Of course all leaders have critics. The point I was trying to make is that he had the full support of the republicans, and many democrats, in Congress. If he had done what many of you lost causers suggest he should and just let the rebelling states go, he would have been impeached, removed from office, and the rebellion would have been crushed by the newly elevated Vice President. The republicans believed that the south was in rebellion and it was the duty of the president to crush it.
That is an interesting comment.
James Buchanan was president when southern states began to secede. Buchanan opposed secession but refused to make war on the South. If there was a move afoot in congress to impeach him for inaction, convict and remove him from office by a Senate supermajority, I am unaware of it.
And consider: On November 13, 1860, the Daily Union in Bangor, Maine, defended the South’s right to secede, asserting that a true Union “depends for its continuance on the free consent and will of the sovereign people” of each state. “When that consent and will is withdrawn on either part, their Union is gone.” If military force is used, then a state can only be held “as a subject province,” and can never be a “co-equal member of the American Union.”
And consider: Horace Greeley wrote in the New York Daily Tribune, December 17, 1860, “the great principle embodied by Jefferson in the Declaration is that governments derive their just power from the consent of the governed.” If the Southern states wished to depart, “they have a clear right to do so.” And, if tyrannical government justified the Revolution of 1776, “we do not see why it would not justify the secession of Five Million of Southrons from the Federal Union in 1861.”
And consider: In April 1861, Greeley wrote that “nine out of ten of the people of the North were opposed” to using force to return South Carolina to the Union.
And consider: General Scott, war hero and Commander of the U.S. Army, said of the “wayward sisters…let them go in peace.”
All of this, of course, was before Lincoln’s Navy became involved in the infuriating Gulf of Tonkin Incident. I mean, the infuriating Fort Sumter Incident.
Your contention that Lincoln would have been impeached and convicted for not going to war is supposition – aspirational supposition. But I would sure like to hear more about it.