blahh2000, slavery was not in fact Lincoln's priority. Never confuse campaign rhetoric with policy, Lincoln was presented with slavery as a problem by last minute moves by his predecessor, James Buchanan, who didn't have the guts to solve the issue but had the smarts to leave a ticking bomb for Lincoln.

Lincoln's priority was to preserve the union and he is on record as being willing to drop freedom for slaves if that would preserve the union. Sadly the South had no trust in him due to his campaign talk.

Lincoln's problem wasn't just the South: he was worried that some Northern states, namely New York, might not support the war - many states in the Union did not support war as a method of solving the slavery issue. Had the South not initiated the fighting Lincoln probably didn't have enough of the Union backing him to initiate a war himself.

Robert E. Lee was honorable and considered a gentleman by even the Union people who dealt with him. But wars are like that sometimes: Lee was on the losing side but someone you wouldn't mind having as a neighbor: Sherman was on the winning side, but all you need to know about his personality is that after the war he went west to conduct the genocide of the American Indians... It's not a tough choice as to which one history judges more kindly, nor is it hard to understand why.

One irony is that the war was *almost* unnecessary to end slavery. Practical farm tractors were only a few years away and they were the solution to the problem.

I've often wondered what might have been had Lincoln had the foresight to push tractor development and production: could slavery been ended during his tenure? Probably not quite that quickly, but a lot of lives would have been saved.