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Basically tempers had time to cool, and alternative paths to power existed.

You don't need a State, but for an entity like the Confederacy and the fact much of the Senior leadership chose to pursue reconciliation-aided by initial lenient treatment by the likes of Sherman at Bennet Place-kept a damper on it in the early phases which was critical.

Proposed after Confederate armies had laid down their arms and the state dissolved, Lee is arguing in favor of renewed National union, and during the "easy times" of the Johnson soft Reconstruction. It's only adopted later and by then the means of legally subverting it are already clear.

By then, you already had leaders like Lee, Longstreet and urges acting to calm down passions and the Union had already taken up occupation duties. It's a lot easier to organize resistance when you still have control over ~190,000 troops in the field then a decade later when they've long since...

If the war continues to drag on and an insurgency happens, that will definitely damage his and his party's popularity with voters who want the conflict to end and, again, Lincoln's looking towards the long term at this point. If the South remains a hotbed of resistance, that negatively effects...

What risks do you mean? Killing tens of thousands of more Americans-on both sides-and the associated economic damage would only make putting the country back together all that much harder. A Confederate insurgency would only increase this; Lincoln very much was looking towards the future at this...

Posting here again because I learned of Donathan C. Olliff's Reforma Mexico and the United States: A Search for Alternatives to Annexation, 1854–1861 since I created this thread. Unfortunately, a Kindle or PDF version of it does not seem to exist given its age (1981), so sharing excerpts is...

I have looked at all the compromises, and among them were allowing slavery to continue as is where it remained as of the time; you haven't actually provided any evidence to the contrary either, and tacitly conceded your overall thrust that there is no way slavery can continue by noting Lincoln...

Lincoln by David Donald (1995) "Stephens' record would be highly suspect were it not confirmed by other, more contemporary evidence that Lincoln did not now insist upon the end of slavery as a precondition for peace. He told Representative Singleton that his 'To Whom it May Concern' letter to...

Actually, he wrote the EP long before any of this, given it was issued in late 1862 and the "To Whom It May Concern" letter is from July of 1864; indeed, all of these references are talking about what Lincoln was saying/thinking/doing in late 1864/early 1865. Overwhelmingly, they show he was...

And as I've cited, that's not what Lincoln himself was saying circa the Hampton Roads Conference and earlier. To quote other sources, starting with What Shall We Do With the Negro? by Paul Escott (2009) "As a consequence of his view of the Constitution, he favored and repeatedly proposed a...

Stopping the 13th Amendment would have a very large effect, as slavery has only been ended in a handful of areas; roughly 400-800,000 slaves have been emancipated, meaning roughly two million remained in bondage even at this late date. The EP would keep the former free but the latter would...

Basically the EP was a threat to free the slaves by force, but even Lincoln conceded it was only legal under war-time provisions and even then was on shaky legal ground; basically, "What we've already freed would stay free, but those we haven't got to yet would remain in bondage because the war...

I think that is to over-state the case: Lincoln instructed Secretary of State William H. Seward, Representative John B. Alley and others to procure votes by any means necessary, and they promised government posts and campaign contributions to outgoing Democrats willing to switch sides.[49][50]...

So, the Blair Plan works and in February of 1865 the American Civil War comes to a close via agreement in an alternate Hampton Roads Conference. Over the course of March of 1865, Confederate armies lay down their arms and the Confederate States are quickly re-admitted which, when combined with...

It ends the war months ahead of schedule, averts the need for Reconstruction and thus reduces the possibility of insurgency by the defeated Confederates and quite literally avoids tens of thousands of casualties on both sides in the final months; at the time, it was not apparent how long the war...

This scenario brings up some interesting possibilities. For a tl;dr version of such: 1) It seems Davis was actually interested in a ceasefire and genuinely willing to consider peace talks that would lead to reunion. 2) Lincoln and Seward both seemed to dangle the prospect of the South being...

From Mexican Projects of the Confederacy by J. Fred Rippy, The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Vol. 22, No. 4 (Apr., 1919), pp. 291-317 On December 28, 1864, Francis P. Blair of Maryland received from President Lincoln a pass through the lines of the Union army to go South and return. On...