Which might be a point if a) Lincoln didn't come up with this "we're waging the war to free the slaves" claim until late in 1862, and b) a war was in any way needed to free the slaves, which it wasn't.
Oh?
Posit:
1) If the Civil War hadn't happened, or if the southern states had gotten what they wanted, we would be more federalist than nationalist; if we did split and stayed separate countries, both countries would have been smaller.
2) If the country was smaller, either literally or in the size of government, we wouldn't have been able to fund WWI, and if we were federalist we most likely wouldn't have even entered the war to begin with.
3) If we hadn't entered WWI, the victory would not have been as decisive, therefore, Britan and the allies wouldn't have been able to pass the horrible Treaty of Versailles; it's also less likely the Russian Revolution would have happened, or if it did, had been a victory for the Communists.
4) Without the Treaty of Versailles, the economic conditions which allowed the Nazis to come to power would not have existed. With no Communism in Russia, no Soviet Union would have been created.
Therefore:
If Lincoln hadn't invaded the Confederacy, then we very likely wouldn't have gone into WWI, and that would have likely meant no Nazis, and therefore no WWII, and no Communists in Russia, and therefore no Cold War (and no Korean War, Vietnam, no arming of Afghanistan and other places where the terrorists ended up popping up from...). It all goes back to Lincoln.
