Limited War????

The last paragraph of Chapter 15 hit me really hard. "The failure of McClellan's Peninsula campaign was not alone a military failure; it represented also the downfall of the limited war for limited ends that McClellan favored. From now on the North would fight not to preserve the old Union but to destroy it and build a new one on the ashes." Perhaps I am reading too much into this, but it has become so evident to me that we need to study our own history so as to not make the same mistakes. "Limited war for limited ends" seems to be the mantra of our current foreign policy. It may be that I remember Vietnam, but at what point do we say this has never worked in the past why should it work now. Lincoln is an interesting man and this war created something about him that would never have been otherwise. Perhaps, if there had been no Civil War, we would remember Lincoln the same way we remember James Buchanan.