Lincoln's not the one who chose to launch a war while congress was out of session. That was the confederacy's decision. I guess by your reasoning, if Pearl Harbor had been attacked, or 9/11 happened while congress was out of session, the president should have just done nothing until they were back.
And the War with Mexico isn't exactly the most glorious chapter in American history. The Polk administration looked for an excuse to seize large amounts of territory and found one. In his memoir, U.S. Grant called the war, "one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation."
“And the War with Mexico isn’t exactly the most glorious chapter in American history. “
I guess not as long as you think that Colorado, Arizona, California, Utah, Nevada, Wyoming and New Mexico would be better off as part of Mexico. If Congressman Lincoln had gotten his wish that would be the case.
“Lincoln’s not the one who chose to launch a war while congress was out of session. That was the confederacy’s decision.”
Is that the church of Lincoln’s current position? ‘They made him do it!’ Poor Abe, he had no choice in the matter.
Putin makes pretty much the same argument when he explains away his responsibility for sending troops into Ukraine. Some politicians just can’t stand secession and will send in troops and then blame the fighting on their targets.
And good try with the Pearl Harbor/ 9-11 rationale. Ft Sumter was located in Confederate territory, quite the opposite of the Pearl Harbor and Twin Towers situation. What Ft Sumter does resemble is Boston harbor 90 years earlier, where King George was sending occupation troops into Boston harbor and the colonists were firing on them.
Lincoln of course was looking for an excuse to launch his war and he gladly seized on Sumter. The sole casualty at Ft Sumter was a horse.
Had Congress been in session, or had Abe waited for them to return, it’s unlikely that they would have agreed to plunge the country into a civil war. There had been previous cannon fire on Ft Sumter in January with the Star of the West and Congress made no move to declare war on the Confederacy.
But with Congress safely out of session Lincoln called up 75,000 troops, blockaded ports, declared martial law, and suspended habeus corpus all on his own. He did this with a series of Presidential Proclamations that resemble the Executive Orders so beloved by Obama. It must be an Illinois President thing.