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In so doing, he anticipated the main issues that were to follow: his determination to keep nationalism from being narrowed into mere "Northernism"; his effort to create an all-parties government; his stubborn insistence that he was suppressing an insurrection, not waging external war; his doctrine that the Executive, having been chosen by the entire people, was the one expression of the sovereignty of the people, and therefore, the repository of all these exceptional "war powers" that are dormant in time of peace.
Especially telling is his demolition of Klopstock's violent "Northernism," to which he opposes a far wider philosophy of grammar and style. The universality of poetry, as contrasted with a narrow "German" clumsiness, is blandly defended, and a joyous abandon is urged as something better than the meticulous anxiety of chauvinistic partisanism.
Chandler was soon to express it still more exactly, saying, "A rebel has sacrificed all his rights. He has no right to life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness." Here was that purpose to narrowing nationalism into Northernism, even to radicalism, and to make the war an outlet for a sectional ferocity, which Lincoln was so firmly determined to prevent.
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