You’ll never believe this, folks, but in the couple of hours since I posted a reader’s attack on Honest Abe —an email that I viewed as one-off, a strange aberration—my inbox has filled to overflowing. Fourteen decades after a bad night at Ford’s Theater, Lincoln goes right on rousing passions. (In our interview on Tuesday, Andy Ferguson claimed as much. Silly me. I doubted the man.) Below, a couple of choice samples.

Lincoln got it right:

I read with some interest your correspondent who argued that “While I think slavery was an abomination, preventing the South from severing their connection to the Union set us on a course that I believe is leading to our ruin…weakening it to the point of eventual failure.”

With all due respect to your correspondent, this is clearly balderdash. What would have irreperably weakened the United States of America would have been the severing of the nation into two seperate nations.

Given the historical record of the South (full disclosure – a region I was born in and have lived much of my life in) regarding Jim Crow, segregation, etc., it’s fairly clear that slavery would not have easily been destroyed as an institution through “more ethical, moral, and logical ways of abolishing it.” In fact, the most telling point of your correspondent’s message is the absence of those alternatives.

Also, it’s well known that although Lincoln was an abolitionist at heart, he had not taken any action to eliminate slavery at the time of South Carolina’s succession, and had professed the priority of preserving the Union, even if that meant that slavery went on for a time. It was the South that pressed the existing civil, economic and social dichotomy into military conflict by firing on Ft. Sumter, not Lincoln.

I conclude by asking just how a divided nation would somehow be stronger or even one nation today? I can’t fathom a reasonable answer to that question and I’d bet your correspondent doesn’t have one either.

Lincoln got it all wrong:

I must add that I think our country would be immeasurably greater if there were two of them. With northern and southern federations, Washington would not be able to jam so much nonsense down the throats of its citizenry: You raise taxes too high in the northern federation, and the people leave to go to the southern federation, or vice versa. I’d expect similar results for social engineering nonsense. Over time, this experiment might lead to a decision on which approach is superior: Federalist or Statist.

We would probably not have the quasi-socialist nanny state we see today if Lincoln had let the south go. There could be, in my estimation, no finer set of checks and balances than to have a pair of federations in alliance, and you know they would have ended up as allies.