Yesterday was Abraham Lincoln's birthday...

...and I postponed writing about him for a reason: he's not my favorite president. In fact, until recently I considered him the worst, just behind FDR. He was just too much of a Statist for the libertarian that I used to be. Without going into all of that, I'd like to focus on just one piece of his presidency, the 600,000 Americans that died during the Civil War. As I'm sure you learned in school, that's more than all the other American wars combined. Now whether or not you think preserving the Union was worth it, that's still a staggering number. Consider the Iraq war, which I think went a long way to electing our current president. It's claimed only 4,000 American lives so far. The Vietnam War, which lasted about ten years, resulted in about 50,000 American deaths. The battle of Gettysburg alone, to put it in perspective, had over 50,000 casualties in just a few days! Chickamauga had 34,000, Chancellorsville had 30,000, Spotsylvania had 27,000, and five others had over 20,000. And many of these battles took place after the war had already been fought for a few years. The hardest hit state was North Carolina, which lost over 20,000 men alone. To give you even more perspective, the 1860 census recorded 31 million Americans. 600,000 would be almost 2% of the total. In today's America, that would be like losing 6 million people!

Now there's a lot more to Lincoln's presidency and I won't go into all of it now--it's just too vast a subject. (You've probably heard that more books have been published in America about Lincoln than any other man except Jesus.) But just suffice it to say that it's hard for me to consider anyone a success that presided over the deaths of that many U. S. citizens.