Abraham Lincoln the “Great Emancipator”

Abraham Lincoln the “Great Emancipator”

Historians rank Abraham Lincoln the “Great Emancipator”, stating him the greatest American president. The primary reasons they rank him that is since; he was the only American president to endure a full-scale civil war. And he won, despite the difficulty in doing so on many levels. He freed a large number of people from slavery and changed the course of more or less everyone in the country in a very real and direct way. He was assassinated, presumably for his "courageous" stance on these issues, and overall preserved the Union. Abraham Lincoln had a far greater impact on this country than the vast majority of Presidents, just based on those factors alone. So, he definitely deserves to be recognized for those things. However, I would also rank him as one of the worse. My personal opinion about Lincoln is that he illegally prevented a number of independent and sovereign states from exercising their most basic right to independence and freedom from tyranny and oppression. He then illegally arrested a number of openly elected state leaders in multiple states to prevent the democratic process and avoid additional states from seceding, violated constitution in doing so.
Lincoln ordered the military invasion of our own country. He authorized attacks on and the destruction of civilians and their property on a vast scale, in complete violation of the rules of war. He was not motivated in any way by a desire to free the slaves at both the outset of the war. Whatever his personal convictions about slavery were, his actions were purely to prevent those states from leaving the Union at all costs. When the slaves could be used to his advantage in this goal, he used them. Not to belittle their struggle for freedom, but Lincoln used them to achieve other objectives and would have just as quickly sacrificed them into another 100 years of slavery if it would have preserved the union.
By not allowing the Confederates to leave the Union, Lincoln destroyed the protections of...

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