[WOSG]

My personal least-favorite President is FDR.

The particular complaints you have about Lincoln were decisively settled in April, 1865. I think well of Lincoln because, although he did not start the war (it was started by the rebels who fired on Fort Sumter), he didn’t let the Union get destroyed. He saved the American Union. The consequences for the history of the American people would have been quite different and quite dire had that not been so.

[BlackElk]

Fort Sumter is located in South Carolina which had seceded from the Union. Fort Pickens is located in Florida which had also seceded from the Union. The artillery of Brigadier General Pierre Gustave Toutaint Beauregard began to bombard Fort Sumter only when the Yankee occupiers refused to leave South Carolina's Fort Sumter. The commanding officer of the "Union" army unit(s) garrisoned at Fort Sumter was (I believe) Robert Anderson of Indiana who was required by the lawbreakers of the Lincoln administration to remain at Fort Sumter in the criminal hope that they could be given necessary provisions to continue their sit-in at Sumter by USS Star of the West (?) which was unable to reach the occupiers because of the efforts of Confederate defensive forces. Anderson struck his colors and retired from the US military expressing his disagreement with the "Union" efforts to countermand secession. The "Union" also temporarily squatted without authority at Fort Pickens but gave up with less drama.

I am still waiting (understandably) for you to identify the specific constitutional grant of authority to Lincoln and his co-conspirators to militarily invade the Confederate States to overturn their decision to secede or to bombard NYC or to murder, rape, loot and pillage Confederate civilians or military within the Confederacy or to levy an income tax or to draft free citizens for military service against their will. It does not matter that Washington raised an army to attack Captain Shays in Massachusetts (again without constitutional authority as well). There simply is NO AUTHORITY and that is why you cannot answer the obvious challenge that the Tenth Amendment prohibited the assault on the seceded South. Then again, you are also arguing that "might makes right." I think we had gotten beyond accepting that argument even in 1865.

As to the argument that the boogie man would have gotten us without Father Abraham's massacre of the constitution, what kind of argument is that??? If Hitler had "saved" Germany from Allied devastation, would that have made him a hero? All that argument amounts to is that the end somehow justifies unconstitutional means. It does not.