Who was the best President?

[Meldread]

40. There is no way that I could support Lincoln.

I think Lincoln gets too much credit.

First, he gets credit for freeing the slaves as if he were somehow morally driven to do it. It's true that he hated slavery on a personal level, but at every turn his hand was forced by events beyond his control. The Civil War itself was long in the making even before he became President. His chief objective during the Civil War was to preserve the Union at all costs. In his own words, "My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause." - Abraham Lincoln in a "Letter to Horace Greeley" (August 22, 1862).

Second, there is the matter of him selecting Andrew Johnson as his Vice President, who ultimately became President after Lincoln was assassinated. Now, one could argue that Lincoln shouldn't be held responsible for President Johnson's administration, but he selected him to be his VP. This is seriously like John McCain selecting Sarah Palin to be one heart beat from the Presidency. As a result, Lincoln gets a bullet to the head, and America gets President Palin errr... President Johnson. He EASILY makes the list for the worst President in the entire history of the United States. Easily. He makes the top three, and really he should be first on the list without any real competition. There is a reason that he was the first President to ever be impeached.

If we want to blame a single individual for the failure of Post Civil War Reconstruction, we can easily lay that right at the feet of President Johnson. We were literally in the middle of ending slavery, when this racist asshole that Lincoln put on the ticket, decided 'Meh. Fuck black people. I don't give a shit about them. They should go back to being slaves again! I just want to fuck over those uppity Plantation owners, and make them kiss my mother fucking Presidential ring as if I were the god damn Pope! Make them all send me, personally, letters of apology!' ...and yeah, well... things went down hill from there.

We literally had a brief time after the Civil War where black people were equal to white people--at least in the South. They were voting and actually becoming elected officials. Literally, they were going from being slaves to elected leaders. There was this brief moment in time when, after all the horror of the Civil War, we had the opportunity to make good on the promise of the country. We had the opportunity to set things as right as they could be, and make all citizens free and equal (except for women of course). However, President Johnson fucked it all up.

Thankfully, we got General Grant to become President after him. He was amazing. However, the situation was too far gone for him to really save it, and the decisions made by Johnson had already fucked things up so much... Here is a wonderful opinion piece on President Grant in relation to Republican efforts to knock him off the $50 and replace him with Saint Ronald Reagan back in 2010. Grant is one of the most under respected Presidents in this country, and could easily be argued that he *IS* the Civil Rights President, more so than any President before or since. Just imagine how different the country would have been with a strong leader like Grant in the White House during and after the Civil War.

Literally, it wasn't until the 1960's and the Civil Rights Movement that we were getting shit done that President Grant was doing way back in the day in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War.