In Lincoln's Gettysburg address he stated that the union must win the ACW so "that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." After pondering on this as well as reading the last paragraph of this article I'd like to discuss how the practice and use of Democratic forms of government might have been changed if the CSA had won independence. Most believe that such an event would have had a strongly negative impact on how people viewed the practicality of a Democratic government and would have changed the bases of many governments that where created after the ACW (such as Canada's).