Lincoln fans.

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Got to be our most overrated president ever. I always thought of him as our Bismarck, uniting our country through blood and iron. Here is a good article on him:

"More than 130 years of government propaganda has hidden this fact from the American people by creating a Mythical Lincoln that never existed. Take, for instance, the fact that everyone supposedly knows – that Lincoln was an abolitionist. This would be a surprise to the preeminent Lincoln scholar, Pulitzer prize-winning Lincoln biographer David Donald, who in his 1961 book, Lincoln Reconsidered, wrote that "Lincoln was not an abolitionist." And he wasn’t. He was glad to accept on behalf of the Republican Party any votes from abolitionists, but real abolitionists despised him. William Lloyd Garrison, the most prominent of all abolitionists, concluded that Lincoln "had not a drop of anti-slavery blood in his veins.

Garrison knew Lincoln well. He knew that Lincoln stated over and over again for his entire adult life that he did not believe in social or political equality of the races, he opposed inter-racial marriage, supported the Illinois constitution’s prohibition of immigration of blacks into the state, once defended in court a slaveowner seeking to retrieve his runaway slaves but never defended a runaway, and that he was a lifelong advocate of colonization – of sending every last black person in the U.S. to Africa, Haiti, or central America – anywhere but in the U.S.

Garrison and other abolitionists were also keenly aware that the January 1863 Emancipation Proclamation freed no one since it specifically exempted all the areas that at the time were occupied by federal armies. That is, all areas where slaves could actually have been freed.

Moreover, Lincoln destroyed the most important principle of the Declaration – the principle that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Southerners no longer consented to being governed by Washington, D.C. in 1860, and Lincoln put an end to that idea by having his armies slaughter 300,000 of them, including one out of every four white males between 20 and 40. Standardizing for today’s population, that would be the equivalent of around 3 million American deaths, or roughly 60 times the number of Americans who died in Vietnam.

Another Lincoln myth was that he "saved the Constitution." But this claim is an outrage considering that Lincoln acted like a dictator for the duration of his administration and showed nothing but bitter contempt for the Constitution. Even Lincoln’s idolaters, like historian Clinton Rossiter, author of the book, Constitutional Dictatorship, referred to him as a "great dictator" who had an "amazing disregard for the Constitution . . . that was considered by nobody as legal."

The Dictator Lincoln invaded the South without the consent of Congress, as called for in the Constitution; declared martial law; blockaded Southern ports without a declaration of war, as required by the Constitution; illegally suspended the writ of habeas corpus; imprisoned without trial thousands of Northern anti-war protesters, including hundreds of newspaper editors and owners; censored all newspaper and telegraph communication; nationalized the railroads; created three new states without the consent of the citizens of those states in order to artificially inflate the Republican Party’s electoral vote; ordered Federal troops to interfere with Northern elections to assure Republican Party victories; deported Ohio Congressman Clement L. Vallandigham for opposing his domestic policies (especially protectionist tariffs and income taxation) on the floor of the House of Representatives; confiscated private property, including firearms, in violation of the Second Amendment; and effectively gutted the Tenth and Ninth Amendments as well.

The biggest cost of the Lincoln’s war was the death of federalism and states’ rights, the value of which was expressed by John C. Calhoun several decades earlier when he said: "The great conservative principle of our system is in the people of the States, as parties to the Constitutional compact, and our opponents that it is in the supreme court . . . . Without a full practical recognition of the rights and sovereignty of the States, our union and liberty must perish." And they did."

http://www.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo12.html

Great quote on Lincoln

"The Gettysburg speech was at once the shortest and the most famous oration in American history... the highest emotion reduced to a few poetical phrases. Lincoln himself never even remotely approached it. It is genuinely stupendous. But let us not forget that it is poetry, no logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it. Put it into the cold words of everyday. The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination -- that government of the people, by the people, for the people, should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves." -- H.L. Mencken

Always viewed Lincoln as more than
merely overrated, but actually an
evil. Pursuing an unjust war against
his own country, and using dictatorial
means to accomplish victory. A war which
might have been avoided, had he not been
elected.

Just proves how well our system works, when
there are more than two viable candidates.