the_dunk_tank

I'm not about to rank US Presidents but Lincoln was no good guy. Perhaps the bar for presidents is just that low and he might still be top 5 dunno don't care.

Check out "Black Reconstruction in America" by W.E.B. DuBois - excellent book about the revolutionary aspect of slave liberation, and how Lincoln tried his damnedest to avoid liberation then went way soft on former Confederates, and really curtailed actual power change to the freedmen. (Johnson of course cranked this to 11 and REALLY fucked shit though)

And of course MANY atrocities were committed against indigenous peoples under Lincoln.

Lincoln was largely uninformed and reactionary on Native American issues and defaulted to policies set by his predecessors, writes University of Texas historian Thomas Britten. That meant making and breaking treaties, confiscating ancestral lands, forcing removal, pushing cultural assimilation—and, at times, turning a blind eye to acts of genocide committed by the military on the western frontier. Among the bitterest pills served to Native peoples during his administration: Lincoln signed laws that gave away millions of acres of tribal land to support white westward expansion, and he approved the hanging of 38 Dakota Sioux warriors, the largest mass execution in U.S. history.

...

During his time in the White House, Lincoln displayed the common paternalistic attitude that tribal peoples required white men's "civilizing" influence. The president, wrote biographer David Herbert Donald, “rather enjoyed playing the role of their Great Father, [sometimes] addressing them in pidgin English," as in one encounter with Potawatomi Indians in which he asked them, "Where live now? When go back Iowa?"—even though they spoke fluent English. In March 1863, when hosting Plains Indian dignitaries at the White House, Lincoln told them: “I can see no way in which your race is to become as numerous and prosperous as the white race except by living as they do, by cultivation of the earth.” He also argued, without a trace of irony, that despite being engaged in a bloody civil war, white men were “not, as a race, so much disposed to fight and kill one another as our red brethren.”

https://www.history.com/news/abraham-lincoln-native-americans