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Comment by jariel | Hacker News Reader

Yes there would be no USA without him, but as a foreigner, reading that, he seems like a brutal federalist.

He literally says 'we don't want bloodshed, but hey, the constitution says you cannot secede, so there will be bloodshed if you try to'.

We have several secessionist movements around the world: Canada, Spain, UK (Scotland/Northern Ireland), EU (Brexit) - to name just a few.

Literally the 'land of the free', a new country, with a lot of devolved power ... but 'if you try to leave we're going to invade you'. It seems really inconsistent with democratic principles.

Though histories and legalities are quite different, I was pretty shocked by his stark position.

His tone is not aggressive, but his position is pretty hardcore absolutist.

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Secession in the case of the American South was not a clear-cut case of everyone in a region wanting to live in their own country. The owners of the large slave-based plantations wanted to secede, and since they were the wealthy political elites, they made it happen. However, poorer white farmers who owned no slaves were either ambivalent about secession or outright pro-Union, and of course the black slave population weren't enthusiastic about the Confederate elites' aims.

So, Lincoln was advocating for the large Southern population that did not want to divide the Union, not quashing regional democratic aspirations.

So that's a good point but - "was not a clear-cut case of everyone in a region wanting to live in their own country"

Neither was the American revolution in the first place.

Where was the referendum? What would have been the results? Would the secessionists even have won?

Lincoln maybe didn't live in a time where he had a lot of historical examples to follow, fair enough, but the argument that 'some didn't want to separate' doesn't quite cut it fully because that's pretty much a pervasive context.

Public pronouncements like this are only nominally statements of the speaker's beliefs; they are intended to persuade people to support the speaker's future policies.

Few abolitonists felt that secession solved anything, and many would regard it as creating a rogue state. These people were already behind Lincoln's policies. The people who he had to persuade were abolitionists who worried whether they had the right to act, those who just wanted some way to make the issue someone else's problem, and those in the North who didn't find it troubling (and if he could persuade some of those who were pro-slavery, so much the better.)

You're confusing cause and effect. The goal of the south was slavery and leave if they did not get it - cause. The north was then handed a problem to which civil war. Effect. The south lost. Lincoln was trying to avoid bloodshed by arguing that the union could not be recinded unless all agreed. As such he was arguing for a third way to resolve the issue. The south didn't find third way. It got the problem it wanted and paid the price for it.

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