Of all the Presidents to villify, I simply do not understand how anyone could see Lincoln as one with the exception of maybe his treatment of hostile natives, which given the time, and other problems, I can't necessarily say he did anything out of line. If you hate Lincoln, you might as well just hate the United States as a whole. If there was a President who embodied the core American cultural values and fought to keep the entire show together, it was Lincoln.<p>Same with most of the Founders actually. Though I've come to be a lot cooler on Washington, and I acknowledge that Jefferson may rub people the wrong way, no President can turn the country on a dime, and if you didn't like the laws at the time, that was largely the doing of Congress, and by extension, everyone else.<p>The President may be Commander-in-Chief, but he's also the tip of a very large, very ponderous iceberg of a Nation. That doesn't mean they get a free pass by a long shot; but one would be wise to temper one's expectations of what one person, even with the highest level of authority could unilaterally do back then. Now is a completely story though.<p>I highly recommend some of the books on the history of Lincoln. The Eloquent President is a good one, and I"ll have to dig up my other one about how his Cabinet appointee drastically influenced the overall strategy and tactics employed in the Civil War.