3. No President Ever Carried as Heavy a Burden as Abraham Lincoln
Throughout the history of the United States, no president before or since has ever faced challenges as varied and as difficult as did Abraham Lincoln. Chief among them was the Civil War, which killed about 700,000 to 900,000 people. Prorated to the current US population, that would be the equivalent of about nine to ten million dead Americans today. He had to handle that bloodbath without the vast support staff and civil bureaucracy available to modern presidents to ease and streamline their workload. He had to cope with ineptness and incompetence by sundry generals, who dealt the Union cause setback back after setback and piled up defeat after defeat.
In addition to armed rebellion in the South, Lincoln had to contend with treason in the North. There were vicious attacks directed at him from both right and left, from the opposition Democrats and from within the ranks of his own Republican party, and accusations of incompetence and tyranny. There was disloyalty within his own cabinet, plots and schemes and terrorism, plus a serious threat of foreign war against Britain and France. In the middle of all that, a beloved son caught a fever and died, at the tender age of eleven years old. To top it all off, he had to deal with a crazy wife at home – a spouse who literally suffered bouts of insanity.