*This sophism derives much, perhaps the whole, of its currency from the assumption that there is some omnipotent and sacred supremacy pertaining to a state -- to each state of our Federal Union. Our states have neither more nor less power than that
reserved to them in the Union by the Constitution, no one of them ever having been a state out of the Union. The original ones
passed into the Union even before they cast off their British colonial dependence, and the new ones each came into the Union
directly from a condition of dependence, excepting Texas; and even Texas, in its temporary independence, was never designated
a state. The new ones only took the designation of states on coming into the Union, while that name was first adopted for the
old ones in and by the Declaration of Independence.
--Abraham Lincoln, 1861

This quote from Lincoln's speech to Congress following the Battle of Ft. Sumter indicates that a primary objective of the Union war
effort was to