Plus the desire not to be bankrupt.

It's the post-war South that was so terribly impoverished, not the Antebellum South, btw.

There's no way of knowing.

The President doesn't have a choice, if he is obedient to his oath. If a State wishes to leave the union, it is free to do so, just as we are free to quit the U.N. if we choose.

Lincoln made an unConstitutional choice.
Perhaps the U.S. wouldn't have been as powerful. Perhaps it would have been even more powerful. That's all irrelevant. He made the morally wrong decision.

You sound like Dr. Potter.

I'm here to buy the rights to Rearden Metal.

Rearden Metal is not for sale.

Oh, well in that case we're going to invade your factory, destroy your furnaces, confiscate your metal, destroy what we can't haul away, and kill your workers.

More simply, the Southern plantation owners would not have sold their slaves to the North any more than Rearden would have sold his metal to the SSI.

Wow. Such ignorance; do you buy into stereotypes about all ethnicities, or is there just something special about the South for you? I bet you also think the government taxes poor people more than rich ones, huh, since the gov't was receiving a great deal of revenue from taxing Southern imports, which they couldn't have been prosperous enough to afford...

Why would it have been a terrible option?
How could you not let them secede without violating the principles of the Founding Fathers?

"That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness...
...But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security." - from the Declaration of Independence

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcZK2CF3m...

It wouldn't have delayed the war, it would have prevented it.
You justify the enslavement of the southern States by saying they were needed as part of the U.S. to fight Hitler a century later? How is that any different than the Head of State or Wesley Mouch enslaving Rearden and Galt because they *need* them?
We must have lost WWII because Canada and Australia and the U.S. were separate countries from England, then. Faulty logic.

The brutality didn't just "occur". Sheridan threw out the Laws of War that limited the horror of war since the days of the condottieri.

And you're assuming we would have remained two countries. As slavery was already dying in the Southern States, long before a century passed the two countries would have most likely reunited, and the Constitution would have remained intact, and the States would not have been reduced to mere provinces.

Maybe, but it's also theoretically possible that the South may have been perfectly content to remain at a lower level of productivity and be less prosperous, since that's how they were used to living and it was their tradition.

Let the South secede? That would have been a terrible option. Lincoln made the right choice when he refused to let it happen.

Franklin D. Roosevelt will always be #1 worst president on my list.