[sargon]

Both Lincoln and Davis were tyrants and enemies of liberty.

I guess I can agree with that, although I'd like to know what you think Lincoln should have or could have done differently. He was put in the most difficult position which any American President has ever been in...

[Captain Kirk]

He should have let the South go and abandon Fort Sumter. Had he done so, Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Tennesse woudl have stayed in the Union (they only left because of Sumter). He should have then opened the borders to runaway slaves. The end result would have been a weak, heavily black, Gulf Coast confederacy which would have been highly vulnerable to slave rebellions and slave escapes. As it did in Brazil, slavery would have probably collapsed from its own weight within a couple of decades.

Instead, as we know, he did the following: sent over a million men to their deaths (millions of others were crippled and maimed), suspended the ancient right of habeus corpus, debased the currency, created the first income tax (thus leaving a dangerous precedent), and imposed the first national conscription in American history (another dangerous precedents). While the war did lead to the abolition of slavery, the same folks who seceded were back in the driver's seat in the South by the 1870s and blacks were confined to second-class citizenship for nearly a centruy.