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Personally, I think Lincoln was one of the worst presidents to date. His presidency was a disaster for the ideas that the Constitution was written to institutionalize. Besides tearing the ninth and tenth amendments to shreds; which can be weakly defended using the elastic clause,
it was a civil war. he needed power to wage war effectively. none of his measures was the first or lasting unanswered violation of the constitution. andrew jackson (president maybe 30 years before) ignored an important supreme court decision on indian rights.
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he was also guilty of the following acts: arresting and jailing 13000 Northern dissidents without warrant or trial,
true. it was a civil war, though, and dissidenting had already happened in many of the states.
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including, I believe, 30 or so Maryland legislators, who refused to grant money, weapons, and soldiers to Lincoln because they thought the war was constitutional; he even ignored an opinion from the Chief Justice Roger Taney ordering Lincoln to restore the writ of habeas corpus, had soldiers interfere in Northern elections, created West Virginia out of the territory of Virginia without the residents' consent,
as i recall, virginia was confederate property. what kind of consent could he have gotten?
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and authorized the brutal campaigns of Sherman and Sheridan with stated goals of exterminating the citizens, etc, etc, etc.
total warfare tactics. by ruining the lives of southern citizens, he dropped southern morale, and made the southern army, which couldn't feed itself, much weaker.
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Lincoln set a precedent of violation of the Constitution that has continued ever since.
lincoln? there are plenty of presidents before and after who had disobeyed the constitution from time to time.
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Am I the only one who has read the Federalist Papers, the accounts of the Constitutional Conventions, English Comman Law? Lincoln was America's first and greatest dictator.
the constitution was built for flexibility. many states seceeded, so lincoln had to declare war to force them to reunite. after a civil war, of all things, our constitution was kept unchanged (except for the 13, 14, and 15th amendments, which make perfect sense). until the new deal, the federal supreme court didn't even allow unions to exist. how much more of a literal interpretation can you get?