I guess I should not degrade the manhood of anybody on this board where I can never come close to explaining myself. Although I did address the comment towards you the slur was directed at the populaces as a whole, not at you in particular. So l apologize if you took offense. Military service does make a boy into a man. Every war has the poor boy fighting for the wealthy but most confederate soldiers would have said they were fighting for state's rights, not to keep indulging in that other well worn topic. Lincoln was not even an abolitionist. That was known by all about him before he was elected president well before the war began in 1861. Lincoln had generals that could not stand the blood curdling slaughter of sending 10,000 young men into the face of death charging into fortified enemy lines. It was common for 7,000 - 10,000 men to die in those battles in a day. Those generals would retreat over & over. The war was literally in a stalemate all during 1861 & 1862. Public support for the war with those terrible losses was weakening in the north so that is why Lincoln declared his Emancipation Proclamation in early 1863, as a measure to regain northern public support. His proclamation freed nobody but people in the seceded states. Those people existed in northern border states and the west territories, they were not freed by that proclamation. Lincoln feared that freed people would wreck the economy, he wanted to deport them all to Central America after the war. Lincoln did eventually get Grant & Sherman as his generals in charge. They did not retreat after a day of witnessing a slaughter. They fought again day after day until they advanced. Conscription in the north supplied them with union troops at a pace the south had totally exhausted. They kept armies of 80,000 men while the southern armies of 30,000 & 40,000 men dwindled away in death. The south had no new recruit reinforcements. There was an issue about Lincoln not being trusted to allow that 'miserable institution' to be extended into the new territories. However that was all. The civil war was more about other things. However Lincoln was a hero to nobody but those desiring the north & south to be reunited. History is twisted to fit present day narratives. I have read numerous books by history professors. You can google this stuff.