But it was Lincoln himself who linked the conflict with the deepest beliefs of northern society. It is sometimes said that the American Civil War was part of a broader nineteenth-century process of nation building. Throughout the world, powerful, centralized nation-states developed in old countries, and new nations emerged where none had previously existed. The Civil War took place as modern states were consolidating their power and reducing local autonomy. The Meiji Restoration in Japan saw the emperor reclaim power from local lords, or shoguns. Argentina in the 1850s adopted a new constitution that abolished slavery, established universal male suffrage, and gave the national government the right to intervene in local affairs. As in the United States, economic development quickly followed national unification. Japan soon emerged as a major economic power, and Argentina embarked on a policy of railroad construction, centralization of banking, industrial development, and the encouragement of European immigration, which soon made it the world’s sixth largest economy.
Lincoln has been called the American equivalent of Giuseppe Mazzini or Otto von Bismarck, who during this same era created nation-states in Italy and Germany from disunited collections of principalities. But Lincoln’s nation was different from those being constructed in Europe. They were based on the idea of unifying a particular people with a common ethnic, cultural, and linguistic heritage. To Lincoln, the American nation embodied a set of universal ideas, centered on political democracy and human liberty. The United States represented to the world the principle that government should rest on popular consent and that all men should be free. These ideals, Lincoln declared, allowed immigrants from abroad, who could not “trace their connection by blood” to the nation’s birth, nonetheless to become fully American.
Lincoln summarized his conception of the war’s meaning in November 1863 in brief remarks at the dedication of a military cemetery at the site of the war’s greatest battle. The Gettysburg Address is considered his finest speech (see the Appendix for the full text). In less than three minutes, he identified the nation’s mission with the principle that “all men are created equal,” spoke of the war as bringing about a “new birth of freedom,” and defined the essence of democratic government. The sacrifices of Union soldiers, he declared, would ensure that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”