For a long time, Abraham Lincoln has been regarded as America’s greatest president. As Dinesh D’Souza points out in Lincoln: Hypocrite or Statesman?, that may be changing:
What unites the right-wing and left-wing attacks on Lincoln, of course, is that they deny that Lincoln respected the law and that he was concerned with the welfare of all. The right-wing school — made up largely of Southerners and some libertarians — holds that Lincoln was a self-serving tyrant who rode roughshod over civil liberties, such as the right to habeas corpus. Lincoln is also accused of greatly expanding the size of the federal government. Some libertarians even charge — and this is not intended as a compliment — that Lincoln was the true founder of the welfare state. His right-wing critics say that, despite his show of humility, Lincoln was a megalomaniacal man who was willing to destroy half the country to serve his Caesarian ambitions. In an influential essay, the late Melvin E. Bradford, an outspoken conservative, excoriated Lincoln as a moral fanatic who, determined to enforce his Manichaean vision — one that sees a cosmic struggle between good and evil — on the country as a whole, ended up corrupting American politics and thus left a “lasting and terrible impact on the nation’s destiny.”
D’Souza, by the way, does not agree with those criticisms:
In my view, Lincoln was the true “philosophical statesman,” one who was truly good and truly wise. Standing in front of his critics, Lincoln is a colossus, and all of the Lilliputian arrows hurled at him bounce harmlessly to the ground. It is hard to put any other president—not even George Washington—in the same category as Abraham Lincoln. He was simply the greatest practitioner of democratic statesmanship that America and the world have yet produced.