John J. Miller: Sorry, Bam: Lincoln Had It Way Worse

John J. Miller directs the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College and authored The First Assassin, a novel about Lincoln and the Civil War.

President Obama has a new complaint: “Lincoln -- they used to talk about him almost as bad as they talk about me.”

More abused than Abraham Lincoln? Obama has no idea.

He has yet to experience anything like the hatred poured on his distinguished predecessor. Lincoln was the single most despised president in American history.

The vitriol began even before he was elected. After securing the Republican nomination in 1860, he was branded the “Black Republican.” Southern newspapers obsessed over his physical appearance. He was “the leanest, lankest, most ungainly mass of legs and arms and hatchet face ever strung on a human frame” and “a horrid looking wretch . . . sooty and scoundrelly in aspect, a cross between the nutmeg dealer, the horse swapper and the night man.”

They didn’t like his views any better. Lincoln was “a blood-thirsty tyrant,” a “border ruffian” and “a vulgar mobocrat.” An Alabama group proposed a motto: “Resistance to Lincoln is obedience to God.” Throughout the emerging Confederacy, Lincoln was burned in effigy. His name didn’t even appear on Southern ballots…