The South illegally kept thousands of people in chains in a most cruel way for two hundred years. Those people were human beings and Americans in God's eyes long before any emancipation or fourteenth amendment.

Here's something more for the thrifty researcher. Logs, journals, diaries, etc. reveal southern preachers, philosophers, and even confederate generals, believing that God would give victory to those who were in the right. They believed the South was in the right and God's hand was with them. Therefore, in their minds, Dixie would be victorious. While many up North felt sure of a union triumph by Divine favor. As it turned out both North and South suffered Divine punishment, with our southern states getting the lion's share of wrath. I wonder why?

So we see from historical perspective that Abraham Lincoln had tremendous perspicacity concerning the great conflict. He believed Providence would use this war for its own Divine purposes,i.e., to punish and correct the nation as a whole. The sixteenth president also stated,

"My concern is not whether God is on our side. My great concern is to be on God's side, for God is always right."

So we hear a lot of complaints from southern reactionaries about Abraham Lincoln and his uses or abuses of executive power. A whole lot of whining charging him with constitutional violations. But somehow the egregious sins and crimes against humanity attributed to the South are of no consequence. We don't hear of the South taking responsibility for plunging America into war by perpetuating slavery; by a belligerent secession; and by firing on Northern troops, thereby, ipso facto, declaring war on the North. And now their great grandchildren are crying foul and blaming Abraham Lincoln.

Give it a rest Dixie. It's over. God fulfilled His purposes by putting an end to slavery in a most painful way. And the North was handed victory.

Lincoln's actions led to the presidency to change from that over a free republic protecting the rights of minorities to a military dictatorship by mob rule, as a democracy; that is quite obvious by the current use of executive orders, which creates statutes without going through the U.S. Congress to be voted on once published in the U.S. Congressional Record. See word definitions from the 1928 United States Army Training Manual for Republic and Democracy.