Any president would have resisted the seizure of federal forts, arsenals, arms and property of all sorts. This is Sedition at the minimum. Any president who allowed that would rightly impeached and removed from office.
The Constitution declares the federal government has power to suppress insurrection. So there is no argument as to legality of Lincoln’s actions.
Why are you espousing a nut-ball critique?
There was never anything righteous about the Southern cause, NOTHING good. It supported Evil until the Slavers destroyed the region.
Don’t blame Lincoln, blame the Slaver Fire-eaters.
Much of the damage done in Reconstruction was due to Lincoln’s killing. One leader said that “the South has lost its best friend.”
Read Shelby Footes’ 3000 page history of the Civil War, it is elegantly written and filled with facts and the forces pushing Lincoln and Davis and their actions.
I’ve read the trilogies of both Shelby Foote and Bruce Catton.
I’ve also read Charles Adams’ “Shall Cromwell Have A Statue” in which Charles Adams discusses whether Robert E Lee was a traitor and whether secession was un-Constitutional.
Adams says that if we call Lee a traitor then we have to do the same to George Washington and the rebels of 1776. Parliament and King George had denounced them all as guilty of treason. Adams says that Lee was loyal to Virginia, which Lee believed to be where his primary loyalty belonged.
Adams then discusses Virginia’s secession. Adams writes that the original states that ratified the Constitution all believed in their right of secession- an idea that Adams believes was hopelessly outdated 70 years into the Constitution but consistent with the logic of those who ratified the document. His conclusion is that both sides were correct, they just came at the Constitution from two different views. The seceding states looked at it from an originalist viewpoint, Lincoln from a nationalist view that had developed over time.
Charles Francis Adams Jr, the author of the piece, was the President of the Massachusetts Historical Society and the American Historical Society. He was the grandson of John Quincy Adams, the great grandson of John Adams. In the Civil War he was an officer in the Union Army and fought with distinction during the Gettysburg campaign.