Sublime

It’s not clear whether Lincoln recalled, or even had read, Adams’s message to Congress in 1825. Both shared, though, this central point: that “liberty is power,” and that “the nation blessed with the largest portion of liberty must in proportion to its numbers be the most powerful nation upon earth.”87 To that end, Lincoln

His decision saved the United States from what would have been a military disaster.

Lincoln said nothing of slaves held in states remaining loyal: he could hardly have claimed war powers if not at war with them.80 He also knew, though, that he didn’t have to: the more blood the Union shed the more just—and, therefore, the more legitimate—emancipation would become. The proclamation, in this sense, was Lincoln’s Tarutino: with no mo

As did military command for Lincoln, who knew without having to read Clausewitz that wars, however ferocious, must serve, not consume, the states waging them. War could never be an end in itself, but it could be the means by which an endangered state saved itself. And Lincoln saw that a civil war—which he’d allowed to be forced upon him—might also