Abraham Lincoln's honored place among America's most revered icons is assured. In his memorial at the western edge of the Washington Mall sits his stone effigy, massive and humbling like the fabled statue of Zeus at Olympia. Etched in marble on the walls behind the great figure are the stirring and magnificent words of the Gettysburg Address, words made necessary by the tragic war of aggression he waged against the breakaway states of 19th Century America. Though there is much to admire in Lincoln, serious questions about him linger.

Lincoln rose to the presidency as the result of a hate-filled election season so rife with sectional hostility that his name did not even appear on the ballots of ten of the states that would ultimately form the Confederacy. Lincoln, confident of the sheer numeric superiority of the more populous North carelessly allowed lies and misapprehensions about his intentions towards the South to fester and metastasize until they had poisoned the entire Southern electorate. Though he had not the slightest intention of freeing the Southern slaves should he gain the presidency, and though he had said so repeatedly in speeches dutifully reported in the Northern press, word never reached the South. Even in his inaugural speech of March 4, 1861, he promised not to interfere with Southern institutions, yet within days seven states of the South seceded, followed soon thereafter by the remaining four who refused his demand for state militias to come assist in suppressing the Confederate rebellion.

Though American mythology holds that Lincoln fought the war to free the slaves, he did no such thing. He attacked the South for daring to break away from the rest of the nation, basing the legitimacy of military aggression on his belief that the South had no legal right to secede. As protector and defender of the Constitution, he felt it his duty to stop them. Yet this same president, desperate to avoid having his capital surrounded by hostile states, illegally arrested and held prisoner several Maryland legislators with Southern sympathies to keep them for voting for secession, even going so far as to defy a direct Supreme Court order to release them.

Following a year and a half of carnage, where blood turned dirt into black mud on the battlefields at Shiloh and Antietam, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. But even in the moving words of this most hallowed of American documents hides a cynical piece of political

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