Why lincoln was the best president

Why Lincoln Matters: As a Leader. Share This Page Facebook Twitter. Search submit. Mobile Menu Site Search Search submit. Virtual Programs. Saved Items 0. It would take Lee's surrender at Appomattox Courthouse and his own death a week later to propel Lincoln into the pantheon of presidential greatness. And Lincoln's canonization began almost immediately.

Within days of his death, his life was being compared to Jesus Christ. Lincoln was portrayed to a worshipping public as a self-made man, the liberator of the slaves, and the savior of the Union who had given his life so that others could be free. His humor was presented as an example of his humanity; his numerous pardons demonstrated his "great soul"; and his sorrowful demeanor reflected the burdens of his lonely journey as the leader of a "blundering and sinful" people.

Historians, mindful of Lincoln's mythic place in American popular culture, accord him similar praise for what he accomplished and for how he did it. Because he was committed to preserving the Union and thus vindicating democracy no matter what the consequences to himself, the Union was indeed saved. Because he understood that ending slavery required patience, careful timing, shrewd calculations, and an iron resolve, slavery was indeed killed.

Lincoln managed in the process of saving the Union and killing slavery to define the creation of a more perfect Union in terms of liberty and economic equality that rallied the citizenry behind him. Because he understood that victory in both great causes depended upon purposeful and visionary presidential leadership as well as the exercise of politically acceptable means, he left as his legacy a United States that was both whole and free.

As the most activist President in history, Lincoln transformed the President's role as commander in chief and as chief executive into a powerful new position, making the President supreme over both Congress and the courts. To do all of these things, Lincoln broke an assortment of laws and ignored one constitutional provision after another. He made war without a declaration of war, and indeed even before summoning Congress into special session. And by using a historically inaccurate wish fulfillment version of Lincoln, we make the burden heavier on other presidents, including candidates for the presidency in our own time.

The mythologized, ahistorical Lincoln is an impossible standard. No one can measure up to it, not even Lincoln. They also determined the degree to which he could become an active agent of change. To his immense credit, when faced with disunion, he drew a number of practical and moral lines in the interest of which he was willing to take great risks. The first was the nonextension of slavery into the territories.

Abolitionists could, understandably, think this so little as to be almost contemptible. But given who Lincoln was and what he faced politically, it was important enough to have significant consequences.

The second was that military force was required to keep the Union intact. Faced with secession, he decided to resupply Fort Sumter, though there was reason to believe the Confederacy would respond with force, initiating armed conflict.

And faced with the likelihood that the war would be prolonged excruciatingly or even lost, he at last, in , decided on partial emancipation. And when he finally found the right generals and gave up his efforts to bribe the border states, he also discovered the courage, born of desperation, to commit himself to black manpower to strengthen his army and weaken the Confederacy. For John Quincy Adams, all this would have seemed a recognition of the inevitable.

That he would not have arrived there had he not been forced by circumstances beyond his control to confront the abyss does not, however, detract from the courage it took to do it. White America had no desire to shed blood or pay money to emancipate slaves. Lincoln had to find ways, halting, difficult, and indirect as they were, to take white America down the road of what became total war and, eventually, total emancipation. At the end, he well knew that this extraordinary accomplishment had left the country with a damaging reality, an almost fatal wound: the difficulty of reconciliation between North and South, between anti-black racism and white America.

Eight million bitterly resentful white Southerners would be forced to co-exist with four million ex-slaves whose freedom they deplored and whose liberators they detested. The result: the failure of reconstruction; the virtual re-enslavement of most Southern blacks; Jim Crow; the civil rights movement; and the still existing post-Civil War hangover of widespread racial prejudice. When he died, he had no solution for this reality, and he knew that his beloved country had entered into a century and more of racial misery.

The racist alt-right and white nationalist movements would have arisen. Of course, happiness was not in his nature, but it was not in the historical reality, either. From Lincoln and the Abolitionists. We saw him, measured him, and estimated him; not by stray utterances to injudicious and tedious delegations, who often tried his patience; not by isolated facts torn from their connection; not by any partial and imperfect glimpses, caught at inopportune moments; but by a broad survey, in the light of the stern logic of great events, and in view of that divinity which shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will, we came to the conclusion that the hour and the man of our redemption had somehow met in the person of Abraham Lincoln.

Sometimes cultural works, novels and plays, can tell you more about the history of culture than cultural history can. Reynolds, in turn, reveals that Spiritualism—hard-core, table-rapping Spiritualism—really was a presence in the Lincoln White House. The movement, as American as Mormonism, had begun in the eighteen-forties with the Fox sisters and their pet ghost, Mr.

Splitfoot, and by the eighteen-seventies had millions of adherents. Abe himself took seriously the political counsel he got from two leading spirit-mongers, though not from their spirits. The ghosts did indeed live alongside the living. Surely the belief in ghosts was, in part, a way of registering the mass killing of ordinary boys—and their persistence as a constant harrowing of the soul. All wars leave a hideous deficit, but the Civil War somehow left one uniquely deep. And, perhaps, above all, one must reckon with the adjacency, the nearness of the places where these farm boys and working men with wives and babies were slaughtered to the places where they had lived: they died not in a foreign glade or on a distant shore but in a hayfield across the state border.

Lincoln was a pluralist politician negotiating a world resistant to pluralism of any kind. He achieved great things through compromise and cunning and occasional cruelty. The choice between pluralism and purism remains the defining choice between liberalism and its enemies.

They spoke the same language of absolutism. But which one? Three possible Lincolns come to mind. Though not a vulgarian himself, Lincoln saw the value of vulgarity. Lincoln says. This was the Lincoln his time knew: ribald storyteller, fabulist, beloved Barnum-style freak.

It is the Bardo Lincoln who radiates moral authority from his time into our own, exactly because he was one of those rare leaders who could stare directly into their complicity in death and suffering without attempting to weaken or lessen its horror.

Lincoln was in intimate touch with the suffering he made happen, and he sought every day to justify it, to himself and to the country. He sensed from very early on that he would never go home to Illinois; the spectre of assassination was constant throughout his Presidency, and his legendary dream of death in the White House is a sign that he accepted this.