...at least in the short term. Things generally begin to be sorted out looking backwards several generations later.
That is certainly the case with the Lincoln cult, i.e. the "church of Lincoln." He was a great man in many ways. He was also a self-serving pragmatist, the highest paid lawyer in the country who argued for "Massah" in his one and only case involving slavery. Thomas DiLorenzo has several books showing the other side of Lincoln which is not a pretty picture.
I was a Lincoln worshiper as a teenager and still have the report I did in high school. But I no longer look at him as a secular saint who "ended slavery" with his Emancipation Proclamation. He did no such thing. The only slaves freed by that document were those in the South, slaves over which Lincoln had no control. He simply, in pragmatic fashion, hoped to stir up a slave insurrection. In view of the bloody revolts in Haiti and Ned Turner's Rebellion, where entire families were wiped out like the genocide in Rwanda, Lincoln apparently had no concern about the possibility he would stir up genocide against southern families.
