Yes, Lincoln was the right man in the right place at the right time. It would be too much to say that he single-handedly saved the Union, but it would have been a harder task without him.

I am glad the North won the Civil War. To get an idea of what the world would have been like had the South won, read "How Few Remain" by Harry Turtledove, and its sequels. Nightmarish stuff-- Turtledove does a good job of reminding us how much the world we have today is a relatively sunny place, thanks to a United States that was (and is) whole and free.

That said, given the over-mighty Federal government we have today, I can't help but be a little sympathetic to the secessionists of 1860-61. They used secession for the worst possible reason-- the preservation of human slavery-- but they were within their rights. (See the Tenth Amendment, the Rodney Dangerfield of the Bill of Rights.)

And I think Gale Norton, ex-Secretary of the Interior, was right when she said, many years ago now, something to the effect that "The states lost too much after 1865." And especially after the adoption of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913-- we've been so enamored of the BS the Progressives and their successors have been selling us for the last century or so, that the states have been reduced almost to the status of mere departments of the central government, on the French model.

(All right-- those of you who went to high school before about 1980: diagram that last sentence! *rueful chuckle*)

The Civil War is an example of a proposition brought forth in the American War for Independence, but rejected four score and seven years later; The notion that people have a right to declare independence from a government they feel no longer represents them. The Civil War made it apparent that the sanctity of this principle depends upon which foot is wearing the shoe.

People often assert the Civil war was fought for some noble purpose. (To Preserve the Union! To End Slavery!) Nonsense. It was fought over egos.
Those other notions were an afterthought, a rationalization for doing what they did. South Carolina wanted union troops out, Abe Lincoln intended that they stay. Ft. Sumter was just the bone in a dog fight that turned into a pissing contest.

To argue that the Nation, or the South is better for what happened is to make the argument that a Marriage is better for forcing the wife to remain with an abusive husband. It may be true, but it misses the point that the woman should have been free to decide for herself what was in her best interest.

I have a long commute and I've been listening to Shelby Foote's "The Civil War". It's amazing to hear just how good a politician Lincoln was. It almost seems as the war was a continuation of the prejudices of the southern leaders back in the Revolutionary days. (You can hear this in the book "1776") Too bad it all had to happen.

To say that the American War Between the States (by act of Congress there has never been "Civil War" in These somewhat-united States) ended in 1865 is to show a total ignorance of issues now before the American people. Those four years were spent trying to resolve one Titanic issue - whether the federl government can intervene between the people of any State and the government of that state. If this issue had been resolved in 1865, then the South Carolina governor would not be debating with Obama over his healthcare bill and saying that S.C. Will not be part of it. No, the issue of States' Rights is still very much alive in America and this current administration has only succeeded in forcing it to raise it's glorious head once again.

Lincoln was a Great.

I can't think of anything else to say.

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