“The Great Emancipator” may have also been “The Great Centralizer”:

The Lincoln regime destroyed the system of federalism, or states’ rights, that was established by the founding fathers. After the war, the union was no longer voluntary, and all states, North and South, became mere appendages of Washington, D.C. Lincoln illegally suspended the writ of habeas corpus and imprisoned tens of thousands of political dissenters without due process; waged total war with the bombing, plundering, and mass murder of some 50,000 of his own citizens; signed ten tariff-raising bills; imposed heavy ‘sin taxes’ on alcohol and tobacco; introduced the first federal income-tax and military-conscription laws; introduced an internal-revenue bureaucracy for the first time; executed thousands of accused deserters from the army; shut down hundreds of opposition newspapers in the Northern states; went off the gold standard and nationalized the money supply; introduced massive corporate-welfare schemes; deported an opposition member of Congress; and exploded the public debt, among other sins.

The Lincoln myth is the cornerstone of the ideology of American statism. Lincoln was the most-hated president of all time during his own lifetime…. The fact that he is now the most revered of all American presidents is a result of the work of generations of court historians and statist apologists who have literally rewritten American history in the same manner that the Soviets rewrote Russian history to consolidate their political power. The deification of Abe Lincoln eventually led to the deification of all presidents, and to the American state in general, . . . effectively resurrecting a version of the medieval notion of the divine right of kings. The divine right of kings is now called ‘American exceptionalism’.”

DiLorenzo’s full Mises Daily article — “The Great Centralizer: Lincoln and the Growth of Statism in America” — is here.