In other words you cannot find proof that Lincoln endorsed slavery.
Lincoln was a masterful politician, especially if as you suggest he forced the south to secede and started a war even before he took the oath of office as president.
Quite a feat by any stretch of the imagination.
Every statement of his that is adduced to show that he did, always had a tactical or political context. No, I've never seen anything that convinced me that he actually did.
Once he picked up the issue as a conspicuous political theme in 1854, when he challenged Sen. Stephen A. Douglas over Douglas's Kansas-Nebraska Act, as a way of putting his own name before the public and the Illinois legislature as a Whig candidate for junior U.S. Senator for the State of Illinois (the seat eventually went to Lyman Trumbull as a compromise candidate), he never laid it down and never compromised, as far as I can tell.
Lincoln was a masterful politician, especially if as you suggest he forced the south to secede and started a war even before he took the oath of office as president.
Well, all students of the era agree he was a master politician. In a war environment, he made himself the undisputed, absolute master of the United States Government. Nobody, not even Chief Justice Taney, ever succeeded in reversing Lincoln on anything.
I'd go so far as to say that Lincoln's success, and that of his party and political circle after his death, illuminates a problem of democracy: the susceptibility of even carefully and artfully checked-and-balanced representative democracy to the workings of faction and cabal. Madison and later Calhoun lost sleep over the problem of faction. Faction eventually burned the Republic to the ground and slew many of its defenders in the process, by turning other defenders against them.
Now we have lobbyocracy and plutocracy and bankocracy and lawyerocracy. People participate in voting in declining numbers, the Congress is a joke full of self-seeking grafters and poltroons, and the Government, driven by a cabal, is overreaching every protection conceived by the Framers.
Got any suggestions?