Defending slavery deprived the Confederate soldier to the same claim to nobility, but not to tragedy. - Allen C. Guelzo

Lincoln is, both culturally and in terms of his economic thinking, firmly and immovably located in the center of what we can call liberal democratic thought in the 19th century. He is very much market oriented, with tremendous confidence in the power of a capitalist society to transform for the better, and he believes in opening the possibilities of that society to as many as possible. To him, that’s what’s coterminous with liberty.

[R]eligious commitment formed the backbone of much of the North's hostility to slavery.

[A]s Americans, our identity does not rest on race, religion, blood, or soil, but on a historical proposition, that all men are created equal. Take that away, render it vain, illusory, or nugatory, and we lose all identity as Americans. And then what remains for us? The great Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said that the first step a tyrant takes toward enslaving a people is to steal their history, for in that case, no one has anything from the past with which to compare the present, and any horror can be normalized.