Contemporaneous with the separation sentiments among the Britannic peoples were the agitations in the United States that were to culminate in the secession movement. The dread of a strong central government had left in the southern portion of America a belief in state separateness that worked against the existence of a common government which, within the scope of its authority could make decisions binding on all its component lands and people. From the end of the French-Pan-Angle struggle to the beginning of the American Civil War, the century of 1763-1861, the course of separation ran almost unchecked. As this separation tendency strengthened, the unity of the race and that of one of its component nations were exposed to disintegration. The outcome {166} appeared to forebode the end of Pan-Angle world control. A house divided against itself cannot stand. If this family was to split into national factions of increasingly smaller size, its end was apparent. Some other civilization would absorb the scattered bits of the once powerful race and another chapter of the struggles of successive civilizations would be concluded. Certain American states, desiring to loosen the tie by which they were bound, seceded from the Union. Other states declared their faith in the federal principle and took their stand against separation. The issue was befogged in many minds by other points of contention. But "the question submitted to the arbitrament of war was the right of secession."[166-1] Those who looked on could see that if success attended the secession movement, Pan-Angles would have to begin again their search for the means of preserving the balance between local and central government. "My paramount object is to save the Union and not either to save or destroy slavery," wrote Lincoln in 1862.[166-2] Wilson characterizes the three great men of that struggle in terms of the question at stake. Of Lincoln he says: "The whole country is summed up in him: the rude Western strength, tempered with shrewdness and a broad and humane wit; the Eastern conservatism, regardful of law and devoted to fixed standards of duty. He even understood {167} the South, as no other Northern man of his generation did. He respected, because he comprehended, though he could not hold, its view of the Constitution; he appreciated the inexorable compulsions of its past in respect of slavery; he would have secured it once more, and speedily if possible, in its right to self-government when the fight was fought out . . . "Grant was Lincoln's suitable instrument, . . . A Western man, he had no thought of commonwealths politically separate, and was instinctively for the Union; a man of the common people, he deemed himself always an instrument, never a master, and did his work, though ruthlessly, without malice; a sturdy, hard-willed, taciturn man, a sort of Lincoln the Silent in thought and spirit."