And? When the point is that it was a war that shouldn't have been fought, you aren't making much of an argument here. Also, it's completely irrelevant which side was the bigger asshole when the point of criticism is that tyranny should not be excused. If Biden does the exact same shit Lincoln did, are you going to excuse him as well?
It would seem then that we are at an interminable loggerheads, because I am firmly of the opinion that 'a third of your country is trying to break away because they lost an election and so they can keep nearly 10 million people in bondage and have spurned literally every possible chance at compromise' is arguably the best
casus belli in history. If Republican states had acted as unreasonably as the Confederate ones did
in defense of chattel fucking slavery, which they hope to not only retain but push onto new states & territories, then yes they will in fact have made Biden the better side by default. So it is fortunate that we're in no danger of that and that it's the blue states which are more inclined to start shooting over odious causes in this day & age instead.
I can't help you out of a libertarian/anarchist purity spiral this strong. Fact #1: Washington and the other Founding Fathers did what they had to do at the time to prevent the fragmentation of the US into its constituent states, making them easy prey for their former colonial overlord and other powers - and any true American patriot ought to be thanking Christ they had the wits to do so. Lincoln followed their example on a larger scale (because the Civil War was a good deal larger than the Whiskey Rebellion...) and hell, the changes he made to the American system were comparatively less far-reaching and longer-lasting than what the Constitutional Convention did.
Fact #2: insurrections and civil wars inevitably always result in civil liberties being curtailed to some extent, because that's the nature of such internal conflict, no exceptions. This has been true since ancient history and the US is not exceptional in this regard, only in that Lincoln managed to hold a fair election that he was in actual danger of losing in the middle of his civil war. Any government that insists on letting possible to probable subversive agents do their thing unmonitored and unpoliced when they're already engaged in a shooting war with rebel factions is one that will cease to exist in a hurry. Don't like it? Don't start a civil war and you'll have no excuse for the government to start getting crackdown-happy, as I've been saying this entire time.
You can ask the Poles from the same 1790-1860 timeframe how well pigheaded unwillingness to reconcile liberal (small-l) principle with reality at any cost ends. Because surprise, it doesn't end in making
The Probability Broach real, it ends with you not having a country at all. And then you'll get the smack of
real tyranny anyway, from foreign oppressors far worse than any domestic tyrant real or imagined would have been at that.
Because joining was completely voluntary to begin with, and many states demanded the right to leave if they wanted to in order to get talked into joining in the first place.
@strunkenwhite seems to have this part well in hand, but I will add that I for one will not consider conventions or referenda to secede legitimate, period, when an entire third of the population of the states in question would have been considered chattel certainly without any say in the matter. This is not an unreasonable proposition, the US itself wouldn't recognize a referendum conducted under such circumstances to be any more lawful, free and fair than a North Korean election.
I view the way Middle Eastern countries, such as Saudi Arabia, treats women as a great immoral wrong. Should the United States invade and impose its will on them? Would I be justified for doing so if I were to become President? If I took the same actions Lincoln did?
Saudi Arabia is its own country on the other side of the world, the Confederacy was comprised of states on the same continent trying to break away from the US. Lincoln himself had sworn a solemn oath to preserve the Union against all threats, as he laid out in his first inaugural address. Were I an American citizen in 1861 I would consider him
not fighting back against the Confeds when he had the chance to constitute extreme cowardice and dereliction of his sworn duties.
And it's well-established that they were provoked into firing the first shots.
Okay well, I'm happy to let
@LordsFire respond to this response to him but I gotta say something of my own in regard to this point. You know what's well established? That the slave states were the ones which consistently piled provocation and aggression atop one another for almost 40 years before the Civil War happened. Even setting aside how they were the aggressor in literally every antebellum confrontation over slavery up to & including Bleeding Kansas (of which I have already given numerous examples in this thread and don't care to repeat myself), they're the ones who seceded because they lost an election, they're the ones who had an agent in the Buchanan Administration (John Floyd, Secretary of War) treasonously do his utmost to weaken the US Army and stockpile munitions where the Confederates could most easily seize them during Buchanan's lame duck period, and they're the ones who fired on the
Star of the West months before Lincoln was even inaugurated.
No, I refuse to accept this assertion because it's complete bullshit if you look at the picture outside of Fort Sumter. And even there it was the Confederates' own responsibility to have chosen the sword when Lincoln presented it to them by...having the temerity to refuse to abandon federal property, so why should I have any response other than 'tough shit' when they're felled by it.
