REP. PAUL: Absolutely. Six hundred thousand Americans died in a senseless civil war. No, he shouldn't have gone, gone to war. He did this just to enhance and get rid of the original intent of the republic. I mean, it was the--that iron, iron fist..
MR. RUSSERT: We'd still have slavery.
REP. PAUL: Oh, come on, Tim. Slavery was phased out in every other country of the world. And the way I'm advising that it should have been done is do like the British empire did. You, you buy the slaves and release them. How much would that cost compared to killing 600,000 Americans and where it lingered for 100 years? I mean, the hatred and all that existed. So every other major country in the world got rid of slavery without a civil war. I mean, that doesn't sound too radical to me. That sounds like a pretty reasonable approach.
He had a chance to make whatever point he wanted, and he chose to characterize Lincoln as a blood-drenched tyrant ( sounds like an endorsement of the Booth position), in spite of the fact that South Carolina and several other states had seceded prior to his inauguration, and in his first Inaugural he bent over backward to be conciliatory.
as I said, he does not address the underlying reasons for the north-south sectionalist problems in the United States in the 19th century, nor does he deal with the political environment leading up to the 1860 election.
The civil war is such a complex set of factors finally combining to split the republic up that I don’t think any candidate can get face-time to actually discuss it in any detail, if they even understand it in the first place, which almost none of them do.