The former guy recently claimed that Lincoln could have negotiated away the Civil War and that TFG could have done so if he’d been there.
To start, let's compare the dates of Lincoln's election to office, the date he was inaugurated President, and when South Carolina left the Union.
Abraham Lincoln was elected as the 16th President of the United States on November 6, 1860.
The first state to secede from the Union during the Civil War was South Carolina which formally declared its secession on December 20, 1860.
Lincoln was later inaugurated, aka actually became President, on March 4, 1861.
Notice that when South Carolina seceded, Lincoln was not President, and thus had no power to do anything, pro or con, about that.
The trend continued:
Mississippi - January 9, 1861
Florida - January 10, 1861
Alabama - January 11, 1861
Georgia - January 19, 1861
Louisiana - January 26, 1861
Texas - February 1, 1861
Notice that by the time Lincoln had assumed the powers of the Presidency on March 4, 1861, seven states had seceded.
While the U.S. Civil War is generally considered to have started on April 12, 1861, with the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, seven out of the then thirty-three states had seceded by that date. That’s about twenty-one percent of the states at that time. If the secession of South Carolina is not generally considered to be the start of the Civil War, I assert it was the lighting of the fuse that exploded at Fort Sumpter.
It seems very unlikely that President Lincoln could have done anything to bring the seceded states back into the Union without allowing slavery to continue unimpeded in both the seceded and soon-to-be seceded states, plus a multitude of future slave states.
Perhaps that’s what The Former Guy is getting at? His “negotiation” would have been to continue and expand slavery, perhaps even to expand it throughout the Union.
What do you think? Let us know in the comments.
#jtg