It is true that others, in the South as in the North, were as determined as he to shatter the subtle tension of state and national powers. But he alone had the power to reaffirm the constitutional balance. It is on his shoulders that the responsibility for war must be placed. Nor, once battle was engaged, did Lincoln wage the war in a manner calculated to bring about the conditions of reconciliation. He waged it to win at any cost-and by winning he meant the permanent destruction of the autonomy of the states.
Total war is war conducted to achieve victory neglecting every other moral end.
It is least excusable, moreover, in a war between brothers. Were it not for the wounds that Lincoln inflicted upon the Constitution, it would have been infinitely more difficult for Franklin Roosevelt to carry through his revolution, for the coercive welfare state to come into being and bring about the conditions against which we are fighting today. Lincoln, I would maintain, undermined the constitutional safeguards of freedom as he opened the way to centralized goverrunent with all its attendant political evils. The first is that I am wrong in my interpretation of the American Constitution as establishing a government of sharply limited and radically divided powers with sovereignty settled in no single center. The second is that I have failed to understand that the concept of equality is central in the American tradition, and with this, that I have ignored Lincoln s role in the eradication of slavery.