You sure you aren’t being led by liberal propaganda here?
It is a fact of history that Lincoln turned to God to pray for help to keep the union together. What the USA became after the war is all on the Democrats, especially after their victory in the 1877 Compromise—much of Wilsoniam statism can be seen as a reflection of that.
No. I am not. Are you? Anybody who denies Lincoln was all about centralized power (statism), is not looking at what he did. Lincoln is the guy who arrested dissenting newspaper editors for printing critical stories, he had the Army shut down a state legislature, he suspended habeas corpus, jailed his opponents, expelled a congressman for opposing his income tax, instituted the first income tax in our history and the internal revenue bureaucracy to administer it, etc. Lincoln did many progressive type things. Most importantly, he changed our government from the decentralized and small federal government we had prior to 1860 to the huge, all powerful, centralized monster we have had ever since. You can’t lay what Lincoln did on Democrats. Lincoln was our first statist president. If it were not for Lincoln and what he built, Wilson would have been simply annoying.