One simple fact to remember is that, in early 1861, most northerners were outraged -- not so much by secession itself, since many said "let them go" -- but by secessionists' unlawful forceful seizures of many Federal properties: forts, armories, arsenals, ships, customs houses, mints, etc.
In early 1861, before the Confederacy's assault on Fort Sumter, when northerners talked about "enforcing the laws" they meant recovering those Federal properties.
At the time of Lincoln's inauguration, on March 4, 1861, he still hoped to win back reunion peacefully, saying:
Lincoln intended to hold the two remaining forts -- Sumter and Pickens -- and did not yet know the moment of crisis was already upon them.
But within a few days, Fort Sumter's commander advised Washington that his food stores would run out by mid-April.
Something had to be done, and quickly.
Lincoln decided to resupply -- not reinforce -- Fort Sumter, so long as peace remained.
But by April 1861, the Confederacy had whipped itself into a frenzy of war-fever, and would accept nothing less than full surrender of Fort Sumter.
When Lincoln continued to refuse, the Confederacy chose war -- first in assaulting Sumter and three weeks later, formally declaring war on the United States.
So a key historical fact to understand here is that prior to the Confederacy's formal declaration of war on May 6, 1861, there was no war -- no Union army had "invaded" the Confederacy, not one Confederate soldier had been killed in battle, and President Lincoln was publicly committed to keeping the peace.
Of course, once the Confederacy had unmistakeably started and formally declared war, then everything changed.
Still, Lincoln's April 15 proclamation had very limited goals:
The Union's full demand for Unconditional Surrender and destruction of slavery took years to develop.
IbJensen: "Sherman vicariously enjoyed his march to the sea and his attempt to burn the heart out of the South."
Sherman's victory at the Battle of Atlanta came more than three years after the Confederacy's declaration of war.
By this time, hundreds of thousands of soldiers had died, and the Confederacy itself had practiced "total war" in every Union territory it invaded.
Indeed, much of the destruction blamed on Union General Sherman's "march to the sea" (November - December 1864) actually resulted from Confederate General John B. Hood's efforts to destroy Confederate supplies, to keep them out of Union hands.
As for your allegation that Sherman "vicariously enjoyed his march to the sea", there is a similar type famous quote from Confederate General Robert E. Lee:
The simple fact of the matter is that no sane soldier "enjoys" war, but every soldier prefers ("enjoys") victory to defeat.
IbJensen: "This became a war of vengeance to show those who indeed hated what the union and the presidency had become exactly what would happen to them the next time."
Of course, there will never, ever, be a "next time" just like the original Civil War.
That can't happen again.
But if by "next time" you mean more generally, "the next time a group of slave-holding secessionists starts and declares war on the United States they will again be defeated unconditionally, and their slaves freed without compensation" then, yes, of course, you are correct in that.
IbJensen: "This slavery issue is a non-starter, for starts.
The slaves would have been given their freedom and passage back to the dark continent if the Yankees had their way intially.
Even Secretary Seward AND Lincoln thought the idea had merit."
First of all, it's important to understand that going all the way back to President Thomas Jefferson (1801 to 1809), several people had calculated the costs, and proposed the Federal government should purchase freedom for slaves, including some ideas about returning freed slaves to Africa.
Indeed, purchasing every slave at peak 1860 market values would have cost the nation less than half of what the Civil War cost.
So Lincoln's original ideas on these matters were by no means new, and they failed for the same reasons those same ideas had failed under previous presidents:
So ideas for peacefully abolishing slavery failed under Lincoln, just as they had under previous presidents.
IbJensen: "After the surrender, some Northern carpetbagging bureaucrats wanted to grant each slave 40 acres and a mule which was tantamount to communism."
"40 acres and a mule" refers to Union General William Sherman's 1865 Order Number 15, which granted mostly abandoned farmland in South Carolina, Georgia and Florida to about 10,000 freed-slave families.
After Lincoln's assassination, Order 15 was revoked by President Andrew Johnson, and the land returned to its previous owners.
Curiously, "40 acres and a mule" in rural farmland, represented around $500 in 1860 values, multiplied times, let's say, a million 1865 freed-slave families, would cost the government $500 million to provide as "just compensation" for slavery.
And $500 million in 1860 corresponds to around $1.5 trillion today, or roughly the size of the US annual deficit. So the relative cost of "40 acres and a mule" is a mere drop in the bucket compared to the many trillions of dollars in welfare and other such payments made since President Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" programs in the 1960s.
So, where you might call "40 acres and a mule" "communism", I'd put it into the category of "teach a man to fish" versus today's policies to forever "feed a man a fish" and thus keep them forever dependent on big-government's largess.
Today all lands labeled ‘Federal’ should be returned to the respective states in which they’re located. The problem with a monster government that comes after everything they get their hands on is that eventually it’s your land and possessions they’re after!@
Promising 40 acres and a mule is communism. Where does the land come from? How about the mule?
I think there is tremendous misunderstanding of what was going on in the six weeks between Lincoln's inauguration and the fall of Sumter.
During this period the CSA consisted of just seven states. Davis and its other leaders, not being idiots, were perfectly well aware the CSA was too small to be viable, particularly if it came to war. They desperately needed to grab off some of the Upper South and Border states. The more they got the better their chance of survival.
So the six weeks basically consisted of the highest stakes poker game in US history between Davis and Lincoln.
If the CSA acquired all the 7/8 states in play, the job of reconquest would have been too big for the remaining states of the Union, as Lincoln later admitted.
If the Union kept the loyalty of all remaining slave states, the CSA would collapse pretty quickly in the event of war. Just much too small a white population.
As it turned out, of course, the CSA grabbed 4 of the states in play, and the Union retained 4, or 5 if you count WV. As a result the forces were balanced evenly enough that we had a long bloody war instead of a short, decisive one.
For much of this period many in the North believed in what turned out to be pretty much an illusion of the strength of southern Unionism. In a time before opinion polls these kinds of mistakes were easy to make.
Lincoln outplayed Davis, bluffing him into firing the first shot. Doing so rallied the Upper South to the CSA, but alienated the Border (which initially tried to be neutral but eventually went with the Union), and rallied the North to the Union.