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Philip Cardella's avatar

One of the crazy things about Lincoln's qualifications is that, at least according to Eric Foner in A Short History of Recommendation, Andrew Johnson (the man who replaced Lincoln if someone reading this doesn't know) was one of the MOST qualified presidents in history. And he's also ranked pretty universally by historians as one of our worst, worse even than Trump. Pretty much all rankings of Presidents have Lincoln top three and Andrew Johnson bottom three. Character matters.

On the other hand, the way Lincoln treated enslaved people in Kentucky was awful. At least well into 1865 nearly two years after the Emancipation Proclamation, which exempted Kentucky and other loyal enslaver states. In fact, when Lincoln was assassinated slavery was still LEGAL in Kentucky as USCT from Kentucky mustering out learned the hard way (they were free, as all men who enlisted were but Kentuckians were not impressed, though that's an interesting word because thousands of black enslaved people were impressed into Union service during the war and their owners were compensated $30/month, more than white union soldiers, $13/month and way more than Black Union soldiers, which was functionally $7/month). So, yeah, I finished Taylor's Embattled Freedom on contraband camps last night. So good.

Most of us (including me) think Lincoln would have handled Reconstruction better than Johnson, even if Johnson didn't set a subterranean bar. But history should make us uncomfortable! And Lincoln leaves a mixed legacy, which I think comes back to luck. It's hard to imagine anyone, in retrospect better suited to guide us through the Civil War and he's without question one of our greatest Presidents. The Civil War started essentially days after he took office. He was never NOT a wartime president. What would he have been like in peacetime?

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Adam Carman's avatar

Lincoln’s remarkable ability to see both sides clearly and to admit the whole nation was complicit in slavery might have helped during Reconstruction. Despite his conciliatory rhetoric, I can’t imagine him being silent about the KKK or Black Codes. But he might have been able to get things done still. Or maybe not.

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