If you guys would just be quiet for a bit and listen to LWM, you might learn something. He doesn't have to post here, and I really wish you wouldn't chase him away. In addition to being very smart LWM is also very sensitive, and very self-effacing.

Now that was funny! You should do stand-up.

But how can I chase him away? He already left with that other fellow amid great drama. I brought a tear to everyone's eye. Then we had a drink and forgot the old sod.

Wait, it was you who ignored my statement about the presidency ratcheting power ever upwards while you made a crack about Lincoln! You started this not lwm. Hmmm, why are you not helping him with a fact or two? He sure does need it.

highlights at 11 ...

Yes, and he tries to prove it by quoting some rubbish from modern times that has not a damn thing to do with dictator Lincoln. You know, the bloke we were taking about. The reason I was told to "fuck off". (with whom we were never told)

Now I will post something on topic.

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"... As DiLorenzo documents – contrary to conventional wisdom, books about Lincoln, and the lessons taught in schools and colleges – the War between the States was not fought to end slavery; Even if it were, a natural question arises: Why was a costly war fought to end it? African slavery existed in many parts of the Western world, but it did not take warfare to end it. Dozens of countries, including the territorial possessions of the British, French, Portuguese, and Spanish, ended slavery peacefully during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Countries such as Venezuela and Colombia experienced conflict because slave emancipation was simply a ruse for revolutionaries who were seeking state power and were not motivated by emancipation per se.

Abraham Lincoln’s direct statements indicated his support for slavery; He defended slave owners’ right to own their property, saying that "when they remind us of their constitutional rights [to own slaves], I acknowledge them, not grudgingly but fully and fairly; and I would give them any legislation for the claiming of their fugitives" (in indicating support for the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850).

Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was little more than a political gimmick, and he admitted so in a letter to Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase: "The original proclamation has no...legal justification, except as a military measure." Secretary of State William Seward said, "We show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them and holding them in bondage where we can set them free. " Seward was acknowledging the fact that the Emancipation Proclamation applied only to slaves in states in rebellion against the United States and not to slaves in states not in rebellion.

The true costs of the War between the States were not the 620,000 battlefield-related deaths, out of a national population of 30 million (were we to control for population growth, that would be equivalent to roughly 5 million battlefield deaths today). The true costs were a change in the character of our government into one feared by the likes of Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Jackson, and Calhoun – one where states lost most of their sovereignty to the central government. Thomas Jefferson saw as the most important safeguard of the liberties of the people "the support of the state governments in all their rights, as the most competent administrations for our domestic concerns and the surest bulwarks against anti-republican tendencies." ..." (Walter Williams)

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Will lwm now call Walter Williams a racist? That would make him a "self-hating black" would it not? :-)

Walter E. Williams is the John M. Olin distinguished professor of economics at George Mason University, and a nationally syndicated columnist. He is also an African-American.

Boy the list of people lwm wants to call racists is an ever growing one, eh?

Here it is: the South was prepared to fight a brutal war to preserve it.

History records that the South was willing to fight a brutal war to do away with the tariff. It was all about money just like it almost always is. No oil back then, but money.

Do you not know about the tariff dispute and what it meant?

Anyway, you say "...So far I haven't even found anything that's actually true ..." and yet you offer no examples. Glenn sure would offer examples and links and support if he made that statement.

I await your corrections. hehehe

Try Harry Jaffa, he is the head court historian. I am sure you will find plenty of half-truths there.