If there is not the war, you don't get the great general; if there is not a great occasion, you don't get a great statesman; if Lincoln had lived in a time of peace, no one would have known his name.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
There is no disputing that Lincoln was a great man.
President Lincoln chose to fight a bloody and unpopular war because he believed the enemy had to be defeated. He was right.
We should honor Franklin Delano Roosevelt today as the greatest commander in chief of the Armed Forces of the United States in our history, bar none - including President Lincoln.
Politically I did not like Mr. Lincoln, for in him I saw the destroyer.
Success in war underpins the claims to greatness of many presidents.
Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.
It is important to understand how leaders have adapted and thought about war and warfare across their careers. 'The Autobiography of General Ulysses S. Grant: Memoirs of the Civil War' is perhaps the best war memoir ever written.
If Lincoln is among history's truly great men, he didn't achieve that stature until his final three years. This was when his long-held antipathy to slavery cohered into a dedicated hostility that gave larger purpose to the Civil War and also confirmed the logic of Lincoln's destiny.
Abraham Lincoln went through 12 generals before he got Ulysses S. Grant. He had never done a Civil War before.
A general is just as good or just as bad as the troops under his command make him.