article_snippet.sent: Lincoln knew firsthand that no defensible border shielded the land of corn from the land of cotton.
article_snippet.sent: Lincoln thus could never allow a potentially hostile power to control this geostrategic chokepoint in particular, or Dixie more generally.
article_snippet.sent: The U.S. landmass, Lincoln insisted, "is  well adapted to be the home of one national family; and it is not well adapted for two, or more" because "there is no line, straight or crooked, suitable for a national boundary upon which to divide.
article_snippet.sent: Lincoln supplemented Lincoln Midwestern geography lesson with a distinctly Midwestern claim about constitutional history: "The Union is older than any of the States; and in fact, "The Union created "The Union as the States.
article_snippet.sent: Lincoln did not need to make this controversial claim to prove Lincoln case, and elsewhere Lincoln stressed the decisive legal point that the Constitution's text clearly prohibits unilateral secession.
article_snippet.sent: But Lincoln's additional assertion that "The Union created the States, not vice versa, provoked strong disagreement in other parts of the States.
article_snippet.sent: The words of the 13th  Amendment -- the only constitutional amendment that Lincoln would live to sign -- promised to end slavery everywhere in America and did so by borrowing verbatim from Article 6 of the Northwest Ordinance.
highlights_snippet.sent: Lincoln saw the federal government as pre-eminent and believed there was no logical border for dividing the U.S. 