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Well stated. Add to that, that when the south began its move toward secession, they were still as free as anyone else in the nation (excepting those, of course, whom they subjugated through slavery). Nothing had changed except a presidential election. They were just as free the day after the election as they were the day before.

It was they who initiated the downward spiral to hell, they who struck the first blow, they who brought the nation to war. What Lincoln did was react to their terms with the intent of keeping the nation intact.

Oh, yes. I forgot. All Lincoln had to do was let the South go and all this could have been avoided. So that absolves them of the blame and places it squarely on his shoulders.

Do I really need the sarc tag for that last statement?

I'm not sure that the moral hectoring and guerrilla actions by the likes of John Brown, William Henry Harrison or the Beechers was useful by 1860. By then they had made their point, it was time for them to shut up. Lincoln was more like Martin Luther King or Gandhi, he had resolved to persuade rather than hector, to appeal to his opponents’ conscious. The reaction to the hectoring New Englanders by the Southern politicians, some of them rank opportunists, made the War inevitable once Lincoln was elected.

Even if Lincoln had accepted session, or the South had won, by 1900 at very latest slavery would have ended in the states of the Confederacy. Would the bondsman have suffered more under slavery between 1865-1900 than he did under Jim Crow? Would his posterity have been better served by a South that initiated emancipation or one that had it forced on them from the outside? I don't claim to know the answers, but the questions are not fatuous.