Kendall, you seem fixated on the fact that the 13th Amendment was passed after Lincoln's death. I have shown you that he was actively working on the 13th at the time he was murdered. It is not his fault he was killed too soon, nor does the postmortem passage diminish his work in freeing the slaves.

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BigMick, re your comment: Lincoln was a politican and had to work, towards total abolition as he could through the war.

Lincoln was very anti-slavery, whose election was the proximate cause of the secession of South Carolina, and the South.

As it happens, while driving this p.m., I heard an interview with Michael Burlingame, who wrote a new (I think) biography, "A. Lincoln: A Live". Two points struck me: the Lincoln family moved from Indiana to Illinois so as to not be in a slave area; in an 1859 letter to a politician, he noted the next president would have to be an anti-slavery leader. Those, of course are not MB's exact words, but I was driving.

I believe that both in the context of his period, hispresidency and the backward look of history, President Lincoln is the greatest president we've ever had, warts and all...and second place isn't even close.