Abe was in office for 39 days when Sumpter was attacked. Besides, he didn’t want the money, he wanted the fort.
1. Abe vowed to defend the Constitution against all foes. It was still standing the day he was shot. Had he let the states secede, it would have been a dead letter.
2. All the arguments about the Emancipation Proclamation not withstanding, the slaves were freed.
3. The era of big government was not started by Abe, that was the Roosevelts and Wilson. RINOs and Democrats are still doing us in today.
Anti-free traders, return to the gold standard, Lincoln haters, conspiracy theorist, moonbats, RINOs: The democrats can have them all, the whole ship of fools.
The idea that it was not Lincoln who destroyed the government created by Jefferson and Madison is absurd. Go find yourself a copy of Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution. This is not written by some Johnie-come-lately without any academic standing. This was written by James McPherson of Princeton who is almost universally considered the dean of "Civil War" historians. (Not be me, mind you.) In the preface he quotes a Harvard professor writing in 1869 as saying that it was as if he is no longer living in the country in which he was born. I don't have my copy at hand, and I do not recall why McPherson chose to quote the professor. Whatever it was, it wasn't what I consider the import of this. This Harvard professor never owned slaves, and probably cared little if at all about slavery. Certainly the end of slavery 400 miles to his south couldn't have had much impact on the life of a Harvard professor. No. What it was was that the government that d'Tocqueville wrote about was gone, just as gone with the wind in Cambridge, Mass. as it was in Charleston, SC. The guys you mention were barely out of diapers in 1869.
ML/NJ