But nowhere in his speech does he advocate a violent solution. That is a figment of your overactive imagination.
“But nowhere in his speech does he advocate a violent solution.”
This relates, of course, to my post 919 when I tried to accommodate your arguments and to see where it would all lead.
I wrote: “For the purpose of this post, let’s stipulate Lincoln could not get the necessary votes to amend the United States Constitution and abolish slavery peacefully.”
About voting to abolish slavery from the U.S. Constitution peacefully you have emphatically stated: “The answer is that it was mathematically impossible, and everyone knew it.”
If everyone knew it, then Mr. Lincoln must have known it at the time he gave the House Divided speech.
If Lincoln knew it could not be done peacefully, then to what was he alluding in his House Divided speech?
I know you don’t know the answer so I ask Brother Bull Snipe (who is knowledgeable about these things) to restate his reaction to the possibility that Lincoln used the military to violently overthrow the constitution and its slavery provisions.
Said he: “Always admired a man of action.”
In the introduction of the House Divided speech Lincoln said:
“In my opinion, it (slavery agitation) will not cease until a crisis shall have been reached and passed. A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new, North as well as South.”
Clearly in this speech, Lincoln wanted listeners to believe he was for “ultimate extinction.”
Later in the speech Lincoln termed his political opponents enemies.
But Lincoln knew what you have acknowledged repeatedly: he didn't have the votes to do it peacefully with a lawful constitutional amendment. You have gone so far as to say it could never happen until the United States had 61 states.
What Lincoln needed was the predicted crisis - real or imagined. And his navy found that crisis in the Gulf of Tonkin Incident.
I meant to say the Fort Sumter Incident.