Too bad (dis)Honest Abe screwed up Washington's hard work.
Read Team of Rivals. It's a study of the political personalitities and influences of the Civil War era. The expressed intentions and expectations, and how events confounded them or confirmed them. The Civil War was about secession, but secession was about slavery. And secession occured over not over existing slavery but over the expansion of slavery into the southwest and, in principle, nationwide.All very well to put the worst face on Lincoln - but that is precisely what the southern firebrands did, and it led them to create the facts on the ground which produced the chain reaction which killed so many Americans in the 1860s. Easy enough for people to say this thing or that thing wasn't worth it - but prospectively people made different judgements. Surprisingly enough, </sarcasm> not all of those judgements proved out.