Mongoose @ 59 puts it all very well. One can think on Lincoln’s tactics, but the decline of State’s rights and growth of the Leviathan started with the Progressives and Lincoln’s effects on that and what followed were trivial if any.

RE riddle, the arguments that the Union would have been preserved without conflict are a bit like global warming alarmism—taking a low-probablilty “could” and turning it into a certain “would.” Anything might have happened, but there was and still is very little reason to believe the seceding States would have returned of their own volition.

You’re in the same bed as Pat Buchanan’s view of WW2, more or less.

People can legitimately disagree about Constitutional issues such as whether there was a right of secession and some of the things the Union did, but there is no realistic basis for pretending Lincoln didn’t face a genuine crisis. That’s just an excuse to say everything he did was unnecessary without actually debating it in a relevant frame of reference. In other words, BS.