[Sailor Steve]

There's not much I can add to the two excellent summations above, but I would like to address a couple of specific points.

Originally Posted by UnderseaLcpl

I will contend that the civil war was one of the U.S.'s most useless wars. It was started over a tax. Specifically a tax on imports from Britain.

This seems like an attempt to focus on one single issue when there were many more involved. If you want to be truly specific and ignore the rest, then you could claim the war started over the same thing most wars start over: a piece of land.

Abraham Lincoln said that he would not fire the first shot. Being a canny politician he knew that the South would open fire on Fort Sumter, and he would have an excuse to respond. If Jefferson Davis and Francis Pickens had been half as astute, they would have responded that the Union could keep that fort, and they would make money supplying and entertaining the Federal troops, and eventually buy the fort, and that they would take that as a token of Lincoln's good faith that he would let them go peacefully. But Lincoln knew that would never happen.

Had the North been constitutionalist this never would have happened.

How exactly was the North not constituionalist? I have my own ideas, but would love to hear yours.

I would like to add that Abraham Lincoln was not a good president. If he was so good why could he not avoid a war.

Benjamin Franklin's words: "We must all hang together, or most assuredly we will all hang separately". Lincoln was a member of the very next generation, and was reasonably certain that none of the states could survive as less than a whole. Right or wrong, he did what he could to save the United States. That he succeeded says much in his favor.