| Notes | Book |
Not exactly, but on the other hand, he was commander-in-chief of an army that killed a lot of innocent civilians in the Southern States in the Civil War.
The circumstances were uncannily similar to those of the Kurds that Saddam Hussein gassed. The South was in a state of rebellion. The Kurds were in a state of rebellion. No government will put up with that. Better you die than pay taxes to some other Statist. Lincoln didn't gas the southerners, but I doubt very much that it matters to a child whether his father or mother was killed by poison gas, or a bullet, or a bayonet. Dead is dead. The suffering of the survivors lasted longer than the suffering of the dead in both cases.
The US Government makes a big deal out of having weapons of mass destruction, but it managed to kill between two and three million people in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam war using "Weapons of Retail Destruction". That's a lot more than the few hundred thousand killed by the A-Bomb at the end of WWII. Perhaps we should reclassify the B-52 as a weapon of mass destruction.
When we hear Neocon Republicans recite the cant phrase, "He gassed his own people", perhaps we should remember that the founder of Republican party did something remarkably similar.