Whether you admit them as "good" or not, the answers are:
- Lincoln never considered Southern declarations of secession constitutionally legitimate.
- In March 1861 Lincoln promised to accommodate secessionists so long as he could continue to enforce US laws.
- Lincoln also promised there'd be no war unless secessionists started it.
The rest, as they say, is history.
FLT-bird: "The 13 colonies of course seceded from the British Empire with absolutely no legal right to do so."
Absolutely false, since Founders' legal right was spelled out in the Declaration, "a long train of abuses and usurpations" leading to British unilateral abrogation of legitimate American self-government.
No such abuses remotely existed in 1860.
FLT-bird: "So the PC Revisionists try to just mindlessly repeat 'slavery, slavery, slavery' hoping nobody will bother looking at the facts and seeing it clearly wasn’t about that. "
But "slavery, slavery, slavery" was absolutely the major issue listed in Deep South "Reasons for Secession" documents.
And once war began, slavery soon became an issue when Union troops freed Confederate "contraband of war" and Confederates seized Union freedmen for sale in Confederate slave markets.
By 1862 Civil War was not just for Union, but also for emancipation.
FLT-bird: "What’s funny is seeing people here who claim to be Conservative lining up with those big government, centralized power, Leftists in Academia who espouse this BS."
But there was nothing "big government, centralized power" advocated by Republicans in 1860 or later, except as a consequence of the war itself.
Excluding debt payments, Federal spending was 2.6% of GDP in 1858, 2.5% in 1871.
Today's is roughly 20%.
As for our academic Leftists, it's remarkable how eagerly Lost Causers grasp their economic dialectics, or anything else except the real reasons, to explain everything Civil War.
- "Lawrence Keitt, Congressman from South Carolina, in a speech to the House on January 25, 1860:
'African slavery is the corner-stone of the industrial, social, and political fabric of the South; and whatever wars against it, wars against her very existence.
Strike down the institution of African slavery and you reduce the South to depopulation and barbarism.'
Later in the same speech he said,
'The anti-slavery party contend that slavery is wrong in itself, and the Government is a consolidated national democracy.
We of the South contend that slavery is right, and that this is a confederate Republic of sovereign States.' "
"Methodist Rev. John T. Wightman, preaching at Yorkville, South Carolina:
'The triumphs of Christianity rest this very hour upon slavery; and slavery depends on the triumphs of the South . . .
This war is the servant of slavery.'
[The Glory of God, the Defence of the South (1861), cited in Eugene Genovese's Consuming Fire (1998).]"