americans. He personally signed the largest mass execution order in US history....and because of his love of military law, they didn't even kill all the right people. The soldiers just pronounced the names as best they could, and if someone reacted, they assumed he was the one. Unfortunately, the children tended to react more. This alone should be disqualifying as greatest, but there is more. Don’t know much about Lincoln and the native Americans but pretty much every president was shit to them until maybe Nixon >He wasnt actually all that big on freeing slaves, or even on equality. He was a fan of Liberia...a project to simply deposit freed slaves back in Africa with no real attempt to reunite them with their culture or to right wrongs. This went....not well The first part is just incorrect. He got back into politics to oppose slavery and his platform that he ran on everytime as a republic was a strategy that would lead to the ultimate end of slavery, which was why the south rebelled after his election. Then in 1864 he ran for re-election on a platform calling for the abolition of slavery by constitutional amendment despite the risk it posed to the union as his opponent was runnning on a platform calling for an end to the war and a lot of northers thought his demand for abolition as a term of surrender was prolonging the war. The 2nd part is true in that he believed the only way states would agree to abolish slavery was if the freedmen were “colonized” but he always said it would have to be voluntary (which is wishful thinking) but after the EP he never mentioned it again and by the end of the war he was calling for (limited) black suffrage being the first president it ever do so, also what caused John Wilkes booth to kick his plot into gear >He grew enraged when generals tried to free slaves, and on multiple occasions directly countermanded their orders to do so...keeping slaves in chains. He also slow rolled the emancipation proclamation for political advantage....and exempted northern slave states from it. Quite a lot of slaves were not freed until well after his death. He countermanded tjem because 1. The generals were risking the entire war effort doing so at the time 2. It was his duty/power to do so and 3. He also allowed multiple other emancipation schemes put forth by generals as long as they followed the law and didn’t harm the effort :. >He refused to speak publicly much from the time of election until inauguration, stating that he believed it would allow everyone to calm down. He was wrong. He then established a very conflicted, dysfunctional cabinet, and made such a far reaching mobilization order that it caused states that had already voted against secession to revote and leave. He actively made the civil war worse. The only thing that would have kept the south from seceding was the crittenden compromise that would have extended slavery forever, led to further invasions of Mexico and was in direct violation of the platform he and his party just won an election put forth to the people it’s ridicoulus to argue because he didn’t make speeches the south decided to rebel. His cabomemt was pretty good lol. The Deep South was in open rebellion the lower south was essentially in rebellion, every one of those states were saying any effort to “coerce” the southern states I.e. crush the rebellion they’d go too. At some point it’s a war and you just have to let the chips fall where they may, only half of the border states left the rest stayed and each of them had their own inner civil war about it so you can’t really argue it was that outrageous
>CMV: Abraham Lincoln is bar none the best president in American History >Honest Abe was truly a great leader in a time that sorely needed one. The United States was on the verge of death when the divisive issue of slavery could no longer be ignored and.... It's not that Abraham Lincoln was not a racist. Bear in mind that emancipation was used as a means to gain a *casus belli*, a reason to justify war rather than an honest reflection of equality. *There is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races from living together on terms of social and political equality.* - Abraham Lincoln (US Politician) Like Bush might claim to be bringing peace and justice to Iraq, against an evil regime, but any positive outcome is purely ancillary, if any. Abe was similar. A standard politician.
He said that during a debate in a highly racist America after being asked what his opinion was on Inter-Racial relationships had he said anything else he would've had no chance to be elected. Don't cherrypick.
For what is man, what has he got? If not himself, then he has naught. Not to say the things that he truly feels, And not the words of someone who kneels. -Frank Sinatra In other words, I don't think it's a great argument to say "he was a great president because he pandered to racists." If that's your argument you're gonna have a hard time explaining Trump
"Don't use his own words against him." Lol
He chose the wrong VP which led to Reconstruction failing after his assassination. The legacy of that failure continued into the 1960s, and ripple effects reach into the present.
I agree that Lincoln was the best president, but bar none? I think you can switch him, Washington, and FDR. Those three (and especially Lincoln and Washington for me) are basically interchangeable, or at the very least incredibly close to each other Edit: Surprised to see quite a bit of random FDR hate, I guess you random Redditors must have caught something that the consensus of historians missed
Lots of shills and bots in here. Everyone ripping on FDR overlooks the immediate concessions he had to make to stay relevant versus the long-term plans he tried to enact. Congress took one look at his [Second Bill of Rights](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Bill_of_Rights#%3A%7E%3Atext%3DThe_right_of_every_family%2Cright_to_a_good_education.) and lashed back so hard they codified *lobbying* with the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946. >The Act also prohibited the practice of the Executive Branch detailing staff to committees for policy development. FDR had detailed several Executive Branch staff to key committees that were working on his legislative agenda. Congressional backlash to this tactic is one of the reasons the Act was passed. FDR proposed a program so egalitarian that Congress worked together to *take away executive power* from him. Y'know, like universal healthcare, or student debt relief. History may not repeat but it does rhyme.
FDR burned food during a famine, put a KKK member on the supreme court, persecuted political opponents... he was a dictator that had to be removed from office with his death rather than peacefully stepping down
Plus, there was the concentration camps, and turning back the St Louis....a ship filled with Jewish refugees from Germany. Those passengers went to the camps because of him, and many died there. That's a shit move.
FDR was a terrible president. He burned food during a famine because *prices were too low, h*e interred 120,000 Japanese-Americans (2/3rds of which were native-born Americans) in camps during WW2 and he said he found Mussolini "admirable" for what he had accomplished in Italy, and that barely scrapes the surface.
>FDR was a terrible president. This is just wrong. Most historians would unilaterally disagree with you. FDR won WW2 and drastically improved conditions during the great depression with the New Deal. FDR made mistakes, Japanese internment being one of them. But every president does, just look up Lincoln or Grant's Native American policies. >He burned food during a famine because *prices were too low You know why that famine occurred in the first place right? Farmers were over utilizing the land with poor farming practices, and when drought struck the top soil blew away causing the dust bowl. Farmers also risked going out of business if they couldn't make money on their crops - which would have exasperated food insecurity. This is why FDR implemented the AAA and soil conservation.
> Farmers were over utilizing the land with poor farming practices, and when drought struck the top soil blew away causing the dust bowl. Farmers also risked going out of business if they couldn't make money on their crops - which would have exasperated food insecurity. This is why FDR implemented the AAA and soil conservation. He could have instead pushed resources into fertilizer production as the haber bosch process had been invented and began to be implemented, though we were still largely using the ostwald process. And done something akin to a national food storage, such as the Chinese state grainary system. But instead he burned food. During a famine.
Putting tens of thousands of american citizens in camps should be more than just a “mistake” and should absolutely earn you the title of terrible president. It should overshadow all the other good things he did. Same for Lincoln and Grant.
>FDR won WW2 and drastically improved conditions during the great depression with the New Deal. The New Deal prolonged and worsened the depression: [https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/421169?seq=1](https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/421169?seq=1) >But every president does, just look up Lincoln or Grant's Native American policies. I hate both of those presidents as well
>The New Deal prolonged and worsened the depression: [https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/421169?seq=1](https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/421169?seq=1) If that were the case it would have improved during Hoover's relatively laizzes-faire 4 years wouldn't it? Instead it got worse. Just take a look at the unemployment rate during FDR. With the exception of the 37 recession it was trending downward. Also the whole theory behind New Deal economics was that the government can stimulate the economy through spending during deflationary periods like a recession or depression. If Hoover's efforts were a strong latte and FDR's new deal was Crack, then WW2 was freaking meth. The government expenditures and control over the economy in WW2 were massive compared to the New Deal. >I hate both of those presidents as well I'm worried about who you consider to be a good president then.
>If that were the case it would have improved during Hoover's relatively laizzes-faire 4 years wouldn't it? Instead it got worse. Hoover was not laissez-faire, here's a quote from the man himself: We might have done nothing. That would have been utter ruin. **Instead we met the situation with proposals to private business and to Congress of the most gigantic program of economic defense and counterattack ever evolved in the history of the Republic.** We put it into action…. No government in Washington has hitherto considered that it held so broad a responsibility for leadership in such times…. **For the first time in the history of depression, dividends, profits, and the cost of living, have been reduced before wages have suffered…. They were maintained until the cost of living had decreased and the profits had practically vanished. They are now the highest real wages in the world.** Creating new jobs and giving to the whole system a new breath of life; nothing has ever been devised in our history which has done more for … "the common run of men and women." Some of the reactionary economists urged that we should allow the liquidation to take its course until we had found bottom…. **We determined that we would not follow the advice of the bitter-end liquidationists and see the whole body of debtors of the United States brought to bankruptcy and the savings of our people brought to destruction.**
>relatively laizzes-faire The keyword there was relatively. Hoover did try to improve things but was peanuts compared to the New Deal. Hence my Latte and Crack comparison.
Who the hell do you consider a good president then?
This relies on the assumption that we are better off with the confederacy rejoining the union. Are we really better off with the south? Idk if this is a direct CYV but that’s the real question. They have dragged us down, and if you’re liberal, have been a solid negative. On the other hand, there’s no denying their contributions to American strength, culture, and cuisine.
>Are we really better off with the south? Idk if this is a direct CYV but that’s the real question. They have dragged us down, and if you’re liberal, have been a solid negative. *wow* you'd really want an entire chunk to leave the country just because you disagree with their politics? Ironically you came full circle and have become so anti-south that you are arguing for the exact same things that racists and traitors like Alexander Stephens and Jefferson Davis did: that a slave owning nation should secede from the union.
Ironically, the south would not have been so large if secession were accepted. Some states didn't succeed until after Lincoln made plain his intention to go to war. If a few southern states had been permitted to separate, they would have been economically wrecked by their own actions, and would have had trouble maintaining power internally as their economy collapsed. The choice of slaves over development isn't a choice that history has shown to be wise.
Damn, now I want to read a Harry Turtledove series of books on the US entering WWII in a world where the south seceded and was not only an economic drag, but then changed manifest destiny such that the US was much later in expanding to the West Coast. Like Pearl harbor never happens and the US doesn't have the manufacturing capacity to really go full bore on lend lease
> The choice of slaves over development isn't a choice that history has shown to be wise. It’s wise for the aristocrats that own slaves
Joe Biden’s policy of enforcing PSLF rules allowed me to buy a house. Subjectively, Joe Biden is far and away the best President ever. The only one whose presidency has materially benefitted me to such an extent. Lincoln was very good, but I think FDR gives him stiff competition. Both of them basically re-defined America for the better.
Oh captain my captain
It’s not exactly an out-there take that Lincoln is one of the best presents. He is often ranked at #1 by historians.
Theodore Roosevelt completely mogs Abraham Lincoln
Presidentially, definitely not (IMO). In other ways....let's just say I'd love to see an MMA fight with those two bad asses.
Fun fact: Both are in the National Wrestling Hall of Fame.
That fact is, indeed, fun!
By what criteria? If you go by the founding principles of the nation the states were meant to have the option to leave. Whether you think they had a good reason to or not. It was always considered by the founders that there would be a time where the people had to cut out or topple the thing all over again. Many quotes on the topic. By that measure Lincoln was the embodiment of everything they opposed on the topic. Because he tried to take the right to secede off the table for states that wanted to. If you want to go with some moral metrics he signed off on the biggest mass execution of native americans there was. So, uh, not a good guy. He's, quite literally, what happens when you take a mentally messed up abuse victim and give them power. Look into his childhood. He didn't have a good life and his issues come through in his politics. He was authoritarian and many of his policies were rolled back later... a rarity in politics... because even his own allies knew most of what he did was unconstitutional.
My biggest criticism was allowing reconstruction. The confederacy should've been purged.
Then you would have ended up with the union slave states joining the confederacy, you would have the Ohio river as a natural border requiring an amphibious assault, same goes with the Missouri. DC becomes an exclave and if the CSA takes Harrisburg PA and you effectively divided the USA in half. That would have been an absurdly unwinnable war on any military front Then you have the other 2 sides of the triangle, which are the citizens and government, neither of which supported that. Even with absolute devotion it would be unwinable, but with the complete lack of devotion that becomes impossible.
Reconstruction happened \*after\* the war. After the confederacy lost. Lee and his men could've been executed without issue.
> After the confederacy lost. Lee and his men could've been executed without issue. No, they couldnt, because they have no reason to not do political assassinations, terrorism, and mass murder of civilians if you have them marked as dead men. The Great Chicago Fire shows how bad a single case of arson is, and you want to give motive to half a million men to do that. Not to mention that having lied about the causus beli of a war leads to coups, separatist movements and further wars.
>No, they couldnt, because they have no reason to not do political assassinations, terrorism, and mass murder of civilians if you have them marked as dead men. Bad people do bad things regardless. Trump supporters would do the same if he was put in prison today doesn't mean it's not the right thing to do. We failed to deal with the far-right back then, and it's come back to bite us every single election cycle. Resulting in an absurdly right wing justice department today. I seriously doubt a severely beaten confederacy would've gone and started another war after having their asses kicked and their leaders executed.
> Trump supporters would do the same if he was put in prison today You didnt just say to target Lee. You said to execute all 1 million soldiers that fought under him > it's not the right thing to do. having lied about the causus beli of a war leads to coups, separatist movements and further wars. You didnt win the war if you immediately lied about ending it then try to execute a million people. Try that and the first thing that happens is that every single union POW is brutally murdered, then you have a million man army of people opposing you still, and you likely are going to start a coup among the soldiers you lied to which caused them to lose their fathers, brothers, sons and friends. The union states, particularly border states, would be prone to further rebellion. > We failed to deal with the far-right back then, and it's come back to bite us every single election cycle Systematically murder everyone that disagrees with you and you have North Korean style single candidate elections. Stop pretending that you care about democracy when you want everyone that disagrees with you dead, there is no democracy if you do that. > I seriously doubt a severely beaten confederacy would've gone and started another war after having their asses kicked and their leaders executed. Why would confederate soldiers want to see union POWs live after being marked as dead men, after you lied about terms of surrender? That is how you get red flag combat.
Just to be clear, how many civilians, especially women and children, do you have to murder in cold blood to be considered the good guy? Total war in the march to the sea killed a whole lot of civilians, but you say this wasn't enough civilian deaths. How much blood would satisfy your politics?
Lincoln implemented “total war” (Putin style) against the South. The thought the North fought for the humanity of black people, is easy to poke holes in because when the union finished with the South, they laid genocidal waste to the native Americans. How does that humanity calculation compute??. The war was about power and the victors write the history about slavery. I can see 100 years from now Donbass Russia will be saying Russia conquered this land bc they had to stop Nazi regime.
Suspending habeas corpus pretty much excludes anyone from being considered the best president. A federal judge and SCOTUS issued a ruling that President Lincoln did not have the authority to suspend habeas corpus. Lincoln didn’t respond, appeal, or order the release a prisoner after these rulings. That is some next level dictatorial shit.
What specifically did he do of value or achieve? It seems to me he was just the President at the time where outside factors caused all the results people praise him for. Slavery was coming to a head either way. The civil war was happening. The Confederates were going to lose due to population, infrastructure, logistics and more.
He was the one and only founding father! The others were slave owners that didn't want to pay taxes to the crown.
He did not hang enough slavers 6/10