Like the moral force of freedom and the American destiny, which are much the same. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. It will become all one thing, or all the other. Mr. Lincoln would lose the election in which he pronounced that awful truth and choice. It began to dawn on even those who didn't much care about slavery or freedom, and just wished the whole issue would go away, that it wouldn't.
Moral issues are like that.
The country would proceed to make fateful and terrible choices, but after Abraham Lincoln rose to prominence in 1858, it could no longer do so blindly, vaguely, blithely. The War, that rock from which we are hewn, would come. And with it would come a new birth of freedom, and another America in the succession of Americas. Mr. Lincoln did not claim to foresee it all, only that a great decision and its consequences could no longer be avoided. Our policy wonks made statesmen superfluous some time ago.