The difference is Lincoln did what he had to do and the result is he saved the nation.
Only if you consider an occupied colong stripped of its economic heart part of a nation. My take is he did it all to perserve his “relevancy”. Just saying.
When the "economic heart" is based upon holding fellow human beings as chattel, then maybe that heart needed to be stripped out.
“The difference is Lincoln did what he had to do and the result is he saved the nation.”
Yes but in so doing, he established precedents that subsequent presidents have used to push us closer and closer to socialism. We will never know for sure but we might well have been better off as two neighboring countries, sharing a language but little else. Similar to France and Belgium.