Comments about ‘Joseph Cramer, M.D.: Where is Abraham Lincoln when we need him?’

Respectfully, Dr. Cramer, Mr. Lincoln was far less noble than history has given him credit for, and he is not to be emulated. It is a sad day indeed when people learn their history from popular culture rather than from reading thoughtful books. Mr. Lincoln started a war--a war that was not fought over slavery--which cost over 600,000 American lives. The victors of that war have painted Mr. Lincoln as a hero. But a hero he was not. He was, in every sense, a tyrant. The admiration over Lincoln is based on half-truths, straw men, and emotional propaganda.

@Brutus

Your revisionist lost cause comments are wholly inaccurate. If you read source material from the 10-15 years prior to the war, it is clear that the war – started by the South – was a war fought to expand slavery and despotism into the western territories (which by the way, was the only part of the slavery issue Lincoln ran against in 1860).

That the war was fought for “States rights” is simply nonsense. Slavery was always the issue of discontent since the founding and only grew more so due to Southern jealousy (towards the more prosperous North) and greed.

Our country fought a bloody and bitter civil war because, in trying to answer perhaps the easiest moral question in history, one side simply got the question horribly wrong and were willing to kill for their answer. That slave owners (who controlled all Southern governments) were able to convince the much larger non-slave owning Southern population that the war was about “our rights” was one of the great tragedies of our history. That people today still buy this propaganda is more pathetic than tragic.