Hello, x. I see nobody has replied to you on this point, which they ought to have done.
Much of the argument about the American Civil War revolves around a key point made by the Southern apologists, that even the Northern Peoples never approved in convention assembled the changes Lincoln sought to impose on the Constitution and on the relationship between the central administration and the States. Lincoln sought to eclipse their authority as much as that of the Peoples of the South. Hence my argument elsewhere and earlier, that Iowa farm boys lost as much as Alabamians, by fighting for Mr. Lincoln -- they became their own worst enemies, and fought on the wrong side of the war. Failing all else, and granting you that Easterners by then were sufficiently deracinated in their understanding of individual responsibility and freedom to have lost the idea of America, having already compromised themselves, in vast droves, in millions of dirty little compromises with employers and ward heelers; Midwesterners nevertheless should have had more sense than to ratify anything like the Fourteenth Amendment.
If Lincoln had simply done nothing and let the rebels have their own way on all matters, he'd likewise be reviled by people today and blamed for what happened.
Not necessarily. He certainly would stand better with Southerners, 140 years of relentless schoolhouse propaganda notwithstanding. You must equate "people today" with the business interests of the East Coast, and what Ivy Leaguers think.
Amen. Bump.
Such inquirers might question whether "state's rights" were an end in themselves or a dogma, or whether they were a means which might advance or retard, preserve or frustrate individual rights and personal liberty. Perhaps they'd question whether the unlimited and absolute right of some group to break away from their nation or larger society necessarily promotes greater liberty. I'd imagine such people -- if they exist -- also wouldn't telescope history and project twentieth or twenty-first century characteristics back on the opposing sides of the American Civil War. They might even be able to understand the 14th Amendment as an addition or completion or correction of the Constitution, not simply as a betrayal.
While some specialists may respect his accomplishments, I really doubt Lincoln has much of a reputation on Ivy League campuses. If he escapes specific condemnation as a racist, Lincoln is simply lumped in with the other Dead White Males. Nor would I imagine Wall Street has much use for him. So much of their time is taken up with financing China's industrialization that they have little time for American history or specifically American concerns.
When I wrote that Lincoln would have been equally reviled had he gone soft and wobbly, Southerners were one important group I was thinking of. Southern Blacks and hill country unionists would have hated him for his weakness which delivered them to their oppressors. I even suppose that some of you who attack him now, would think differently when Confederate or South Carolina tax day came around. On election day, when you had to choose between this or that set of local oligarchs, demagogues, bureaucrats or oppressors you might well wonder if things would have been better had the union been maintained. Being natural grumblers looking for a single Point At Which Everything Went Wrong, you might well have made the broken union the focus of a Lost Cause mythology -- though in this case, you might be on more solid ground, since much would have been lost had the Confederates won.
So much of what gets tossed around in these discussions is dogma or mythology. The idea seems to be that if states had been allowed to secede in 1860 or had seized their independence by force of arms, history would have stopped and the twentieth century wouldn't have happened. I don't think one can tear oneself out of the surrounding context of history. One can't wall oneself off from technological development yet enjoy its benefits. One has to choose between ending slavery or tyranny and defending the local right to enslave and tyrannize -- sooner or later one has to choose.
It sounds fine to talk of Jefferson's vision of the tree of liberty being watered with the blood of patriots and tyrants, but I suspect that breaking up the union in the 1860 would have meant many more years of such waterings with no greater liberty in sight. It would have made our history even more a story of force and repression reminiscent of Balkan or South American or African or Middle Eastern history than it was. Perhaps I'm wrong, but that at least was what many Americans feared, and they had reason to do so.