NationStates Jolt Archive

Since we have a thread for FDR, I've noticed that people also have very differing opinions about Abraham Lincoln. Now is your chance to voice your opinion. Was Honest Abe the great emancipator of the slaves and savior of the Union or the destroyer of states' rights?

I don't want to influence the poll without a fair chance for argument from both sides, but I think he was one of our better presidents. He faced an incredibly difficult challenge when he came into office and he handled it extremely well. It's really just a shame the Union didn't have better generals otherwise they could have ended the Civil War a lot earlier.

Then there's the slavery issue. I realize that Lincoln only issued the emancipation proclamation so that Great Britain wouldn't side with the Confederacy, but it was nonetheless a very important step forward. He broke the cycle of compromising with the south and took a strong position and enforced it.

Hmmm I smell a school assignment.

No worries, it's not. I got the idea from the FDR topic a little bit down the board.

What exactly was the state right the South was fighting to protect again?

Oh. . .

Honest Abe

Good President

Great Lumberjack

Honest Abe

Good President

Great Lumberjack

Tallest Jedi ever.

Hmmm I smell a school assignment.

Yeah, no shit.

The man looked like he needed a cheeseburger badly.

My mother always taught me not to trust men with beards, especially when they suspend the writ of habeus corpus.

He wasn't perfect, but he did what he thought was right. Overall, he was a good president considering the circumstances he was in.

http://img227.imageshack.us/img227/8196/samurailincolnjj6.jpg

He was a completely unmitigated racist bastard. He was a segregationist. He believed that Black people should be sent back to Africa. He even blamed the slaves for the Civil War itself.

Basically, he opposed slavery on racist rather than humanistic grounds.

Granted, he had some valuable things to say (none of which were related to slavery or race). But freeing the slaves was realpolitik.

Was Honest Abe the great emancipator of the slaves and savior of the Union or the destroyer of states' rights?

Both. What makes him a great President is that he was willing to make those hard decisions. People had been putting this probelm off for roughly a hundred odd years, always trusting to 'future generations' and half-assed compromises. He stepped up, grabbed the problem with both hands, and solved it. Granted, there had to be sacrifices along the way, and it needed roughly another hundred years before it became de facto as well as de jure but he started it.