Was Abraham Lincoln wrong?

I am going to throw a grenade by asking this, but was Abraham Lincoln wrong to try to save the United States as a unified country?

America, I believe has reached a point where it is no longer sustainable as two diametrically opposite countries in one. It was unsustainable before, during, and since the Civil War. We have to stop kidding ourselves that that war was fought over slavery.. it was not. Slavery was a symptom, but it was not the cause. It's the essential reason that the Emancipation Proclamation was not conceived and introduced into the discussion until 1863 two years into the war, and only as the Union forces were losing to the confederacy. It was a practical matter of how to win the war, and freeing the slaves to fight FOR the UNION, and AGAINST the confederacy. It's also why Lincoln, in his first inaugural address, stated quite plainly he had no right nor intention to end slavery (look it up, and read it for yourself). It's also why we are still fighting the major reasons the civil war came to the point of war, 150+ years after the end of slavery If slavery had actually been the issue at the core of the disagreement, it would have been settled that many years ago.

We disagree about the very most basic of issues, and there is no hope we will ever agree. Let me just say at this point that I was once married to a liberal (a school teachers union, card carrying, parent hating school board snorting liberal). We met in college, and were fascinated with the discussions, which we agreed at the time would be left as 'simply discussions', and never get heated with each other. THEN we had kids, and kids in schools, and a home to buy, and my military career.... and we ended up loving each other, but getting divorced.

So now i ask, isn't it time for America to likewise get a divorce? Let New York and California form their own left wing country, and fail as big and boldly as they want. Let them castrate their own children in the name of 'gender affirming care'... let them abort those that they wish to kill right up to the day they are born...let them spend trillions on reparations for an institution no longer relevant or known to have been personally experienced by anyone. Let them allow invasions of millions of immigrants who they will never check nor care if they ever become or even want to be citizens, who can vote and seek jobs and make no distinctions nor provide advantages to anyone based on citizenship. But let the rest of the country establish laws to keep those states that choose sanity to do so unfettered by those who wish to and do choose secession. And noone to complain when police are hired and supported, no one to complain when a wall is built to keep out all but those who enter by legal means, etc etc etc

Was Abraham Lincoln wrong?

 

I try to not talk politics, because in my experience, it never goes well but I can tell you this, if you really believe these things about liberals, you are the one that is wrong...very, very wrong. It makes me sad to think that things have become so skewed in the world that this monstrous description is what so many people actually think "the other side" is all about.

 

I agree that the USA is currently politically polarized but it would be foolish to think that a split as you describe ( without any real detail ) would or could work. And is it necessary?
I wrote a thing about a week ago on here about the US. No-one has responded lol.

Anyway; there's more to unite you guys than to divide you.
You have more in common than some seem to realize and, so, to turn inwards on your country-folk, to have a row will diminish everything your hold dear.
Of course we know why it's happening and who (and what) has caused it.

Meanwhile, yet useful to this thread, over here in the UK there's a part of it called Northern Ireland. One of your (very) good guys, Senator George Mitchell, has made several interventions in the 'peace process' and his work and very huge effort has been very helpful.
And when he makes a speech, he is not limiting it's value to Northern Ireland but, instead and deliberately, it seems, he is making a principled model (blue print) for use in conflict resolution across the world.

My point is that if you were to read some of his speeches, such as in April or May, 25yrs on from the Good Friday Agreement, he specifically refers to the 100%ers.
Politics is about compromise. It is the art of compromise. To seek 100% in politics generally gets you 100% of nothing (nothing that you would like).

In my view, the issue is about the current wave of populism spreading around the world.
People have been promised that they will get what they want by those populists in power - and they like it. Why wouldn't they. They're going to get what they really want. Trouble is they won't and can't because they have been lied to by those populists who are more interested in themselves than they are in anyone who they have wound up to believe in them.

And of course, when they can't deliver what they have promised, they blame others such a Liberals or lefties, further creating tension and causing division.

Such division serves only those who cause it and those who believe them are being manipulated.

Here's a thing which you may be able to see in the context of the USA and decide if it's what you would like.

Ireland was divided in 1921 where one part was independent from the UK and the other part (Northern Ireland) was maintained within the UK, to favor those who formed the majority of that part, the unionists. So NI was majority unionist.
They got what they wanted but (as I said), politics is the art of compromise and without that the rest followed.
The others, who were the minority, had no vote, were second choice when it came to jobs (history repeating itself where hundred of yrs previously, instead of employing locals the English sent over 'their own' to do the jobs).

That's (about 99%) the unionist population.

The Irish in NI stood up several times (with a bloody conflict) which resulted in the split in 1921. Did it work? Would such a split in the US work.
Well, in NI the Irish (republicans) rose up again in 1969/70.
They wanted what you already have and which you seemingly hold dear.
They had no jobs or very menial ones. Their housing was rubbish largely because they were 2nd/3rd class citizens and their landlords were English. Historically, if they weren't able to pay rent, because their income was so poor, the landlords often burned their thatched roofs making the house a shell and consequently uninhabitable, purely to stop them living there rent-free but preventing them earning anything as well. (They didn't need that income anyway). That's where resentment started initially, back in the 1800s.

So, without political inclusion, some would say they rebelled, whilst others would say they stood up and called it out. However calling it out wasn't enough to secure change.

They began their 'terrorist' campaign in 1970. There were political talks with normal nationalist parties who wanted Ireland to be as one, again but who weren't militarists/terorists/freedom fighters (depending on viewpoint).

Agreement after agreement, required compromise from those who could give it - the unionists. They didn't give an inch. Their political leaders even said 'not an inch' before then changing it to 'no surrender'.

From 1970 to 1998 and since too, occasionally, many thousands of people were killed on both sides of the conflict - which is a misnomer. They were innocent and weren't on a side. They may have been eating lunch or an evening meal in a restaurant, or they may have been shopping. They may have been sitting in their own home; or at work - an ordinary job such as a kitchen worker but working in a police station.
Specifically targeted, his family held hostage as he was tied into a van bomb and it as then detonated.

Lots of similar events (not stories) with families across the place apparently still in trauma. That's where conflict takes people.
Is that what you would like for the USA?

I doubt (and hope) it would never happen because someday soon compromise will again be seen as the good thing it is.

Nobody can ever have everything they want. That's life. Like you, I too am divorced. Some compromise back then would have helped prevent it.

[edit]
For those who think such a military thing could never happen in the USA, don't forget the Irish are known globally for being laid back, non-confrontational and - as a country - they are indeed, the embodiment of soft power. So, it would be wrong to assume such a rising could never happen in the USA. Depends on the significance of the conflict coz it wasn't an Irish reaction which caused conflict, it was a human reaction to suppression. And you humans in the USA are just like us humans elsewhere; in England, Ireland, Australia or anywhere else.[/edit]

my 2c.

 

[ Lincoln suggested that if slavery were allowed to spread it would block free labor from settling in the new states and, as a result, the entire nation would soon become ever more dominated by slave owners.]

Such was the opinion of the founders of the British Colony of Georgia which was setteled in 1733. They wanted an armed yomanary on the border.

At the conclusion of the War of Austrian Succession in 1748, slavery was instituted in Georgia. The Moravian Colonists then decamped to Bethelem Pennsylvania.

 

Idiots never give up! Noooo--the civil war was not about slavery---it was about southern heritage. You know. The heritage to --uh --the heritage to hmmm---awwwww fuck it.

 

How can people really think like this? Facebook is leaking again...

 

Whatever the vision for a post civil war America, it was cut short with John Wilkes Booth. Incompetent presidents followed like Grant and Andrew Johnson and Reagan and Bush 1 and 2 so that the racism was and is tolerated…Thanks to spineless politicians like Graham, DeSantis, Abbott, Mitch M and the Rs, there is no end in sight. Just where do think the bigots in the Supreme Court came from?

 

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The civil war was about states rights, one of those rights having been slavery, but not limited to it.

In his third autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, the orator wrote that Lincoln asked him “to undertake the organizing of a band of scouts, composed of colored men, whose business should be…to go into the rebel states, beyond the lines of our armies, and carry the news of emancipation, and urge the slaves to come within our boundaries.”

 

I stated the position currently expressed and driven by liberals on a daily basis, clearly, accurately, and succinctly. If it sounds monstrous, that's because it in fact is. That's on you, and those pushing for these 'progressive' ideas. It is in fact a repugnant agenda, and exactly the reason we are so passionate against it.

 

Succession is the act or process of following in order or sequence. Order of succession, in politics, the ascension to power by one ruler, official, or monarch after the death, resignation, or removal from office of another, usually in a clearly defined order

Secession is the withdrawal of a group from a larger entity, especially a political entity, but also from any organization, union or military alliance.

 

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The currently accepted practice of castration and mastectomies for underage children is barbaric, and is in fact child abuse

Democrats Cite Infants’ Well-Being in Arguing against ‘Born-Alive’ Abortion-Survivor Bill
Democrats Cite Infants’ Well-Being in Arguing against ‘Born-Alive’ Abortion-Survivor Bill (yahoo.com)

It's guaranteed by the US Constitution. Now we have a fair number of black billionaires (Oprah, Michael Jordan, etc). The sky is the limit in America, for EVERYONE!

I'm against ILLEGAL immigration. Use the door, don't just swim in!

 

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It's barbaric and child abuse to target trans kids as the villians du jour in Retrumplican political campaigns--pawns in your current power plays. Transsexuals are this election season's successor to Muslims as the pariahs to hate. Cruel to the bone!

How deceptive! You respond to Meagain's statement about most Democrats not favoring late-term abortion with an article from the rightwing rag National Review dealing with the concerns expressed by a few Democrat legislators about a Retrumplican effort to modify an existing law specifying a certain level of care for fetuses or babies surviving abortion procedures. Even from your biased article, the reader will discover that the Democrat legislators had some valid concerns about the bill: 1. that it was unnecessary, since a 2002 born-alive bill had “reaffirmed” that infanticide is already illegal in every state. Killing babies is homicide. Professor Mary Ziegler of Fla. State College of Law, pointed out :“States can and do punish people for killing children who are born alive . Most criminal laws are at the state level not the federal level.”The Facts on the Born-Alive Debate - FactCheck.org So it seems like what you "states rights", small government are really complaining about is that we don't have more unnecessary federal legislation on the books; (2) that the law is unclear and has feds looking over the shoulders of physicians and second-guessing them. If fact some suspect the main purpose of the bill was to create this risk in order to discourage physicians from performing abortions at all. (Retrumplicans are so sneaky).(3) some Democrats were concerned about the provisions requiring hospitalizations in all cases where the operation wasn't performed in a hospital. Taking a struggling baby to a hospital miles away might not be in its best interests. These all seem like sensible concerns about a bill which was obviously passed to virtue signal to the religious right.

Hate to break it to you, coach, but that happens to be FALSE! I hope you aren't the kind of coach they have teaching high school civics! Since you claim to have devoted so much of your life to defending the Constitution, I thought you might have read it. The U.S. Constitution doesn't guarantee Blacks or anyone else equal opportunities. The Fourteenth Amendment does have an equal protection clause which protects all persons from discrimination by the States, or local governments empowered by them. It doesn't apply to private employers, schools or other entities. The Fifth Amendment protecting our rights from the federal government does not contain and equal protection clause, but the Courts have interpreted it to protect us from discriminatory laws and actions by the feds.

What a ludicrous statement! The "billionaires" you mention seem to have in common skills in entertainment and sports. Unfortunately, most African-Americans (despite racist stereotypes) aren't endowed with the necessary talent to excel in these fields. Thanks to affirmative action, which the Retrumplican Supreme Court just abolished, still relatively small but growing numbers of black lawyers, physicians, and other professionals and businessmen have been able to make it. But there is nothing approximating equality of opportunity.
https://home.treasury.gov/news/featured-stories/racial-inequality-in-the-united-states
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-co...ericas-struggle-to-overcome-racial-inequities
racial inequality in america - Yahoo Video Search Results

Democrats will continue to work toward comprehensive immigration reform that fixes our nation’s broken immigration system, improves border security, prioritizes enforcement targeting criminals, keeps families together, and strengthens our economy. Retrumplicans so far resist the idea of comprehensive immigration reform, since the current situation gives them another wedge issue they can use in their struggle to divide and conquer!

 

I am going to throw another grenade in, but I have addressed it to you, because it is your country and I am seeing it from the outside.

For many years, I have seen the US as too large, resulting in a uniform standard of mediocrity. I would suggest far more home rule for the member states, including their own leader with presidential powers. A consortium would be needed to take care of defence, but not have the power to enter the states into needless wars. An FBI style operation could also deal with organised crime, particularly when it existed across state boundaries.

For the rest, a system similar to the former EEC could be set up, allowing free trade internally between the states and facilitating inter state medical care.
However it would need to avoid becoming similar to the EU and trying to pass laws across the board. Needless to say people should be allowed to cross state boundaries, both for work and leisure.

The system would require a great deal of though, some of which may require national standards, but working properly, everyone would be better off and showing far more national pride.
Hopefully, at least some states would control, if not ban, importing from China and returning both jobs and pride to their people. The large corporations would certainly not agree with me, when companies such as Levi's would need to manufacture within the US, rather than be the parasites that they have become.
Perhaps the most important thing would become BALANCED trade.