The Next Great President of the United States

[Lexicus]

While is it a good thing that Lincoln freed the slaves (originally only in areas where his order carried zero weight), that was not his goal. He was even willing to support a constitutional amendment which would have guaranteed that slavery could never be abolished in states were it still existed when he took office. He may have personally opposed slavery, but his views would still qualify his as a strong White Supremacist. He preferred to deport all of America's Black population back to Africa, and accepted the support of many Free Soilers whose main motivation for preventing the spread of slavery was a belief that no Black persons (free of slave) should ever be allowed to live in any of the states formed in the Western territories. The Confederates were definitely bad guys, but the Union was not much better. While the Confederate leaders were motivated by paranoia over preserving and expanding slavery, the North did not care much about human rights but rather wanted the power to continue collecting taxes in the South to fund infrastructure projects meant to benefit capitalists in the North. Through most of the war, he continued to enforce the Fugitive Slave Acts. Those laws exceeded their constitutional authority in compelling citizens of free states to help track down suspected slaves (including those who were actually born free), but the fact that the Constitution did include a fugitive slave clause was already made it an immoral document. I would have supported the early secession movement of Northern states that wanted nothing to do with such slave patrols. Lincoln however cared too much about notions of "national greatness" to do the right thing. He antagonized the South into war, in much the same way that he had previously in his Spot Resolutions criticized the US government for antagonizing Mexico into war. He could have chosen to negotiate peaceful terms by which the Confederacy could purchase the Federal property within their borders, but instead chose to goad them into the bloodiest of wars. He then chose to unconstitutionally impose martial law on much of the country, suspending the writ of habeas corpus himself instead of asking Congress to do so as the founding document permits in times of emergency.

This is full of spurious oversimplifications. Lincoln's views on black people and slavery evolved over time. He did not actually enforce the Fugitive Slave Act until the end of the war; he did enforce it for the border states but as a pragmatic measure to prevent them from seceding. He never enforced it for the states that were actually in rebellion.

Meanwhile your portrayal of Lincoln "goading" the South into the war is simply Lost Cause pro-Confederate nonsense. Lincoln was unwilling to cave in to the South's demands because he saw correctly that if he did so the South would simply threaten to secede every time they wanted something.

FDR should be considered the 3rd worst (after only Woodrow Wilson and Andrew Jackson), not the best 3. He did not deserve one term, much less 3. He did the opposite of almost everything he campaigned on doing, and seems to have been motivated by a strong need to be seen as doing something rather than to make sure what he was doing was actually beneficial. He campaigned on staying out of WWII and on intervening less in the economy than Hoover, and then rushed in the opposite direction. He almost certainly made the Great Depression worse, and made it last much longer than it would have without his intervention. His programs often worked at cross purposes, leading to extraordinary economic waste. He subsidized production but let the produce rot or burned it rather than allowing it to be sold to starving people. Things only ever appeared to improve under his because he cooked the books, releasing wildly inaccurate numbers to to public. He was basically a Fascist (not nearly as bad as Hitler, but not unlike Mussolini), whose policies forced industries to form cartels and keep prices high and wages low. Most of the New Deal was blatantly Unconstitutional.

This is all pretty much untrue (except that he campaigned on staying out of World War II). The New Deal was vastly insufficient as a program of economic recovery but it was far better than nothing. Most of the New Deal was ruled constitutional by the Supreme Court. GDP per capita had recovered almost entirely to pre-crash levels by the end of the 30s, until Roosevelt stupidly attempted to balance the budget leading to recession. Seriously, your arguments about Washington were good but it seems you learned about Lincoln and FDR from reactionary cranks.