User blog comment:Marshal6000/Who should be the next president?/@comment-4845243-20130915024423/@comment-4845243-20130915161741

Actually, I think that is a plus. Nowadays, the high ranking politicians are the ones who are best at getting elected, not the ones who are best for the job. Whereas he didn't deal with anything during his presedency that was as difficult as the Civil War, that doesn't diminish his trustworthiness as a politician. IMO, Washington would have handled the CW better than Lincoln. Also, he set important precedents that effect us today. Washington also had a foreign policy that would have kept us out of countless unnecessary wars.

Lincoln, it is arguable, caused the Civil War. He could have averted it, at least. His decisions led to the death of 600,000 men. That's not a plus. Obviously, Lincoln thought it was more important to keep the Union together than to preserve the lives of those who died in the war. I'm not so sure I agree with that choice. Also, Lincoln did not end slavery. He issued the Emancipation Proclamation, yes, but he did that on dubious authority, and it only freed the slaves in the states that were currently in rebellion. The ammendment that ended slavery was not only because of Lincoln.

I do agree that Lincoln would have dealt better with the South than his predecessors did. However, that doesn't make him a better or more trustwothy president than Washington.