Let's begin this look at Reconstruction with the murder of Lincoln. When did Lincoln go from being the most hated man in America ( in the North and South ), to his present state of being thought of as Jesus? These excerpts from the New York Times (the entire article at the link is well worth a read ) I think cover this touchy subject- and why it was done.

WHEN LINCOLN BECAME JESUS

THIS year, Good Friday, the day commemorating Christ's crucifixion, falls on April 14, as it did in 1865. On that evening, in the balcony box of Ford's Theater in Washington, John Wilkes Booth fired a handmade .41-caliber derringer ball into the back of Abraham Lincoln's head.

In the days that followed Lincoln's death, his mourning compatriots rushed to compare him to Jesus, Moses and George Washington.

Despite the Good Friday coincidence, the Jesus parallel was not an obvious one for 19th-century Americans to make. The Protestant population, then as now, included a vigilant evangelical minority who thought that Jesus, sinless on earth, was defamed every time ordinary sinners presumed to imitate him. No mere mortal could be put beside Jesus on a moral balance scale.

But Honest Abe overwhelmed the usual evangelical reticence — by April 1865 the majority of Northerners and Southern blacks took him as no ordinary person. He had been offering his body and soul all through the war and his final sacrifice, providentially appointed for Good Friday, showed that God had surely marked him for sacred service.

At a mass assembly in Manhattan five hours after Lincoln's death, James A. Garfield — the Ohio congressman who would become the second assassinated president 16 years later — voiced the common hesitancy, then went on to claim the analogy: "It may be almost impious to say it, but it does seem that Lincoln's death parallels that of the Son of God."

Jesus had saved humanity, or at least some portion of it, from eternal damnation. Lincoln had saved the nation from the civic equivalent of damnation: the dissolution that had always bedeviled republics. "Jesus Christ died for the world," said the Rev. C. B. Crane in Hartford. "Abraham Lincoln died for his country."

The small minority of Jews and Catholics, equally awed by Lincoln's bodily sacrifice, joined Protestants in hailing the president's uncommon virtues: forgiveness, mercy, defense of the poor and the oppressed. Catholics joined Protestants in noting his Christ-like habits of brooding in private and keeping his own counsel.

Nearly everyone joined in heralding Lincoln's phrase "with malice toward none, with charity for all," which Christian mourners hailed as the heart of the Gospel. Those words from his second inaugural address, delivered just six weeks before his death, turned up on hand-scrawled banners all over the Union. People mounted them, along with black-bordered flags and photographs of Lincoln, in the windows of their homes and shops.

Thomas Nast's 1866 painting "President Lincoln Entering Richmond" (commemorating his surprise stroll into the capital of the Confederacy on April 4, 1865, shortly after Robert E. Lee's retreat) reinforced the sentiment: Lincoln shepherded his people just as Jesus did. The president walked into Richmond before Holy Week the way Jesus rode into Jerusalem before Passover: humbly, not triumphantly. Both men were enveloped by exuberant admirers.

Most American Christians turned to the Jesus analogy because they realized how much they loved Lincoln. They took his loss as personal, often comparing it to a death in the family. Many felt attached to Lincoln almost as they felt attached to Jesus. The striving rail-splitter from Illinois and the simple carpenter from Nazareth resembled them, the people. In contrast, while still heroic, Washington seemed more distant, even aloof.

Yet calculation as well as veneration entered the campaign to sanctify Lincoln. Radical Republicans revealed a political reason for comparing Lincoln to Jesus. Trying to explain why a rational Providence had permitted Lincoln to die, they decided that the savior of the nation had proved himself too Christ-like, too softhearted, too "womanly," for the necessarily punitive job of "reconstructing" the postwar South. God in his wisdom had put Andrew Johnson in place for the messy task of enacting justice.

Many Protestants also displayed a religious motive for emphasizing the resemblance between Lincoln and Christ. They made the president a virtual holy man because they wished retroactively to make him a morally impeccable and believing Christian. They considered theater-going, a favorite pastime of the president, as morally dubious; his choice of the stage for recreation on this day of crucifixion made them sick at heart.

And Lincoln, who after 1862 had spoken repeatedly of his dependence on God and Providence, had never referred much to Jesus. The barrage of Jesus comparisons offered a camouflaging aura of piety for a man who had enjoyed lowbrow, off-color humor as much as play-acting.

Results of Civil War:

LINCOLN LEFT NO PLAN OR EXIT STRATEGY AT WAR'S END: WHAT HAPPENED AND WHAT WAS DONE- RECONSTRUCTION!

President "Staggering" Johnson who took over after Lincoln, tried to block emancipation in his home state and keep the states slaves AFTER the war. He despised blacks, tried to get out of Lincoln's inauguration, some believe he was the contact in the White House that was to put a letter on Lincoln's desk after Lee's victory in Gettysburgh setting terms for the end of the war. ( Since there was no Lee victory, we'll never know).

To acknowledge Johnson however means having to discuss THE REALITY of America after the Civil War. Not idealistic promises BUT WHAT REALLY HAPPENED.

The first sign of trouble was probably that Johnson refused to mourn Lincoln, refused to lead the nation in mourning him, AND MADE NO COMMENT ABOUT HIS DEATH.

I think it's time to bring up the Reconstruction in a new thread. The true litmus test of what was fought for.

What really happened after the war Lincoln supporters don't like to mention. "Pay no attention to the results....."

Johnson surprised Mr. Lincoln himself when he asked if his presence was necessary for the inauguration; "This Johnson is a queer man," Mr. Lincoln told Shelby M. Cullom.1

The public was also surprised when a sick Johnson fortified himself with liquor in order to prepare for his swearing-in as Vice President on March 5, 1865. His subsequent speech in the Senate chamber was a strange humiliation of himself and everyone else present. "I am a-goin' for to tell you here to-day; yes, I'm a-goin for to tell you all, that I'm a plebian! I glory in it; I am a plebian! The people—yes, the people of the United States have made me what I am; and I am a-goin' for to tell you here to-day—yes, to-day, in this place—that the people are everything."
Frederick Douglass later contended that Johnson revealed another aspect of his character that day: "On this inauguration day, while waiting for the opening of the ceremonies, I made a discovery in regard to the vice president—Andrew Johnson. There are moments in the lives of most men, when the doors of their souls are open, and unconsciously to themselves, their true characters may be read by the observant eye. It was at such an instant I caught a glimpse of the real nature of this man, which all subsequent developments proved true. I was standing in the crowd by the side of Mrs. Thomas J. Dorsey, when Mr. Lincoln touched Mr. Johnson, and pointed me out to him. The first expression which came to his face, and which I think was the true index of his heart, was one of bitter contempt and aversion.
Johnson was unique among Southerner senators at the outbreak of the war in retaining his seat rather than supporting the Confederacy. He supported emancipation, but opposed the application of the Emancipation Proclamation to Tennessee and opposed the extension of rights and assistance to blacks after the war.

Obstinate and opinionated, insecure and class-conscious, well-dressed but frequently ill-tempered, Johnson as President quarreled with Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and with Congress over Reconstruction and the Tenure of Office Act. He was impeached on February 24, 1868. Conviction failed by one vote—in part because of the weakness of the case and in part because of opposition to Senator Benjamin Wade succeeding Johnson as President.
Although Johnson waited patiently to occupy the presidential quarters, his failure to pay the customary acts of condolence infuriated Mrs. Lincoln, who was sensitive to any slight of her husband or herself . She later wrote that "My own intense misery, has been augmented by the same thought—that, that miserable inebriate Johnson, had cognizance of my husband's death..
http://www.mrlincolnswhitehouse.org/inside.asp?ID=91&subjectID=2

The answer to the question posed in the title of this article is: No. There are no limits to the lies and misrepresentations about Lincoln’s political legacy – and about those who question the Official Version of it – that are spread by what I call the Lincoln cult. It almost seems congenital. As soon as The Real Lincoln was published in 2002, the Lincoln cult swung into action with outlandish and outrageous misrepresentations of what I say in the book in an obvious attempt to keep people from reading it. I was surprised to learn from various hatchet men associated with the Claremont Institute, for example, that I am a Marxist; that there is not a single Lincoln quote in my book (a blatant lie, of course); that there is a defense of slavery in the book (another blatant lie); that there is sympathy for Nazi Germany in the book (the biggest lie of all); and on and on.

Various "Lincoln scholars" have stood up during debates with me to declare to audiences of laypersons such blatant falsehoods as: the Union Army never caused the death of a single Southern civilian; no private property was stolen during Sherman’s march; Lincoln never did a single thing that was unconstitutional or illegal; I supposedly wrote that it would have been fine had slavery lasted into the 20^th century (this was actually Lincoln’s opinion, not mine); Virginia did not reserve the right to take back the powers it delegated to the central government at some future date as a condition of ratifying the Constitution; the king of England did not sign a peace treaty that named all the individual states; and myriad other lies that are easily researched by simply consulting the plain facts of history.

The latest example of such shenanigans is an article entitled "The Limits of Lincoln Bashing" by one Grant Havers, a Canadian philosophy professor, in the April 23 online edition of Taki’s Magazine. Havers apparently believes that pointing out how the actual facts of historical reality conflict with Harry Jaffa’s stylized interpretations of Lincoln’s rhetoric constitutes "bashing" as opposed to scholarship. He devotes only a paragraph to myself and my writings, and every single thing he says about me in the paragraph is false.

Havers identifies me as a "paleoconservative historian" despite the fact that I have never described myself in this way to anyone, either verbally or in writing. In fact, I don’t even know what a paleoconservative is. I know of several people who label themselves as such, but they seem to have differing views on many issues, which leads me to believe that there is not even one single definition of the term. Nor am I a historian (thank goodness) but an economist with an interest in history, especially economic history.

So much for the first half of Havers’ first sentence. The second half of his first sentence discussing me and my work contains the preposterous falsehood that I "have eagerly accepted Jaffa’s terms of discourse while disputing its moral implications." In reality, I think Harry Jaffa is a crackpot. I utterly reject his strange notion that Lincoln was a champion equality, a myth that is at the heart of everything Jaffa has ever written on the subject. While it is true that Lincoln quoted Jefferson’s "all men are created equal" words from the Declaration on Independence on a few occasions, his entire adult life is a demonstration that he was in fact as opposed to equality as any white man in 19^th century America was, North or South. "I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races," he said in his September 18, 1858 debate with Stephen Douglas. He repeated this on many other occasions.

More importantly, his lifelong actions prove that this was indeed his true belief. He voted against black suffrage in Illinois; opposed allowing blacks to testify in court in Illinois; voted against abolishing the slave trade in Washington, D.C. during his one term in Congress; supported the Illinois "Black Codes" that deprived the small number of free blacks who resided in the state of any semblance of citizenship; supported the "Corwin Amendment" to the Constitution that would have formally enshrined slavery in the U.S. Constitution; and spent his entire adult life advocating "colonization" or the deportation of black people from the U.S. He was one of the "managers" of the Illinois Colonization Society which sought to use state tax dollars to deport free blacks out of the state.

Lincoln was a masterful politician who could use tongue-twisting rhetoric to deceive the public better than any American politician in history. In this regard he was Bill Clinton times ten thousand. For example, referring to the part of Declaration of Independence that mentions equality (while ignoring the fact that the entire document was a declaration of the right of secession), he said: "The African upon his own soil has all the natural rights that instrument vouchsafes to all mankind" (emphasis added). The italicized words are the key to understanding Lincoln on this point. He considered black people to be some kind of alien beings, which is why he called them "the Africans." More importantly, he believed that they could never be equal here in America, but only "upon their own soil" or "in their native clime," i.e., Africa, Haiti, Central America, etc., as he often stated. Moreover, he also clearly believed that it was undesirable to attempt to enforce racial equality in the U.S., as he stated in the above quotation from the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Harry Jaffa has spent his entire career spreading the Big Lie of Lincoln as a champion of "equality" in order to justify the Republican Party’s foreign policy agenda of military aggression and imperialism in the name of spreading equality around the globe. (Spreading "equality" around the globe at gunpoint sounds a lot like the professed goals of 20^th-century communism, doesn’t it?).

Jaffa’s second Big Lie, one that was invented by Alexander Hamilton, repeated by Webster, Joseph Story, John Marshall and others, including Lincoln, was that there was never any such thing as state sovereignty in America. The Constitution was supposedly ratified by some kind of national election involving "the whole people." This lie was invented by Hamilton in his propaganda war for a centralized, monopolistic state. Of course, "the whole people" never had anything whatsoever to do with the founding or the ratification of the Constitution (women didn’t even have the right to vote until 1920). That was the job of the sovereign states, as is clearly stated in Article 7 of the Constitution.

The next falsehood about me and my work that Havers jams into one short paragraph in Taki’s Magazine is that I allegedly put "the responsibility for all American empire building on Abe’s shoulders alone"; I am supposedly unaware that "pre-Lincoln America" had certain "tendencies towards centralized power"; and that Lincoln was not "the first architect of Leviathan in America."

Havers has obviously not read my books. If there is one over-arching theme, it is that Lincoln, as I have written, was the "political son of Alexander Hamilton, the champion of a centralized governmental monarchy, or something like it, coupled with British-style mercantilistic economic policies (protectionist tariffs, central banking, corporate welfare) and an aggressive foreign policy. After the death of Hamilton and his nemesis Jefferson, this political mantle was carried on by the heirs of Hamilton’s Federalists, the Whigs, including Clay, Webster, and Lincoln. I tell this story of the struggle between the American advocates of Leviathan government (Hamilton-Clay-Lincoln) and their Jeffersonian opponents in my books, but as I said, Havers obviously did not bother to read them before posing as a legitimate critic of them.

April 29, 2008

Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send him mail] professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland and the author of The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War, (Three Rivers Press/Random House). His latest book is Lincoln Unmasked: What You’re Not Supposed To Know about Dishonest Abe (Crown Forum/Random House).

Critics decided they "didn't give a damn" on Wednesday after the world premier of a new musical version of the American Civil War epic "Gone With the Wind."

http://www.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnoughNews/idUSHAR36168520080423?rpc=401&feedType=RSS&feedName=oddlyEnoughNews&rpc=401