He said as he was waging a war to 'preserve the union'; i.e. against the very bedrock principle of democracy, which is the right to self-determinism, the right to secede, to participate or not of self-volition. You can't compel the South under force of compulsion and war to participate in your democratic society against their own interests, and pretend to be some democratic savior. Lincoln was a joke. The quote reminds me of the Russian revolution, where a small band of a few hundred thousand Bolsheviks at most toppled Saint Petersburg and brought death to Russia, all in the name of the people. But I suppose, perhaps, the American revolution too was warred by a minority, as the majority of the populace were loyalists, all in the name of popular soveirengty. Democracy is a joke, an aberration of instinct, and of the natural culture-preserving and culture-promoting forces that had been immemorial in history and well into pre-history, testaments in their tried antiquity to their being expressions of evolutionary instinct. Democracy is destined to degenerate, as it is a structural expression of nihilism, and is predicated on subversion. Only structures which complement and therefore supplement instinctual evolutionary realities will truly benefit human society in the long-run. The founding fathers should have elected a king.