________________________________________
To be fair??? To whom??? The Southerners holding the whip (what do you think crack down means)?
“To be fair” refers to the slaveowners. As Jefferson had said many years before, “we have the wolf by the ear and feel the danger of either holding or letting him loose.”
As southerners felt more and more insecure, they reacted in the natural human way of cracking down on slaves and, to the extent they could, abolitionists.
Lincoln himself sympathized with the slaveowners, and agreed that if he had all power on earth he would not know how to go about ending the institution safely.
I believe, with Lincoln, that not all or even most southerners were evil. They were (almost) as trapped in the institution as their slaves.
The truly evil ones were those like Calhoun and the later fire-eaters who initially put forth and then spread the notion that slavery was a positive good and should be expanded and perpetuated.
It is impossible to imagine a doctrine more inimical to the American creed that “all men are created equal.” It is, in fact, the exact same doctrine (master race and slave races) on which the Nazis later based their racial policies.
Unfortunately, by the time of the war these evil men had obtained an entire dominance in the South, and slavery as a positive good had become very widely accepted there. As Lincoln pointed out, the only thing that would have satisfied the South by 1860 would be for the North to join in proclaiming slavery a positive good.