“Were Americans in 1880 really less free than they were in 1850? Was the country any less free?”
Absolutely. In 1850, we still had a government that operated based on consent of the governed, which is one of the most essential elements of liberty. You can’t pretend we still had that in 1880, once half the nation were being forced to “consent” at the barrel of a gun.
All the subsequent usurpations by the federal government that you would rather focus on wouldn’t have been possible unless a man like Lincoln had asserted the supremacy of the federal government with the kind of brute force that he did. He broke the American spirit of resistance to unconstitutional overreach, forever drawing a line that most of the citizenry will not cross when opposing the government, because now we all know that to cross that line means the government will try to kill us.
Man you have some serious butthurt going on. How do you bear to continue?
But you knew that from the beginning, didn't you? Shay's Rebellion, the Whiskey Rebellion, Aaron Burr. Not to mention Indian and slave uprisings.
The idea that Americans would be rising up all the time against big government if it weren't for Lincoln, just won't fly. We get big government because half the country is willing to vote for it. Very few people are going to take up arms over that.
And what if half the country were rising up every time it had a grievance with the way an election went? What would the country look like now? Would we seriously be freer?
And what was the "unconstitutional overreach" that the secessionist were resisting? What was it that the federal government did that made mad enough to revolt? Not what happened later, after the first secessions, but what happened before South Carolina took down the American flag?
It sort of sounds like somebody made a massive blunder -- wasting the right of legitimate rebellion -- over an unworthy issue. But who's to say we don't still have the right of rebellion, if we feel it's necessary and choose to exercise it (this time perhaps over a more worthwhile matter)?
So many questions.