It looks like what you're saying is that all the messiness surrounding slavery and race were the fault of Lincoln and the War and Reconstruction. You're implying that we'd have gotten a fine result if things had been left up to the slaveholders and secessionists. That's really assuming a lot.
It's clear to me that if and when emancipation came, maybe 20 or 40 or 60 years after it did in our world, it would have been done on the slaveowners terms with their interests paramount. What you got wouldn't have been better for the ex-slaves than what we did get. The same kinds of quasi-slavery or indentured bondage or serfdom that you criticize would have been the order of the day in an independent Confederacy. So you can't pin the blame on Lincoln.
Also, you assume a lot when you say that the Founders regarded secession as a state's right. That's a very questionable assumption. Washington and Adams, Madison and Hamilton wanted a more secure, stronger union than what existed under the Articles of Confederation. Judging from how Washington treated the Whisky Rebellion and what Madison thought of the Nullification Crisis, I think you're on the wrong track.
I call BS. The federal convention recognized that a secession could occur, and Madison offered a motion that the militia could be used to prevent secession. That motion was defeated 8-3.
It would have been a more orderly and likely bloodless transition yes. Likely occuring sooner. The nation as a whole would have prospered as the southern industries would have made the nations trade more secure. The south was seen by the nothern industrialist as competition. Abe was sympathetic to their cause. And Smedley Butler a man to come later was indeed right LOL.
Lincoln aloud the border states Delaware, Maryland, Missouri, and Kentucky and later West Virginia to continue to own slaves as an enticement to stay in the Union. The consequence of this reality was that in virtually every major battle of the Civil War, Confederate soldiers who did not own slaves were fighting against a proportion of Union Army soldiers who had not been asked to give theirs up.
So what did this say to the individual soldier in Gray about the importance of slavery to President Lincoln?
And that view is borne out by the farce of the immediate postwar Black Codes produced by the ex-slaveowning drones of the plantaion class who were largely responsible for the secession madness in the first place.