Heroes do not always appear heroic until time has a chance to reveal the magnitude of their actions.
From Hillsdale College's Imprimis July/August 2019. "Rediscovering the Wisdom in American History" by Wilfred M. McClay.
So accustomed are we to thinking of Lincoln in heroic terms that we forget the depth and breadth of his unpopularity during his entire time in office. Few great leaders have been more comprehensively disdained, loathed, and underestimated. A low Southern view of him, of course, was to be expected, but it was widely shared in the North as well. As Lincoln biographer David Donald put it, “Lincoln’s own associates thought him ‘a Simple Susan, a baboon, an aimless punster, a smutty joker.’” Abolitionist Wendell Phillips called him “a huckster in politics, a first-rate, second-rate man.” George McClellan, his opponent in the 1864 election, openly disdained him as a “well-meaning baboon.” For much of that election year, Lincoln was convinced, with good reason, that he was doomed to lose the election, with incalculable consequences for the war effort and the future of the nation.
Writing Regency novels makes it easy for me to see why the upper class "gentlemen" of the day would scorn a man raised in a log cabin.
