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Lincoln was a statist pig who got what he had coming.

Never a serious student of the Civil War, I ask this question honestly and without bias. How would a panel of the best qualified Constitutional scholars view the war in retrospect? Was it legal? Or was it Mr Lincoln and supporters, saying, no, I'll kill you before I let you divorce me?

I always find it humorous that blacks believe Lincoln was their hero. Lincoln was a divisive racist and didn’t want freed blacks to remain in the US after the CW. Further, he only used the Emancipation Proclamation to free Southern backs in an effort to further erode the South’s power.

Before he was elected, Lincoln promised to preserve slavery as a constitutionally mandated permanent reality. Lincoln’s own words are an inconvenient truth that most Americans wish to ignore:

“I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists,” he said, vowing never to defy what was “plainly written” in the Constitution. “I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”


Further, during the war he continued to view slavery only as a tool to achieve victory over the South.

Written during the heart of the Civil War, this is one of Abraham Lincoln's most famous letters. Greeley, editor of the influential New York Tribune, had just addressed an editorial to Lincoln called "The Prayer of Twenty Millions," making demands and implying that Lincoln's administration lacked direction and resolve.

President Lincoln wrote his reply when a draft of the Emancipation Proclamation already lay in his desk drawer. His response revealed his concentration on preserving the Union. The letter, which received acclaim in the North, stands as a classic statement of Lincoln's constitutional responsibilities. A few years after the president's death, Greeley wrote an assessment of Lincoln. He stated that Lincoln did not actually respond to his editorial but used it instead as a platform to prepare the public for his "altered position" on emancipation.


Executive Mansion,
Washington, August 22, 1862.

Hon. Horace Greeley:
Dear Sir.

I have just read yours of the 19th. addressed to myself through the New-York Tribune. If there be in it any statements, or assumptions of fact, which I may know to be erroneous, I do not, now and here, controvert them. If there be in it any inferences which I may believe to be falsely drawn, I do not now and here, argue against them. If there be perceptable in it an impatient and dictatorial tone, I waive it in deference to an old friend, whose heart I have always supposed to be right.

As to the policy I "seem to be pursuing" as you say, I have not meant to leave any one in doubt.

I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be "the Union as it was." If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them.

If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.

I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors; and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views.

I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free.

Yours,
A. Lincoln.


In regards to his Presidency, Lincoln tread all over the US Constitution by suspending habeas corpus unilaterally. He ignored Congress and proceeded to arrest thousands of political opponents and suppressing the free press and free speech to a degree unmatched in U.S. history before or since. When Chief Justice Roger Taney of the Supreme Court held that the suspension was unconstitutional, Lincoln ignored him.


Lincoln should not be exalted by either side of the aisle. He should have been impeached for his actions.

This contortion of history is almost as bad as the 1619 project and cancel culture's interpretation of history. History is not to be interpreted it is to be taught as a historical fact. Fact is Lincoln tried concessions to the Southern Oligarchs, but it didn't work. The great debate wasn't necessarily about the southern states having slavery but about the New Territories that the South was hell bent on making slave states. Lincoln was not the only person in government and in the North that wanted America to abandon Slavery. Our Constitution demanded it and still does if you can read. Tremendous growth and fundamental economic differences between the North and South had as much to do with it as anything else. The north had manufacturing and industry established and the South was largely agrarian with large scale farming that depended on slave labor. They wanted slavery's extension into the new territories. In 1854 the us congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act which opened up all new territories to slavery by asserting the rule of popular sovereignty over congressional edict. The North was violently opposed and The Republican Party was formed based on the principal of opposing slavery's extension into the western territories. After the Supreme Court's decision in 1857 (Dred Scott) confirming slaveries legality hatred simmered until the abolitionist John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859 was the start of what would become the greatest disaster in American History. Over 600K people would die in the bloodiest war in our history. Lincoln's election in 1860 was the last straw and within three months the South seceded.
Who attacked who? In March 1861 confederate forces attacked Fort Sumpter in SC. The war was on. John Wilkes Booth sealed Reconstruction's fate by murdering the only person in American Government that wanted to forgive and forget. Lincoln would have made Reconstruction much easier and less painful. As it was it took almost a century to get over the effects of Reconstruction and in some ways we have not made it yet. People on this forum still complain about North vs South and relive the war as much as they can.
Leave our Honored dead in peace and understand that the only way America has survived as a Nation; a Union to this day is because we were not allowed to tear ourselves apart forming little island nations on the same soil. Take a clue from Europe's many wars over centuries that "a Nation divided cannot stand".

Lincoln's death resulted in the failure of his plan to resettle freed blacks to Central and South America. Further, his death was used as a tool to empower the abolitionist movement.

If Lincoln had not been assassinated, this country would look a whole lot different that it does today.

No doubt it would, but if everyone were to believe you, America wouldn’t be a better place.

I don’t consider your analysis as entirely correct, and I also don’t see Lincoln as the monster you have painted him.

Never said he was a monster. I said he does not deserve the heaps of praise based on the revisionist High School version of his actions before and during his presidency.

Lincoln clearly viewed slaves as nothing more than property and a means to an end - to preserve the Union. He also committed Impeachable acts while President, again all under the excuse to preserve the Union.

The ends does not justify the means and Lincoln epitomizes this POV.

It was not legal, since each state was always, prior to the war, considered to be free to separate from our voluntary union (which notion was one of our nation's founding principles, see, e.g., the Declaration of Independence). That ever-present possibility was one of the built in checks against centralized tyranny intended by the Founders and Framers. In fact, the threat of secession had been already successfully used several times to moderate proposals for the concentration of national power in the decades prior to the Civil War.

Any one care to give an opinion on the above?

Also, while at it, is the notion Lincoln came to believe later in the war that slavery was immoral and without abolishing it the country would never fully fulfill its inherent promises?

You continue to judge him by your 21st century standards, not knowing what it was like to live in 1861 America.

Most likely the illegitimate kid of a farmer and servant girl right here in Western NC

Dagum

Because they simply don't want to understand that Lincolns view on Negroes evolved during the War. Mostly because of his friendship with Frederick Douglass. They like to believe here that 1860 Abraham Lincoln was 1865 Abraham Lincoln

Frick you and the horse you rode in on. This entire GD mess we have today is because of GD Lincoln and his GD war that saved this glorious union so it could continue to oppress us to this very fricking day. Every godless Democrat, statist pig, and communist [bleep] is his spiritual descendant. Frick him and his rotting corpse and frick anyone who has anything good to say about him.

Don’t hold back, JoeBob…..

I just so tired of people getting on here and elsewhere glorifying that bastard and everything that has come since when it has so clearly led us to this point where we are today. We are probably the most corrupt nation on earth with regard to our government. We have endless foreign wars and are about to get in some conflict with THE ONE power on earth who could kill damned nearly everyone one of us about what? Who the frick knows? At home we are besieged by communists who control this leviathan and inundated with third world foreigners from around the globe against our will. Today, there are people rotting in federal jails under absolutely inhuman conditions who MIGHT AT THE MOST, be guilty of trespassing.

And yet, we still have to endure the cult of Lincoln. The man who made all of this possible and established the principle that no matter what, the federal government is supreme and can and will use the ultimate force to demonstrate and enforce that supremacy. Everything that is happening now is possible ONLY because of the actions he took in the 1860s.

Thanks, I guess the evidence was always there, it just went over my head. No matter anyone's opinion on this national divorce....is war ever the best solution? Other than the obvious people like Hitler, Stalin, Xi who believe in world domination and genocide on an epic scale. I often wonder today, what would this nation look like now if PTG Beauregard hadn't ordered that attack? A 600,000 man gene pool of maybe the best and bravest...gone to the worms.

Some people misunderstand Lincoln’s reluctance to cede federal territory in Fort Sumter. The fort was only secondarily placed there for defense of the harbor. The main reason it was there was to collect import duties and tariffs which were almost the sole means of funding the federal government in those days. Keeping the fort and keeping it garrisoned demonstrated an intent to continue to dominate the harbor and collect duties. In fact Lincoln even said South Carolina could do whatever they liked as long as duties continued to be collected. Obviously, no nation could allow a foreign power to collect import duties in its harbors.

Many are not smart enought to grasp the facts

Well said.

You can’t have it both ways. The Republican Party was formed to fight the notion that men and women can be legally enslaved. If you are a Democrat wear that racialism proudly.
Quit trying to fight a war that was lost over a century ago. It was fought and won to free men from slavery.
If you like the deprivation that the democrat leftists have put on us then you deserve what you voted for.