[x]

You can pretend the North was in a death struggle for its very life during the Civil War but that is both silly and false. The South didn't have the desire or the resources to conquer the North.

If Davis & Co. had their way, they'd take the national capital and everything up to 30 miles from Philadelphia.

They'd be at the Ohio River and 100 miles from Lake Erie -- a convenient point to choke off east-west transportation.

They'd find a way to detach the West Coast and New York City and work mischief in other parts of the country.

What would happen to Kansas, New Mexico, and other western territories would be anybody's guess.

Not to mention Confederate expansion southward into the Caribbean.

Lincoln had to take a stand to prevent the country from falling apart. That didn't have to mean war -- but war was what Davis wanted.

[HandyDandy]

All of this lost cause nonsense, that sends jeffersonDavisauntieEm and his ilk snuffling their snouts through the mud, for their little nuggets of vengeance, stem from the words spoken by a lunatic actor/coward/murder (whose name I don't speak) who, like a guttersnipe, struck Lincoln down with a snowflake style shot in the back of his head with not a word spoken, till, supposedly when he broke his leg upon landing on the stage, decried (like a snowflake) "sic semper tyrannis"! Rue that day, America! That was the blow that forever condemned the South to living in a half realized vision of Honest Abe's Union. He never got to finish his work. The North was deeply upset about that and the South bore the brunt of the angst. Lost causers are forever condemned to wander in a never never land of what-ifs. Sic semper snowflakes. They know there is nothing they can do to uplift the role of the South in the recent unpleasantness, so they bleat the mantra of Northern Slavery and try to spin cotton into wool. They twist "sic semper tyrannis" into a States rights mantra. Ironically, the States in the Confederacy had no sovereignty. It was go slavery or go home.

The South did indeed pose a threat to the Union, and the South did indeed invade the North. More than once. Lee took the Army of Northern Virginia into Pennsylvania in a vainglorious roundabout attempt to attack Washington, DC. Had he succeeded, France and England would have stepped in on the side of the South, and the United States of America would have been relegated to the ash bin of history. Instead, Lee f'd up and got his ass handed to him at Gettysburg. Deal with it. Lincoln could whup you hand to hand, he could whup you in court, he could whup you in an election and he could whup you in a Civil War. He could out wrastle, outsmart, out write, and generally best any Southerner who ever lived. He was the greatest American who ever lived.