Were it not for the wounds that Lincoln inflicted upon the Constitution,
it would have been infinitely more difficult for Franklin Roosevelt
[the father of American socialism] to carry through his revolution
[and] for the coercive welfare state to come into being....Lincoln,
I would maintain, undermined the constitutional safeguards of freedom
as he opened the way to centralized government with all its attendant
political evils.
--Edmund Wilson, in Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the
American Civil War
