Unfortunately, a George Washington or Abraham Lincoln doesn't come around very often. Washington was widely and justifiably well-regarded and loved by most all Americans in his time. And Lincoln, who is practically unanimously considered by historians today as one of our best ever presidents, was often ridiculed and disliked in his own time.
Sorry Hodge,
they were both monsters
Washington was the biggest realtor of his day
his objection to british rule was the limit of 200 miles from salt water - Washington wanted to be selling real estate from ocean to ocean.
Vested interests or what?
During the whisky rebellion, Washington even took parties of potential customers to up-state Pennsylvania to view the prime properties he had there - my personal opinion, it's a shame that none of the rebels gave him a hot lead injection.
as for the whisky tax, there were sufficient parasites who wanted an income from tax farming in the area, that the new united state army (remember how short a time this was from the coup d'etat of the constitutional convention) was used to enforce that tax, for those idle and parasitic cronies.
elsewhere, people continued distilling and selling (and drinking) whisky relatively un hindered.
Lincoln; take a look at the leading Lincoln scholar, Tom DiLorenzo
forget all about Lincoln wanting to end slavery
The rest of the world had already done that 80 years before, and the only place where it took a war was Haiti (yeah, that shithole!). there is absolutely zero "grace" attaching to 'murica for that appalling war. zero.
Lincoln was a racist - The black people who he called to the Whitehouse, he brow beat into preaching sermons about emigration of blacks to Africa. He was convinced (and that is very clear in his correspondence) that black people were in every way inferior to whites and that there had to be a race that was master - and it naturally follows, one which was inferior.
The 700,000 plus deaths in the war against the south were far more about the Morrill tariff (paid predominantly by the south and benefiting yankee crony (and absolutely shitty) industrialists) than it ever was about ending slavery
Lincoln is clear that he didn't give a damn about slavery
he wanted to "preserve the union" (the tax/tariff base)
but the south had already left the gulag of the union
and as Lysander Spooner noted:
"the right to secession derives from a slave's right to be free"
the war against the south was a war of colonial conquest and tax serfdom.
absolutely nothing personal against you or any other poster here
Mount Rushmore is actually a pretty good guide
the faces there, were the worst monsters of all.
whichever one comes next, probably deserves pride of place there
personally, I'm hoping that the head says "non of the above"
