Replies

So,......you agree. Lincoln was first and foremost concerned with preserving the Union. We only disagree on what his reasons were.

He was willing to give up the "Union" in exchange for Virginia offering assurances that it would remain. Apparently "Preserving the Union" was negotiable regarding the 7 lesser seceded states.

You are trying to use "Preserving the Union" as a blanket cover for what his real specific goal was. Keeping the money. Yes, if he "preserved the Union" his wealthy and powerful allies would get to keep their income streams, and so too would his government in Washington DC.

Were the Southern states no economic threat to his allies best interests, I think he would have not cared at all about "Preserving the Union."

I am reminded of an abusive Husband who "preserves the Union" by beating near to death the wife that tried to leave him.

You sound as if you are talking out-loud and trying to convince yourself of your own cockamamie notions that conflict with your own previous post to me. When you are merely talking out loud, there is really no reason to bounce it off me. Go study your pointy graph. You are not yourself today.

Handy Dandy: "So,......you agree.
Lincoln was first and foremost concerned with preserving the Union.
We only disagree on what his reasons were."

DiogenesLamp: "He was willing to give up the "Union" in exchange for Virginia offering assurances that it would remain.
Apparently "Preserving the Union" was negotiable regarding the 7 lesser seceded states."

No, Lincoln's (alleged) offer to Virginians might have prevented war from starting at Fort Sumter, but that's all.
It would not stop war from breaking out somewhere else, Fort Pickens, for example.

And we know that Jefferson Davis needed war to flip the Upper South and Border States from Union to Confederates, so even if Lincoln had worked a Fort Sumter deal with Virginia, I think war was all but inevitable anyway.

DiogenesLamp: "You are trying to use "Preserving the Union" as a blanket cover for what his real specific goal was.
Keeping the money.
Yes, if he "preserved the Union" his wealthy and powerful allies would get to keep their income streams, and so too would his government in Washington DC. "

That is pure fantasy based on nothing more than DiogenesLamp's vivid imagination.

DiogenesLamp: "I am reminded of an abusive Husband who "preserves the Union" by beating near to death the wife that tried to leave him."

Except in this particular case there was no "abuse", and the "wife" left without a legal settlement, with guns ablazing and taking truckloads of the "husband's" stuff.
"She" also claimed ownership of nearly half the house and declared war when he wouldn't immediately give it up.

As for who beat whom "near to death" when it was all over the "wife" had killed far more of "his" people than "he" did of "hers".
And "her" overall population statistics were indeed a little "off" in the incomplete Reconstruction census of 1870, but had been fully restored, along with cotton production, by the time of the more accurate 1880 census.