re: Best Presidents (Happy Presidents Day)

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I mean his first post accused Lincoln of being a tyrant

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Some of his actions were considered as tyrannical by some. Mobilizing military to enforce laws of the US over the CSA isn't exactly peaceful politics. Now before the idiots chime in, secession, at the time, was not "illegal". There is a bunch of grey area there.

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Did Lincoln abuse the power of his office? Absolutely

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And some would call tyrannical.

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He has the company of virtually every single other president there.

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Not nearly to the extreme of Lincoln, however.

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Was he in a very precarious situation of trying to keep the country together, not many of which were his doing? Absolutely.

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Also agree. I often wonder what would have happened, had the civil war never happened. Would slavery still exist today? I highly doubt it. I think the Union's isolationism of the South would have eventually broken the institution of slavery. However, the Union buying cotton and other goods from the CSA would have made it harder for the CSA to abandon slavery completely.

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And the reality is you can't have any discussion of the Civil War without bringing slavery into it.

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Not saying you can't at all. It definitely played a large part.

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Maintaining slavery was the sole reason the Southern states seceded.

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I don't know as much about the politics around the civil war as i do, say world war 2. I will say, though, that the idea that every CSA soldier was a slave owning blood thirsty demon is silly. The fact is, slave owners were a small minority of the population of the south. Goods and services produced by slaves, however, was a huge industry in the south. It was free labor. So big of an industry that the union participated by purchasing said goods from the South. But to think that every Confederate soldier fought to keep slavery, an institution run by a wealth minority that enriched mostly themselves, is a bit absurd. I think a lot of the soldiers that fought, fought for their state. Unlike today, state loyalty and pride were a big thing back in the day. Robert E. Lee was offered the commanding position in the Union army, but turned it down to defend Virginia, per many reports.

I do wonder, personally, how things would have ended up without the Civil War, though. Would slavery survive? How different would the landscape look? Would the Confederacy survive? Would the idea of the US have survived, with a split nation? Would the British retake the US with a divided nation?