On Lincoln
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Lincoln wasn't a good president. He wasn't even a mediocre president. He was a terrible president. He suspended individual rights. He massively expanded the government through money printing. He led millions of people to their deaths. All for power.
What we learn in school is that he was the great emancipator, ending slavery and winning a war that had to be won. That he was some man of genius and virtue, thrust upon the national stage at the right time to progress history.
Such is the result of the history being written by the winners. Similar hagiographies have been written about FDR and even Woodrow Wilson. But like the news, much of history is spun to manipulate us. Most of conventional history is fake and even a cursory study of what actually happened is enough to make you question how virtuous they were, and why they made the decisions they did. Almost always, you find that they were opportunistic cowards that did what would cost them least, even at the expense of the people they affected.
History is a tricky topic because the counterfactuals are always very speculative. But what we can judge is the values played out in actions taken, and in that sense, Lincoln was pretty terrible. He suspended habeas corpus, he cheated in border state elections to keep them in the union, and he massively, massively expanded the scope, power and size of government through inflationary theft.
It's hard to imagine what things were like before Lincoln, because before him, was a string of single-term Jacksonian, hard-money Democrat presidents. This was back when liberal meant being for personal liberty and that era of government before 1860 was insanely small, about 2% of the GDP. He would oversee an unprecedented expansion which would take the government to 20%.
Much of it, was, of course, because of the Civil War, and the popular narrative is that he needed to wage that war to end slavery. And yes, the issue was a major one in that era, but the elimination of slavery was more of a lucky by-product than an aim. His main goal, as he stated over and over again and as acted out in his policies, was to preserve the union, not to end slavery.
In preserving the union, he destroyed the idea that states had the right of secession, he weakened the idea of natural rights and he stole through inflation and sent many to their deaths. The centralizing of the federal government, the behemoth that we live with today began during his heyday.
The main thing that preserved his legacy was his assassination. Had a couple of battles gone the wrong way in 1863 and 1864, he wouldn't have been re-elected and he would have disappeared into the annals of history as a political amateur that lucked into the presidency in 1860 and screwed things up for 4 years. Instead, he was re-elected, assassinated and the horrific legacy of reconstruction was blamed on others. In short, he died at the right time.
There are those, of course, that will argue that Lincoln would have done things differently, and that he would have been more merciful to the south and rebuilt things as to spare them the suffering. But that's inconsistent with everything he did. Like most politicians he was a power grabber and he did what was politically expedient and not what was virtuous or right. He suspended habeas corpus (needing a reason to arrest and detain people)! He made generals do what would make him look good so he would get elected, not what would save the most lives or win the war the quickest. He created the greenback, which was a form of money printing to finance the war. And he spent an insane sum of other peoples' money through implicit and explicit taxes to "preserve the union."
Ending slavery, of course, was a big deal and in the annals of history, it's a dark mark in the history of the US that the institution survived so long. And yes, the Civil War did end it, but that wasn't the objective of the war itself.
Being Republican, he had a large Radical wing that he had to deal with and they wanted abolition, and later full voting rights for blacks. Because the south had seceded, they had the votes to pass the constitutional amendments, though only toward the end of the war when it was clear the north would win. That was a political expediency that ended up defining his legacy. But really, it's his biographers and historians of the winning side that have spun him to be a hero, when he was anything but.
The big flaw of Lincoln is that he created an unnecessary war that cost millions of lives and billions of dollars, one that set back the US by decades. Letting the south secede and revoking the Fugitive Slave Act would have ended the institution just as well, for much less cost. And this isn't idle speculation. Brazil had the second largest slave population in the 19th century that was whittled down quickly because the slaves had northern provinces where they could escape. The price of slaves dropped dramatically and soon, the institution itself was destroyed through economic means, not martial ones.
What's worse about Lincoln's legacy is that he set a precedent for federal power that brought forth the progressive era and eventually to Woodrow Wilson and FDR. The centralization of federal power began with him.
Lincoln wasn't a good president. But the history is written by the winners and they have made a secular saint out of him.
