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It is easy to criticize in hindsight—affecting moral superiority over those who lived in long ago and much different times.A**holes focus on single issues that validate their personal hate-like painting George Washington as ONLY some white devil slave master and nothing else—well GW did own slaves yet he was still the chief founder of the most just and free country the earth has ever seen.
The South perceived Lincoln as a threat to their way of life and in essence he was because he was elected by those states where emancipation of the slaves would not result in economic collapse.
To the South, slavery was the ultimate necessary evil and even many Southerners were aware the institution was intrinsically wicked and damned to end someday.
When Great Britain outlawed slavery in her colonies she purchased the freedom of those slaves in areas where the economic impact of emancipation could result in war.
It worked and it was a shame that the United States couldn't come up with such a peaceful alternative to invading and laying waste to the South with atrocities,war crimes and typical Yankee bad manners.

Funny thing though—personally I AM glad Lincoln was a cruel determined savage in his efforts to preserve the Union otherwise the South would have won.
My CSA Army veteran great grandads were (respectively) South Carolinian and Tennessean first—Their great grandson is an American first.
So even though I cheer at Fredericksburg and curse at Gettysburg, I give a sigh of relief at Appomattox.

My CSA Army veteran great grandads were (respectively) South Carolinian and Tennessean first—Their great grandson is an American first.

You could learn a lot from your great grandads. States rights died at Appomattox, and with it the republic. Now we live in a cartoon constitutional dictatorship, one the original founders would make cringe and hang their heads in shame.

PS: The south would not collapse without slavery. After the war the North tried to destroy the South, but most somehow barely survived reconstruction despite the freedman bureau's best efforts..

Funny thing though—personally I AM glad Lincoln was a cruel determined savage in his efforts to preserve the Union otherwise the South would have won. My CSA Army veteran great grandads were (respectively) South Carolinian and Tennessean first—Their great grandson is an American first. So even though I cheer at Fredericksburg and curse at Gettysburg, I give a sigh of relief at Appomattox.

That's right poetic.

The only difference is that I, like many others, believe that the 10th Amendment was de facto repealed at Appomattox. In the last couple of years a few states, mostly Southern, have passed resolutions declaring state sovereignty in an attempt to dampen the over reaching of the federal government. It is a futile, and mostly symbolic, gesture, in my opinion.

Funny thing though—personally I AM glad Lincoln was a cruel determined savage in his efforts to preserve the Union otherwise the South would have won. My CSA Army veteran great grandads were (respectively) South Carolinian and Tennessean first—Their great grandson is an American first. So even though I cheer at Fredericksburg and curse at Gettysburg, I give a sigh of relief at Appomattox.

That's right poetic.

It is easy to criticize in hindsight—affecting moral superiority over those who lived in long ago and much different times.A**holes focus on single issues that validate their personal hate ...

Right -- I am so sick of the "A**holes" who affect superiority over Lincoln, Grant and other people who lived long ago, and go on and on about "states rights", ignoring the real issues of the time to validate their personal hatred of Northerners.

To the South, slavery was the ultimate necessary evil and even many Southerners were aware the institution was intrinsically wicked and damned to end someday.

This is, unfortunately, an anachronistic argument.

In 1787 it was absolutely correct, one reason the Founders were always careful to avoid giving the institution any explicit recognition in the Constitution, instead always using euphemisms. Washington (highly honorably), Jefferson (much less honorably), Madison and pretty much all the prominent southern Founders explicitly denounced the institution as evil.

Unfortunately, by 1860 this attitude had been stood on its head, and slavery was believed throughout the South not to be "intrinsically wicked" and "damned to end," but rather to be a positive good the blessing of which they fully intended to spread throughout Latin America if they couldn't force it on the northern states.

If you have countervailing evidence, I'd love to see it, but in all the Declarations of Secession I've read, I don't recall a single statement about slavery being evil and to be brought to and end. On the contrary, they normally list the protection of the institution as the primary or only reason for their secession.

In fact, I doubt there is much discussion of slavery as an evil by prominent southerners during the whole decade of the '50s.

Lincoln, quite accurately, declared his attitude towards slavery to be that of the Founders, and that of the slaveocracy to be the perversion of their ideals. The secessionists quite openly proclaimed our founding ideal, "all men are created equal," to be false.