12 Biggest Abe Lincoln Myths

TruTV.com:

Abraham Lincoln is considered one of our greatest presidents, but there is a lot of myth surrounding the facts.

Luckily, TruTV.com has gotten to the truth about Honest Abe.

Read the whole story: TruTV.com

Comments

[builderman55]

12:37 PM on 02/12/2012

Very bad article, because it fails to adequately explain some of its more provocative claims.i taught Advanced Placement US History for 16 years and found this article seriously wanting...

[UnknownSolider]

10:18 PM on 02/10/2012

WTF wrote this drivel B.O'Reilly

[Grimmsd]

06:05 PM on 02/10/2012

Well, he was a Republican...

[wolflover3825]

09:25 PM on 02/10/2012

Your point?

[Boo2You2]

10:34 AM on 02/10/2012

This is obviously written by someone who misses the "good old days."

[SBinF]

10:31 AM on 02/08/2012

It's a myth that the Civil War was fought over slavery?

My head is about to explode. Of COURSE the Civil War was fought over slavery. Yes, taxes were an issue, but the tax fight was about tariffs....The South opposed high protective tariffs while the North preferred tariffs to protect industry. The South was largely agrarian, and only interested in the lowest price for manufactured goods. In the end though, this is a regional difference that is predicated on the fact that the North was industrializing while the South was an agrarian society. Still, it's a difference in that the South had an economy which required slaves, while the North did not....

Poor poor history work, ANTHONY MORENO.

[builderman55]

12:48 PM on 02/12/2012

Lincoln, unarguably our most brilliant President was a politician but also a lawyer. He knew that he could not banish slavery because it was protected in the Constitution, and to do so would be to violate rights of property, which unfortunately, slaves were. The underlying issue of course was slavery--Lincoln said it would be protected where it existed but would not be allowed to expand into the territories acquired in the Mexican Cession. But the proximate cause was the illegal act of secession--it was a direct challenge to the Supremacy clause in the Constitution (Article 6). If a state were allowed to secede it would, in effect, be supreme to the Federal Government. America had tried a confederacy prior to the Constitution and it was a dismal failure. You don't have a nation in any meaningful sense if you are a loose association of friendly, supreme state governments. The Southern Confederacy proved that again during the Civil War when the government in Richmond had no ability to direct the war effort with states jealously guarding their "sovereignty." Georgia had enough shoes in its warehouses to shoe the entire Confederate army, much of which was shoeless, bit refused the order to provide them.

[SBinF]

10:28 AM on 02/08/2012

Lincoln provoked the Confederacy into war?

Who the heck wrote this.

The Confederate states seceded after Lincoln was elected president. How would you argue the country attempt to address states which seceded? Should they have talked it out? Obviously that didn't work.....slave and free states disagreed greatly for DECADES before a shot was ever fired. So yeah, that statement isn't necessarily accurate.

As for the rest of those "myths," who said these were myths? Many of them I've never heard...

[wolflover3825]

09:52 PM on 02/08/2012

Actually I have heard of 3/4 of them. To add something to the last one about the names, Lincoln has a secretary with the last name of Kennedy.

The occult one I have heard of. It was mostly Mary Todd Linclon. But Abe did have the nightmares about his death.

Here is a bit of irony to fit into this story. Robert Lincoln while standing on the platform to catch a train almost fell to his death as the train neared the platform. Suddenly a hand reached out and grabbed him, pulling back to safety. That hand belonged to Edwin Booth, brother of John Wilkes Booth before the assination of Abe Lincoln.

[wolflover3825]

09:31 PM on 02/07/2012

HP actually paid someone for this? Amazing. Just simply amazing.