A cursory glance at historical fact backs this up. Southern States seceded. Southern states fired first shot. Lincoln's position was that he was not going to invade southern states, but merely prevent them from further taking Federal properties (forts, munitions, etc).

You could make nuanced examinations into justifications, but to make a claim like "Lincoln started the Civil War" is to make a claim completely divorced from reality. If you're going to strip the nuance out and view it in purely binary terms, there's pretty much zero way to place the blame on Lincoln's bit, so to speak.

You'd have to be in some sort of bubble to believe that.

Did Lincoln mishandle the war? Sure, and you'd be hard pressed to find a conflict that couldn't have been prosecuted better, and you could find none that were not mishandled to some degree. But at the end of the day did he really "mishandle" it? He won it. He handled it competently enough that hundreds of years later we can look back on it as one nation, instead of two or more that may or may not still exist. So where it matters most he did not mishandle it. He handled it.

Legacies are made and judged by the sum total of ones output. A couple confused stabs at attacking his efficiency in winning the war and misrepresenting who started it don't quite get you there in charting a reversal. The constitutional question that cliff brings up is more nuanced, but like his other points, a cursory glance at historical facts shows more nuance and legalese than he pretends isn't there.

So I guess in answer to his question on whether Lincoln's was bad, terrible, or just meh, the clear answer is the last one, -'awesome'. He just forgot to write that one down.