I think you forgot a smiley faced wink. ;-)
You know where I stand.
Davis, Lee and the rest were traitors, not only to the best government yet devised, but also to the future.
Walt
Here, you make the same sort of mistake that Princeton Scholar James McPherson does. You assume some sort of continuity between the government of Madison and the Boys, and the government left to us by Lincoln. McPherson calls one of his books Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution. It is more hymnal than history to my mind. It's full of the usual pap: Lincoln restored order. Lincoln saved the Union.
Lincoln didn't save or restore anything. McPherson in the preface quotes a Harvard professor, George Ticknor, four years after the war ended as saying, "It does not seem to me as if I were living in the country in which I was born[in 1791]." Now you don't think this Harvard professor was referring to slavery, or even "reconstruction," do you? He was talking about the government that affected him, a professor living in Massachusetts. He was lamenting the passing of "the best government yet divised." You may think yourself in good company with McPherson, but I would suggest that neither of you are able to see beyond the history written by the Northern victors.
ML/NJ