What was unconstitutional about all that?
Lincoln was a machine politician who liked the steel fist. He played with the gloves off, and he could have given lessons to all those other machine pols you're so proud of.
(*yawn*) One man's opinion, until you show otherwise.
About what I expected from you -- rope-a-dope and homework assignments. I'd be your dope to debate on your terms -- and I won't.
You know what he did, we discussed the unconstitutional admissions of both Nevada (insufficient population) and West Virginia (part of an existing State, no consent of same to partition) to death, and we went 15 rounds each on his suppression of the People in Missouri and Maryland -- and their governments in both States, using a cabal of Wide Awakes in Missouri and the Army in Maryland to impose direct military rule in both.
(*yawn*) One man's opinion, until you show otherwise.
Slothful induction, bad faith in discourse. Already demonstrated in abundance by nolu chan's documentation of Lincoln's interference with the Judiciary Branch and suppression of civil rights in arresting citizens, legislators, newspapermen, Rep. Vallandigham, and his issue of a warrant for Chief Justice Taney.
Mark Neely can run out his "so's your old man, and you're another" recriminatory jibes about Jeff Davis until the cows come home, but the fact remains, that Lincoln did all these things out of his determination to conquer the South. He didn't have to open hostilities by ignoring the People and pretending to govern by force the People of another country, in pursuit of an irridentist policy of forcible reunion. As the term of art would have it now, the Civil War was, for him, a discretionary war -- an option. He voluntarily advanced these policies and methods, as part of his larger policy.
As I said -- these weren't just "emergency measures", they were his answer to the problem posed by constitutional slavery in the South and the rights of the Southerners and their States, the problem he had confessed in his letters of 1855 that he didn't yet know how to solve. These methods were his response to the problem as he saw it, his modus operandi -- just as I said.
His determination to conquer being that great, he both ruled and conquered with the same iron glove -- the Army, which was unleashed on dissent in the North as well as on the Southern States.
Or do I have to document the fact that Lincoln used the Army?!