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Evidence for The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln

"The illustrious Honest Old Abe has continued during the last week to make a fool of himself and to mortify and shame the intelligent people of this great nation. His speeches have demonstrated the fact that although originally a Herculean rail splitter and more lately a whimsical story teller and side splitter, he is no more capable of becoming a statesman, nay, even a moderate one, than the braying bubblegum can become a noble lion. People now marvel how it came to pass that Mr. Lincoln should have been selected as the representative man of any party. His weak, wishy-washy, namby-pamby efforts, imbecile in matter, disgusting in manner, have made us the laughing stock of the whole world. The European powers will despise us because we have no better material out of which to make a President. The truth is, Lincoln is only a moderate lawyer and in the larger cities of the Union could pass for no more than a facetious pettifogger. Take him from his vocation and he loses even these small characteristics and indulges in simple twaddle which would disgrace a well bred school boy."
Above was as written in an article in 1861..

How could a man elected president in November be so reviled in February? The insults heaped on Lincoln after his arrival in Washington were not the result of anything he himself had done or left undone. He was a man without a history, a man almost no one knew. Because he was a blank slate, Americans, at the climax of a national crisis 30 years in coming, projected onto him everything they saw wrong with the country. To the opinion makers in the cities of the East, he was a weakling, inadequate to the needs of the democracy. To the hostile masses in the South, he was an interloper, a Caesar who represented a deadly threat to the young republic. To millions on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line, he was not a statesman but merely a standard bearer for a vast, corrupt political system.
Some surprising parallels with Mr.Trump here...
"[ Dictator ] is what the Opposition press and orators of all sizes are calling him. Witness, also, the litter on the floor and the heaped-up wastebaskets. There is no telling how many editors and how many other penmen within these past few days have undertaken to assure him that this is a war for the Union only, and that they never gave him any authority to run it as an Abolition war. They never, never told him that he might set the negroes free, and, now that he has done so, or futilely pretended to do so, he is a more unconstitutional tyrant and a more odious dictator than ever he was before. They tell him, however, that his …. venomous blow at the sacred liberty of white men to own black men is mere brutum fulmen [empty threat], and a dead letter and a poison which will not work. They tell him many other things, and, among them, they tell him that the army will fight no more, and that the hosts of the Union will indignantly disband rather than be sacrificed upon the bloody altar of fanatical Abolitionism."
Emphasis added by me to point out the exact same sort of vitriolic rhetoric isued to Mr. Lincoln as we are witnessing to Mr. Trump.
In July 1863, in the wake of the Emancipation Proclamation and the Draft Law, riots broke out in New York City, a conflagration that, aside from the Civil War itself, was the largest insurgency in American history
Seems we have yet another parallel but not related to laws but rather business/commercial interests in North Dakota.... and in several cities all across America (most notably Portland Oregon)

So to recap;
Lincoln won presidency with 39.8 percent; lowest percentage of popular votes ever...
Lincoln was immensely unpopular while alive
Media hated him and everyone who were considered important counted him as a dictator/tyrant
Riots broke out in one large city as a response to certain things
National crisis that was 30 years in the making;
The start of a civil war
The death of Lincoln immortalized and made him immensely popular in the decades and century ahead
 
I sure hope Trump is not as bad as Lincoln (our worst president) was.
Carter was the worst President before Obama stripped him of the title

Jimmy-Carter-Barack-Obama.jpg
 
If you've ever been to the Lincoln Library & Museum in Springfield, Illinois then you already know that even the Internet lunatic fringe are pale imitators of 1860's mainstream newspapers.

I consider Lincoln one of the greatest presidents we ever had. He did what had to be done to hold the country together; and I'm glad for that.
 
He did what had to be done to hold the country together

That was exactly the problem with him. The Constitution died during his regime.

The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War: Thomas DiLorenzo: 9780761526469: Amazon.com: Books

"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, not 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
 

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