What facts? You Lincoln bashers are in the same category as the Holocaust deniers. If you don't like this country, get lost and move to Africa. They are ripe for revolution. If you fail, maybe they will hang you by your neck.
The southern states were not allowed to secede because Lincoln said so. It was Lincoln's war...Lincoln could have said goodbye and good riddance to the secessionists. Of course Lincoln could have offered freedom to any slave that crossed over. Of course Lincoln could have sent covert agents south to help the slaves escape north and/or atleast aid and abett them to revolt as they did in the caribbean...especially if indeed the end of slavery was his aim. Rather, Lincoln chose war with the seceding states.
The seceding states wanted no part of his overbearing centralized govt which would trample citizen and state supremacy in violation of the Constitution to which they south had sworn to defend.
As a result, today, we have the federal supremacy clause . Here a fed agent can kill anyone anytime they so desire with immunity...ie Ruby Ridge and Waco. Then we have any state law (voted upon and ratified by the citizens of a state) which might conflict with a federal law is null and void. ie medicinal marijuana in California
Just the facts Dave. Sure we live with our condition today of a federal bureaucracy run amock stamping out freedoms and trampling on the Constitution at every turn. All the while becoming entangled in every foreign matter on the planet costing taxpayers billions upon billions.
No need to deny the reality of our condition, nor to deny what lead us to our current state of affairs ...it was from the onset Lincoln's War which in effect ursurped the Constitution for then and forevermore.
Why? More likely he did so to protect his centralized command over all the states figuring that an industrialized north could handily defeat what he considered for the most part to be a backward and illiterate agricultural south...and he nearly guessed wrong. But he didn't, and today we are all slaves to the fed.gov
What?? Both joined the Reform Party?
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
In order to accomplish those goals, States needed to stay United and search for ways to settle their differences...not to take an "my way or the highway" attitude.
What's really funny is that this many years later, people on this thread refer themselves as "us" and "we" when discussing the Civil War.
They still don't consider themselves part of the "perfect Union" the Founders wished to create.