Had the democrats not split the vote in the 1860 election and one of his opponents succeeded could the union have been persevered? Would slavery have ended? What about had McClellan won in 1864? If anyone could have wrestled defeat from the jaws of victory it would have been McClellan.
I am not sure that anyone other than Lincoln could have done what he did and it is a miracle that he managed to become president at all.
You may be right, but that leads me to another question: “would it have really mattered if Lincoln didn’t succeed in keeping the country together?”
If he had failed, ( or if he hadn’t been elected at all, and some other politician who became president decided that it wasn’t worth fighting the South)–would modern America be much different?
Lincoln himself could have decided not to fight–and he would still have been leader of a strong nation covering 75% of the continent, and president of a government of the people , by the people and for the people.
The 10 states in the Confederacy might have survived as an impoverished country,much like Mexico is today.
But the other 40 states (including the ones that didn’t exist yet in Lincoln’s time) would have gone on to build a great nation, using the abundant natural and human resources they had.
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What about had McClellan won in 1864? If anyone could have wrestled defeat from the jaws of victory it would have been McClellan.
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If McClellan had won the Presidency in 1864, a settlement with the South likely would have followed.
And if McClellan was as ineffectual a President as he was a military leader, the South would have conquered the U.S. in a future war and we’d still be an impoverished, backward agrarian society without cellphones and social media. 
Interesting, I’ve read countless articles and books about “what would happen if the South won”, but not much on “what would happen if there was no war”.
I do imagine the North would keep industry going, while the South would stay agricultural. I wonder if the North, becoming that much more powerful and richer, would later invade to bring the South back?
Or, North and South both might have wound up completely Balkanized. If the U.S. government had just said “Well, if you don’t like the results of a national election, don’t let the door hit ya where the Good Lord split ya” then the precedent has been established that no American federal union is more than a loose alliance. The minute Texas gets in a snit with the rest of the South, they decide to go back to being their very own Republic. If California or the New England states get upset about some policy pursued by the rump U.S.A., they could just walk. And the example of West Virginia shows you couldn’t necessarily count on such secessions remaining neatly confined to existing state lines.
Meanwhile, you’ve got the British Empire up in Canada, Napoleon III and his little Mexican adventure to the south of the American Republics; on the fringes you’d have the Russians in Alaska and the Spanish in Cuba and Puerto Rico; plenty of fresh grievances and potential border disputes among the American Republics, or between the American Republics and the French-backed Second Mexican Empire; maybe throw in the Mormons and the Indians too; and of course the possibility of slave uprisings in the Southern Republics; all ready for European imperialists to start playing the “Great Game” right here, if not a full-blown “Scramble for North America”.
I don’t think Lincoln was entirely kidding around when he talked about our Civil War testing whether the American democratic experiment could long endure.
Just looked it up - apparently, “free” (but indentured) labor was cheap enough that the mechanical picker was not invented until 1944 (when everybody was in the military or war industry).
I suspect that even the most radical of racists (“the black Africans are, by nature, the only ones who can work in the Southern sun and heat”) would have looked at the industrial output of the US and asked if they could come back.
(yes, the Brexit fiasco comes to mind)
If the CSA was still around by WWI, I suspect the USA would soon have a hostile foreign army jutting up into its borders.
If that happened, the CSA would be destroyed far more than Sherman ever dreamed of.
But, good God, Bill would’ve loved it!