The great Presidents eradicated the tyranny caused by a developing caste system
Abe made the first real grab for executive power, setting the stage for future abuses by his successors.
Because our government started off with only 1 party, a natural totalitarian system arose during the infancy of our nation's functioning. This represented the first grab for executive power when the legal precedent of the 2 party system was created. While the Federalists party was created as a challenge to ammend the Constitution, the Democratic Republican party was created to preserve it. The Democratic Republicans feared that any ammending process would go beyond simple clarification to the degree that the whole Constitution would be thrown out.
The legal precedent of the 2 party system allowed government a way of interpreting the Constitutionality of laws because the Supreme Court at that time did not handle such a function as it was only in the business of penalizing states with "Writs of Mandimus." So, if they wanted to express their interpretation of the Constitution, a party needed to win executive power.
Lincoln did indeed increase the power of the Executive branch but he did so to preserve the Union as a modern civilization. He achieved this task by both the freeing of the slaves and the binding of the masters. Both of these tasks were needed to keep the natural form of a primitive caste system out of our modern civilization.
In addition, due to his poor handling of the Civil War and Reconstruction, we still have race relations problems today, a hundred and fifty years after the end of slavery.
Before the time of Confucius and Socrates, teachers were only in the business of training. They trained the children of the "master" castes how to take the reigns of power to prepare them for the end of their parent's rule. No one dared consider that the poor children of the serving "slave" castes could learn how to improve their happiness (which Socrates called the "good life") because such an idea endangered the futile functioning of the primitive system. So, everyone subsisted content together while dynasties from around the world perpetuated themselves for thousands of years.
Confucius in China put pressure on such dynasties when he said that: The children should obey their parents; the wives should obey their husbands; the men should obey their government; while, in turn, the government should serve the people.
More significant, it was Socrates who introduced to the world the concept of the midwife philosopher (serving teacher) to the poor. He believed every human soul existed in equal form before the time of their existence with each mind knowing everything there was to know. After darkness entered their minds during the traumatic event of their births, it was only then that all knowledge was lost. So, unlike the trainers of his time, Socrates served. He served the poor mind so that it might "recollect" knowledge that had been lost to it.
So, while government functioned as a primitive caste system of a master and slave relationship prior to both Confucius and Socrates, both of these philosophers introduced a modern concept of positive government where all people might find a degree of happiness for themselves.
As the primitive government is a natural one and the modern unnatural, there will always be pressure for modern governments to return to their natural, primitive state. So, it is naive to think that just because we freed the slaves once we have rid our nation forever of a primitive caste system. This is a process that requires a continual battle by us. This battle involves constant eradication of the caste system with the slave constantly having to be freed and the master constantly having to be bound.
Two examples of how our nation is eroding back into the tyranny of a primitive caste system are through the processes of our taxation and of our legal system. As taxes are working to eradicate the middle class from our nation for the purpose of giving money to a rich master class and to a poor slave caste, the verdicts of our legal system are sentencing people into winning master castes and into losing slave ones. As our lawmakers create legal precedents which erode our nation back into tyranny, the civil purpose our founding fathers designed into the Constitution was to eradicate such a tyranny.