1. This thread is wrong. To start with, the "house divided" speech launched Lincoln's 1858 Senate campaign, it wasn't during the war. The last thing Lincoln was arguing for in 1858 was crushing the slaveowners.
2. Lincoln worked hard in 1858-60 to position himself as making a modest, even conservative, case: restrict further expansion of slavery to establish the principle of its wrongness & prevent its growth. His speech made clear that the slave power was the aggressor: 
3. Lincoln's specific grievance was the pro-slavery faction's use of the Supreme Court (in Dred Scott) to short-circuit any further effort at legislative compromise, nationalizing the issue to heighten the crisis:
4. No, sorry, Lincoln did not start the war; that's Confederate propaganda. He won an election. He begged & pleaded for a way to keep the nation together under its existing institutions. The Confederates fired the first shot.
5. Lincoln spent not only the spring of 1861 but much of 1862 offering every kind of compromise but two: he would not let the union dissolve, & he would not be extorted into letting slavery expand.
6. Both @HeerJeet & @ThePlumLineGS are conflating Lincoln's strong principles & willing to fight for the outcomes he wanted *through the political system* with today's left-wing incivility, with its heckler's vetoes, speech codes & cancel culture.
@HeerJeet @ThePlumLineGS 7. Lincoln greatly valued the classical liberal virtues of open debate, reason, argument, norms, coalition-building, & compromise when needed. He chatted genially at Hampton Roads with the Confederate commissioners, even while insisting he had every right to hang them.
@HeerJeet @ThePlumLineGS 8. I'm fond of this 1854 Lincoln quote, which makes explicit his willingness to stand with anyone when they are right, rather than playing tribal politics of "how dare you collaborate with those people."
@HeerJeet @ThePlumLineGS 9. Lincoln despised the Fugitive Slave Law. Was he uncompromising? In his first Inaugural, he pledged to enforce it so long as it remained law, because that is what the president's oath of office requires.
@HeerJeet @ThePlumLineGS 10. Of course, Lincoln also recognized the necessity for wartime leadership to take steps unacceptable in peacetime. He crushed rebellion, declared runaway slaves forfeit, suspended habeas corpus, even deported seditionists. But his end was always to restore the system.
@HeerJeet @ThePlumLineGS 11. Lincoln is, properly, an icon of long & principled battles for political change. He gave no quarter in debate. But he's also rightly invoked as an icon of working through the system, compromising when necessary, remaining personally civil, revering written law & the Founding.
