Can someone do a factcheck on this meme about Abraham Lincoln?

by ChillyPhilly27
freedmenspatrol

Well that's a meme. I am not going to do the compare and contrast exercise because we have a rule against that. Let's go through the points one-by-one.

Lincoln did win the presidency with less than half the popular vote, but he still had a plurality of all votes cast. He polled 1,8,65,908 (39.9%) to the next runner up, Stephen Douglas' 1,380,202 (29.5%). However, that's in a race where four candidates win electoral college votes so it would be a remarkably commanding majority if he busted 50%. Almost forty percent is a clear win here, not just barely getting over the finish line. It's true that the electoral college majority is disproportionate in Lincoln's favor -he got almost sixty percent of the EC- but it's not like the famous situations in 1828, 1876, and two times more recently where the EC made a loser into a winner.

Lincoln was unpopular among some, but we don't have public opinion polling back then and there are other presidents who had a hard time in office. The Republicans never really turned on him, though there were always some who believed he was not attacking slavery vigorously enough. This is a better situation, from a strictly political POV, than John Tyler had. His own party drummed him out while he was president. Andrew Johnson was impeached basically by the party who's ticket he won the vice-presidency on.

Lincoln had extensive political experience. He was active in Whig politics from a fairly early age and developed a reputation as a skilled hand during his time in the Illinois legislature. His career in national office is short, but that's not especially unusual. As a Whig congressman from a Democratic state, advancing from the House to the Senate, winning a governorship, or something like that was always going to be a huge uphill battle for him. He did about as well as one would expect, really. With a brief period of political inactivity between 1852 and 1854, as the Whig party collapsed, Lincoln is politically engaged and involved for his adult life.

Lincoln was called radical and people did make fun of his appearance. Sometimes he joined in on the latter. Politically, he was a moderate.

Lincoln's debate performance depends entirely on one's political position. The papers are openly partisan and unless you really blow it -or go against party orthodoxy- you can expect your side's press to declare you a commanding victor. The other side will declare you a miserable failure. That papers decided he was one only tells you that Democratic papers existed and Lincoln was a Whig.

The Democrats did not threaten secession nationwide. They did the opposite: Unable to agree on a platform vis-a-vis slavery, the Democracy split down the middle and ran two candidates. The Southern Democrats' John C. Breckenridge ran on the ticket of the faction which considered disunion a viable option if they lost. Stephen Douglas pledged that if secession happened he would lead the nation in suppressing it by force. When it did come, Lincoln showed Douglas a draft of his proclamation asking for men to fight the rebellion. Douglas told him to ask for more men. Douglas is no nobody; he was the leading Democratic politician of the 1850s and garnered more votes than Breckenridge did. Breckenirdge's group are also significant, but they're decidedly sectional.

Riots did not begin as a result of Lincoln's election. The closest you can come are proslavery Marylanders attacking a column of soldiers marching through Baltimore or the New York City draft riot in 1863. If you want to call the Civil War a riot then I guess you can, but it's stretching the word so far as to be wildly misleading.

Lincoln did not have an approval rating. There were no polls. For the author of the meme to imply that he did requires they know essentially nothing of nineteenth century US political history. This is anachronism of a kind with the notion that he did television appearances.

No one called Lincoln a fascist, which is a twentieth century term for a political phenomenon that at its earliest begins after Lincoln's death. Robert Paxton specifically locates the first fascist movement in the Reconstruction-era Klan. So far as I'm aware, Lincoln is not accused of mental illness either. He is called "fanatical" in the sense of being radical or having unsustainable ideological commitments, but that's what the opposition press usually say. The friendly press do not, so "all the press" is just another ignorant statement.

The nation did erupt in political violence, but not between fringe factions. Neither the South nor the North were run by marginal figures who came to power via some strange flukes. Their ruling parties are representative of the broad will of their voters and stood for platforms in line with popular opinion. The Civil War was certainly violent -it's a war- and could be chaotic, but general disorder does not sweep the land. Except when armies are nearby, life more or less goes on as it has before. War-related disorder does occasionally break out in the North -the draft riot is a great example- but it's vastly more common in the South since that's where the armies are and the social system, slavery, actually does suffer general disruption.

Which goes to say that, yes, the pic is unrelated.

Sources

Year of Meteors by Douglas Egerton

The Fiery Trial by Eric Foner

Road to Disunion (2 vols) by William Freehling

Half Slave and Half Free by Bruce Levine

Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson

The Impending Crisis by David Potter

Disunion! by Elizabeth Varon