This was interesting:
"Into the hands of Lincoln and Davis was thrust the destiny of a divided people. Lincoln was the product of the soil, Davis of the study. One had breathed the freedom of nature and could beat express his inner feeling in parables; the other had breathed the air of the cloister, and his soul had grown stiff as the parchment it fed upon. Lincoln was very human, Davis artificial, autocratic and forever standing on the pedestal of his own conceit; a man of little humour who could dictate, but who could not argue or listen and who could not tolerate either help or opposition. Because he relied upon European intervention to scuttle the war, he had no foreign policy outside establishing cotton as king.
Early in the war the Hon. James Mason, Confederate Commissioner in Europe, affirmed that all cotton in that continent would be exhausted by February, 1862, "and that . . . intervention would [then] be inevitable"- yet before the end of 1861 Europe was learning to do without cotton. Davis could not believe that he was wrong; he staked the fortunes of his government and his people on this commodity and lost. On the other hand, Lincoln pinned his faith on what he believed to be the common rights of humanity.
In spite of division he saw one people, and in spite of climate and occupation, one nation. To him the Union was older than any state for it was the Union which had created the States as states.
He saw that whatever happened the nation could not permanently remain divided. His supreme difficulty was to maintain the unity of the North so that he might enforce unity upon the South; whereas Jefferson Davis's ship of state was wrecked on the fundamental principle of his policy that each individual state had the right to control its own destiny, a policy which was incapable of establishing united effort."
--"A Military History of the Western World Vol 3, P. 16 by Major General J.F.C. Fuller
Fuller, along with B.H. Liddel Hart is best known as proponent of the theory of warfare the Germans developed into the operational technique known as Blitzkrieg.
Walt