GOOD DONE BAD

 Hello ladies and gents this is the Viking telling you that today we are talking about

Reasons Lincoln Was Secretly A Terrible President

Was Abraham Lincoln as worse president than Donald Trump? Is Lincoln—man who freed the slaves in 1862—as bad as Trump, the impeached president who stirred up a gaggle of MAGA patriots into breaching the United States Capitol? Let’s review.Abraham Lincoln: hero, martyr, vampire hunter—Honest Abe is the president all other presidents want to be seen as by Americans and the world. In his single term, he freed the slaves, held the Union together, and generally showed the world how to run a country like a total boss. It’s too bad he just happened to do it all while being a despicable, authoritarian bungler. But worse than Trump? 

Let’s pretend for a second that today’s front page of The New York Times is running a big hatchet job on Trump. The claims are unsubstantiated, even libelous, and contain quotes misattributed to the president that could damage America’s relationship with Russia. Now imagine the article turns out to be a fake and Trump responds by sending in the military to seize the paper’s offices and arrest its editors. There’d be outrage, right?Well, that’s exactly what Lincoln did in 1864. 

When two newspapers got conned into printing a fake message from the president, Honest Abe reacted by ordering a military takeover of the titles. The rationale was that the article in question was damaging to the government during a time of national crisis—an excuse you may recognize as one recently deployed by Egypt’s bloodthirsty military junta. In the end, Lincoln did the right-ish thing by having the imprisoned editors released—three months after he gave freedom of speech a flying kick to the teeth.

Deporting His Critics

While we’re on the subject of free speech and all, let’s meet Clement L. Vallandigham. An Ohio Democrat during the dark days of the Civil War, he was by all accounts a bit of a miserable idiot. He liked nothing better than to rile his Republican rivals by opposing everything they stood for. Since this was the 1860s, that meant campaigning to end the war and criticizing Lincoln for his cavalier approach to civil liberties. A criticism Lincoln responded to by having Vallandigham arrested, tried by the military, and deported behind enemy lines.

Just to be clear, Vallandigham wasn’t a spy. He wasn’t aiding the Confederacy. He was just a guy who had a misguided admiration for the South and felt uneasy about winning a war by crushing civil liberties. Deporting him for expressing these views was about as far from democracy as you can possibly get. Then again, Lincoln did a lot of things that don’t exactly sit well with our idea of a democratic leader.

 Suspending Habeas Corpus

If you’ve ever so much as been in the same room as a lawyer, you’ll know that habeas corpus is an important legal principle. In essence, it means that any state that orders your arrest must then justify your continued imprisonment before a judge. Getting rid of it means anyone can be summarily rounded up, imprisoned, and left to rot. Lincoln ditched it within two months of taking office.To be fair, the 16th president had his reasons. 

There was immediate danger in April 1861 of Maryland seceding to join the Confederacy, and Washington risked being overrun by Southern troops. The trouble is, when you’ve crossed a line once, crossing it again becomes a lot easier. Once he was done imprisoning Maryland’s legislature, Lincoln turned his sights to the rest of the country—and the results weren’t pretty.

Without waiting for congressional approval, Abe authorized the indefinite imprisonment of citizens across the Union, culminating in an 1862 attempt to have habeas corpus suspended for draft-dodgers—a suspension he intended to enforce by deploying the military against state judges. Although it was a measure born of desperate times, it allowed Jefferson Davis to portray the Confederacy as a place where liberty was valued—a move that nearly won the South some vital allies in Europe. It could have been an utter disaster—the fact that it wasn’t only proves how little appetite Europe had for declaring war.

Appointing Ambrose Burnside

For a president widely agreed to have been a strategic genius, Lincoln sure had a knack for picking incompetent generals. In November 1862, he ordered talentless nobody Ambrose Burnside to take control of the Army of the Potomac—an outfit so well-trained and equipped that anybody should have been able to lead them to victory. Do you want to guess what happened next?

Five days after taking up his post, Burnside unveiled to Lincoln his plan for a daring assault on the Confederate capital. The President gave his approval and Burnside marched his troops into the Battle of Fredericksburg—a humiliating slaughter that saw the Union defeated with embarrassing ease. Undeterred by his costly failure, Burnside waited just over a month before launching his next offensive—a little something known today as the Mud March.

Originally a plan to outflank General Lee’s troops, the Mud March quickly dissolved into farce after Burnside led his men through an apocalyptic rainstorm. Bogged down, the Yankees fell over one another, marched into each other’s units, and created a vast human traffic jam that sent the Confederates into hysterics. 

To make matters worse, Burnside attempted to boost morale by issuing each man hard liquor—resulting in a mass of disheveled, drunken Union soldiers brawling with one another in a seething mess of mud and idiocy. Lincoln finally removed the incompetent general in January 1863, but not before he’d single-handedly made a mockery of the entire Union war effort.

Reversing General Hunter’s Emancipation Proclamation

It’s no secret that Lincoln utterly detested slavery. He once famously remarked that “if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” But there was at least one other thing he hated with equal ferocity—subordinates stepping on his toes. In May 1862, these two passions collided with depressing results.A few weeks earlier, Union soldiers under the command of General David Hunter had managed to occupy a fair chunk of South Carolina, Florida, and Georgia. 

With the Confederacy now vanquished in the region, General Hunter did something both deeply heroic and entirely unexpected—he declared all former slaves in the occupied states free. Sadly for the 100,000 or so slaves his proclamation affected, a week later the “Great Emancipator” reversed his order, crushing any dreams of freedom they may have had.

Sure, Hunter never really had the right to issue his order, and Lincoln himself would devise the general Emancipation Proclamation just a few months later. Still, the incident remains a reminder that Lincoln valued other things above abolition—namely, his own inflated ego

And as always have a chilled day from the Viking