Welcome to Blogging the Presidents: A Voting While Intoxicated™ Almost Original Series. We will be taking a serious look at the 42 men who have led our country and hopefully finding a few laughable details.
PART XVI
Without fail, even the greatest of men are ultimately just men. Abraham Lincoln is generally considered the greatest President in history, and I’m not necessarily inclined to disagree. He held the union together and ended the scourge of slavery. During his tenure, many great policy accomplishments passed including the Land Grant College Act, funding higher education, the income tax, which allowed for greater public works (as problematic as it has become today), the transcontinental railroad, the first official paper money, and most importantly of course, the Homestead Act. My ancestors immigrated from Norway and took advantage of the Homestead Act. I think Jefferson in particular would have been very proud in the way that the Homestead Act distributed our country’s land up among the common people and put them to farming, the very paragon of his yeoman farmer.
On the other hand, Lincoln (perhaps justifiably) violated the Constitutional right of habeas corpus, he, like others after him, consented to a brutal terror campaign against civilians on the enemy side.
And of course, one’s ultimate verdict of Lincoln may fall on the merits of the civil war. Looking back through history now I wonder…are we really better off with the South in our midst? It would be interesting to see through the looking glass at an alternate reality in which the United States let the Confederacy go peacefully and the two developed independently. Would the North look more like Europe. Would either/both be organized enough to rise up to save the World from the eventual fascist threats? Still, on a basic principle, it seems a great oversight that no mention was given in the Constitution as to a state’s right to exit; quite shocking considering how independent states considered themselves at the time. Yet, based on social contract theory, it is hard to argue that those states, based on democratic consent, should not have had the right to leave the union. And thus it is with hesitation that I recognize Lincoln’s greatness, and concede that he was probably doing what he though was right and necessary at the time.
