This is really tiresome, and somewhat off point.
1. Slavery is a very old, very undesirable institution that we are well rid of. 2. Lincoln didn’t go to war to free the slaves. 3. Except in Haiti and the US, slaves in the Western Hemisphere received their freedom peacefully. 4. An independent Deep South that did not have the benefit of the Fugitive Slave law of 1860 would have been hard pressed to maintain the peculiar institution for that reason alone. When other economic considerations are taken into account, such as the declining demand in the 19th Century for unskilled labor and the unsustainability of a “cotton culture” became apparent as a result of cotton plantations in Egypt and elsewhere became apparent, slavery would certainly have been ended everywhere in the US, probably much as it had been in Brazil. 5. What is the italicized “and it’s not coming back” phrase supposed to mean? No one wants slavery. 6. Ideas embedded in institutions and uncritical minds do rule us. In that sense, there are many dead men who rule us. To say it isn’t necessary that we follow any particular set of ideas is true in a purely logical sense, but it also ignores the intellectual inertia of cultures and individual minds.
"The earth belongs to the living, not to the dead; and the dead have neither powers nor rights over it." - Thomas Jefferson
Our Constitution has been amended more times since Lincoln died than before he died. We have no choice but to accept responsibility for the way we govern ourselves today. Our government reflects our current choices. Just sitting down in the dirt and crying about Lincoln does no one any good. Today is about us. It's our job and if we fail, we fail.