Interesting how much people cling to the history they have been told as sacred while thinking that today is a shit show. The truth is it started a long time ago and history being written by the winners it is always distorted to make them look much better than their actions. Regarding Lincoln there is a case to make that abolishing slavery was not his main motivation and happened as a by-product of fighting the southern states. Maybe a more realistic hypothesis is that secession meant a big loss of tax revenue for the federal government that Lincoln was not willing to let go so he went to war and in doing so cancelled the right to secede to supposedly sovereign states (not that southern states were right but that is another story)