Oh, Greg, so Lincoln was this saint and Davis was the devil... Okay, I see where you are coming from... A totally biased viewpoint where one side is the bad side and the other the good side... Lincoln did indeed say all the things the the Northern Repubs wanted to hear... And in the Charleston harbor he did all the things that were overtly antagonistic and not helpful if there was going to be a way to not end up at war...

I don't think those points are all that debatable... Of course, American history being what it is, to the victors go the spoils of sanitazation and revision...

I think when we discuss the unCivil War in terms of bad guys and good guys we aren't lookin' at much more than the revised edition...

I mean, heck yeah the Southern states that were hanging onto slavery were wrong... So were folks in Washington, D.C. where there were over 4000 slaves at the beginning of the war...

But there was shortages of wrongness in the mid 1800's... Northerners didn't get the Southern culture and vice versa... I mean, different ways of livin' cross the Mason Dixon line not all that different between today's progressives and the Tea Party folks...

My own feelin's beyond my observations that we had two guilty parties is that if we could do a "reset" then alot more folks would have voted for John Bell in 1860 and avoided the entire mess...

B~