Now here's a question. Would the flowering of New England have happened if we'd remained a British colony?
Would there have been a Margaret Fuller, a Ralph Waldo Emerson, a Herman Melville, an Emily Dickenson. Well, there might have been, but would they have been taken seriously as writers, these men and women from the colonial backwoods?
Off the top of my head I can think of only 2 Canadian writers of any note, Robetson Davies and L.M. Mongomery.
Lincoln would, probably, be remembered as an engineer, not a politician. One of those interesting facts, Lincoln held a patent for a piece of machinery designed to help riverboats move upstream. He was a bright man. Lacking the opportunity to study law, he would have focussed his energies on mechanics, I suspect. Though he also wrote poetry......