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Had any truely horrible abuse had occurred, the Congress could have just as easily impeached Lincoln.

You obviously don't understand political violence.

Read a book about the Roman Revolution and the demise of the Roman Republic sometime, or William Shirer's Collapse of the Third Republic, about why France fell apart in the 1930's.

You don't understand, as Madison and Calhoun did, the deadliness of a national political faction that is determined to take over the country and run roughshod over the rest of the People. That's what Lincoln had at his back, backing him up on every illegality, every rip in the Constitution, every despotic measure. He was covered. He could do as he pleased. Conversely, his troops and officers in the South were likewise covered -- they could do as they pleased. Sherman was lauded, and none of his troops were court-martialed. Lincoln covered for them, for the tax agents confiscating Southern real estate and selling it to their brothers-in-law, for the carpetbaggers already swooping down on wharves and freight platforms laden with cotton. "Black Republicanism" was a "party" -- in both the political and the street sense. Do what you want to do; do what you can -- it's all good.

This has only happened once in American history. Being taken over like that is like the fourth or fifth exponential power of having your neighborhood taken over by the Rolling Forties. It isn't politics, it's political violence. Emphasis on "violence". And it is instructive, that it wasn't just people in the South who suffered from it. People hauled off to prison in the Old Northwest likewise suffered, and farmers who lost their spreads in the ensuing sixty years of Gilded Age hard-money, railroad-cossetting policies likewise suffered. But outside the South, people never connected the dots, and farmers done in by the Gilded Age never figured it out, that they had been on the wrong side in the Civil War.