Which leaves him doing nothing of the sort.
Where the People were consulted directly, to give a comparison, the People backed the secession conventions, even in the Upper South where first they had voted for continued Union.
When the People changed their minds and voted for secession, they voted the same way the conventions did, and the informed opinion represented in the conventions did reflect the popular feeling, only in even more decisive degree.
You Union triumphalists always try to represent secession as a Chinese fire drill or a hooraw stampede, when it was nothing of the sort. These people weren't playing. It was very much for real, but you will go to any length to blink the fact that your Southern neighbors, knowing you well, rejected you completely at the moment of decision.
That is what sticks in your craw, to this very day.
And nothing you did later, then or now, has ever vitiated that judgment of you.
Not nearly as badly as the fact that, once you started a war you got your asses kicked sticks in yours. You've been whining about it ever since.