I find it very interesting that the amateur revisionist historians on this site are overlooking the fact that the CSA started the Civil War by firing on Fort Sumter. Moreover, the armies of CSA, buoyed by their early military successes, briefly considered attacking Washington DC and conquering the entire United States. The Civil War, from the Union perspective, was predominantly defensive in nature when it began. Further, I am sick and tired of Southerners, in 2007 no less, still railing against Lincoln's horrible abuses of the US Constitution and his rough-shod treatment of states' rights. No, the Consitution doesn't allow a state to violently secede. You can say that it does, but it doesn't. What was Lincoln suppposed to do? Stand idly by while Southern armies ransacked the North and imposed slavery from Delaware to Maine? And what was he supposed to do after the Union army had recaptured Confederate military conquests? Should he have left the hostile CSA and it's army intact so that it could continually attack the Union? No, he should have done what he did, and he did it well. And any Constitutional "abuses" that can be cited are, in reality, allowed in time of war. Today, 142 years after the end of the Civil War, American Southerners have to somehow accept that they initiated a war to defend their own racist, self-serving, inhuman practices. To advance any other collective hypothesis is to practice the most ridiculous sort of self-deception and historical revisionism.