Sort of like Butcher Davis was for the union before he was against it?
Or like Butcher Lee thought the union indissoluble before he joined those who wanted to dissolve it?
But it's not really that fair a comparison, because in the context of his day, Lincoln was never pro-slavery.
Then again, maybe slimy liars Davis and Lee were really against the union all the time they professed support for it -- that would explain a lot.
Anyway, changing circumstances force people to reconsider their previous assumptions, and circumstances were changing very quickly at the beginning of the 1860s.
Plenty of people in the South as well as in the North found themselves taking positions they wouldn't have dreamed of years before.
Lincoln was neither the most nor the least consistent of his contemporaries.
The reader of Lincoln Unmasked is in for a great many mischievous pleasures. Consider: Harry Jaffa, the dean of what DiLorenzo calls the "Lincoln cultists," has more than once compared the Southern cause to that of Nazi Germany. DiLorenzo embarrasses Jaffa in this book by pointing out passages in Hitler’s Mein Kampf in which the German leader expressed both his support for Lincoln’s war and his unwavering opposition to the cause of states’ rights and political decentralization (which, as a dictator seeking absolute power, he naturally sought to overturn in Germany). Hitler even adopted Lincoln’s fanciful retelling of American history in which the states were creatures of the Union rather than vice versa.
In Germany, Hitler promised that the Nazis "would totally eliminate states’ rights altogether: Since for us the state as such is only a form, but the essential is its content, the nation, the people, it is clear that everything else must be subordinated to its sovereign interests. In particular we cannot grant to any individual state within the nation and the state representing it state sovereignty and sovereignty in point of political power." Thus the "mischief of individual federated states…must cease and will some day cease…. National Socialism as a matter of principle must lay claim to the right to force its principles on the whole German nation without consideration of previous federated state boundaries." Which side was the Nazi one again, Professor Jaffa?