Rethinkin’ Lincoln

 

The most frequent question I have received during promotion of my new book, 9 Presidents Who Screwed Up America and Four Who Tried to Save Her, has been, “How can you say that Lincoln screwed up America?”

After all, he is the man who saved the Union and who put slavery on the path to extinction.

There should be a qualifier…at the expense of the Constitution.

Lincoln’s crimes against the Constitution are not as well-known as they should be, but historians and legal scholars, even mainstream academics, have begun to take a hard look at the lasting legacy of Lincoln’s abuse of executive power, particularly in the last decade.

Lincoln was called a dictator and a tyrant by many Northern opponents, was publicly castigated by former presidents Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan and famous authors Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, and barely squeaked by in the 1864 election even though the war was in hand and he only had to win Northern votes.  That should say something about his reputation among his peers, but how did he “screw up” America and the Constitution?

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