Lincoln was the spokesman of the rising capitalist class of the North, who viewed the emancipation of Negro slaves as indispensable to the development and triumph of the manufacturers and bankers of the industrial North, East and West over the slave-holder of the South.
Far from creating a new formalism what these can yield is something far transcending surface values since they not only embody form as beauty but also form in which intuitions or ideas or conjectures have taken visible substance.
