So you are going to split hairs that a "plea to get them to return" is somehow different from offering them a deal?
It isn't my choice of verbiage to which you object, it is the fact that I have pointed out that Lincoln's principles, and therefore the cause for which he killed 750,000 people and destroyed huge swaths of land and impoverished millions of people, were "malleable."
Yes, Lincoln's principles were malleable. They would change to suit his current political needs. In his speech to Congress in 1848 he clearly said that all people had a right to leave a larger government and become independent. He called it a "sacred right" to do so.
But that principle also ended up on the chopping block when it came to what he saw as his political best interests. By 1860, he had thoroughly reversed his position on this "sacred right."
Lincoln was going to keep slavery so long as the South remained under Washington's economic control. It was their independence from Washington that was the real cause of war, not whether or not they and the five Union states had slavery.
Lincoln could compromise on keeping slavery permanently. He adamantly refused to cooperate with the idea that states could escape his economic control.
Of course once the south started the war, it was moot.
The South did not start the War. Lincoln started the war. He attacked first. He sent a war fleet to Charleston with Orders to attack the Confederate forces there. When the warships showed up in Charleston, the Confederates saw this as a deliberate attack, and so they started firing at the fort.
Lincoln swung first, but the Confederates connected first.
That's more nonsense. The southern slavocracy was wholly responsible for the war, They whipped up a hysteria about Lincoln that painted him as an ape who was going to take their slaves away, something he had no power to do. They had largely seceeded before he took office, so nothing he did caused that. Then he specifically refused to initiate hostilities, and sought a negotiated settlement, his only condition at being that they stayed in the union. At that point he offered far more generous terms than he would have otherwise, specificaly to avoid a war. Hardly the actions of a warmonger. The south, in the grip of that phony hysteria, and ridiculously certian of quick victory, then initiated war anyway. Lincoln simply responded in the only way he could at that point. The death and destruction lies soley on the heads of those foolish enough to start a war they had little chance to win, not Lincoln.
The bottom line is the south's motive for secession and starting the war was fear of losing their slaves. That's understandable. They represented trillions of dollars worth of "property" in todays terms. In the north, the goal the vast majority agreed on was saving the union. Some wanted slavery abolished, others didn't, but they agreed on union. As time went on public opinion shifted and more people began to believe that all the blood and treasure spent would be wasted if the union was restored with slavery. Your attempts to say slavery wasn't the root cause of the war are simply a way for you to justify the south's actions without having to justify the indefensible institutiion of slavery and paint the side that started it all as the victim.