[DoodleDawg]

It isn’t hard to blame the late unpleasantness between the states on Dishonest Abe.

Especially if that's your only purpose to begin with.

[central_va]

Funny how he felt compelled to talk about, to wit justify ignoring, southern agents wanting to negotiate peace prior to hostilities in his second inaugural. It is also funny how that piece of history was import to LINCOLN but historians of present seem to gloss that over.

[central_va]

You can say that the South wanted that war. But Lincoln wanted that war just as much if not more so.

The second inaugural he justifies ignoring peace talks pre war. Yes he does....

[BlackElk]

Ummm, especially for those who care about facts. Dishonest Abe saw his neo Whig, neo Federalist, Hamiltonian opportunities and used them to maximum advantage to advance those discredited and hated agendas.

NOTHING IN THE CONSTITUTION authorized:

1) A military draft;

2) A federal income tax;

3) A military invasion of South Carolina and other states;

4) The ridiculous claim that a state, having joined the Union voluntarily, could not secede from the Union just as voluntarily as eleven states did;

5) The jailing of state legislators in Maryland who were believed to be intending to vote for secession;

6) The suspension of the constitutional right to petition the courts for writs of habeas corpus;

7) The jailing without trial of opposition newspaper editors, see the SCOTUS decision in Ex Parte McCardle;

8) The smashing of the presses of the New York Daily News for opposing Lincoln's tyranny and policies;

9) The US Naval bombardment of the civilian population of New York City's Manhattan.

10) It took SCOTUS years to clean up Lincoln's constitutional mess after he was shot under the remarkably candid and honest leadership of Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase of Ohio who had been Lincoln's Secretary of Treasury before Lincoln appointed him to succeed Roger Taney in the middle of the war to resurrect Hamiltonianism.

More available on request.

What's YOUR only purpose?