The Stakes

What Abraham Lincoln surely saw as the Union seemed to be dividing, splitting, and shattering under him, was unacceptable emasculation. At stake was not just whether slavery would live or die. It was not just whether republican government, "the last best hope of earth" would succeed or fail--as important as those two outcomes were. There was a host of very practical reasons he could not let the rebellion succeed, to not let this "government of the people, by the people, and for the people" perish from the earth.

He doubtless clearly saw that a divided Union, a separate nation in the South and a separate nation in the North, which was what the South was seeking--to save slavery and its political leverage-- would have given us not the single united nation that would become the greatest in the world by the next century. It would have given us instead two second rate operations with little separate leverage, power, and clout in a growing world. To let the Union divide would be to emasculate America, water down its power and influence across the board. To be a great nation the Union had to be a union, a single hegemony, a single powerful whole, unified economically and in every way across the board, not an entity split in two.

His America was not just a geographic whole, but an economic, cultural, and social whole, inextricably linked and interdependent in so many ways. We simply could not afford to balkanize and diminish the muscle of this young republic by splitting into two separate nations going their own way. It simply would not do. As divided nations, both would be worse off. It was a sad truth that the South either did not see in its resolve to save slavery and the Southern way of life, or did not want to see.

Lincoln saw it, and despite what it would cost in lives, had to do what he eventually succeeded in doing--holding the entire enterprise together. Because he succeeded America become indeed the greatest power on earth.