if abraham lincoln had a drone (i don't know with a time machine or whatever)

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41. Since we are playing "a-historical what-if", here is how I think it would have played out:

Lincoln would have droned one or two confederate leaders. After that, the rest of those leaders would have started hiding amongst civilians. Lincoln, under political pressure to be "tough on the south" would have ordered strikes anyway, based on spy reports which would have sometimes been reliable, sometimes not. As a result, there would have been a large number of non-combatants dead.

This would have done a number of things: Northerners with family members in the south would have stopped supporting the war effort. A large number of southerners would have been hell-bent on retaliation independent of any political goals. There would have been retaliation bombings in the north, done by unknown people, targeting civilians and political leaders. These would have not been done with drones but with traditional dynamite. As a result, security would have had to been tightened in the north, a climate of suspicion emerging. Perhaps people with family in the south would have been pre-emptively locked up in camps for security reasons.

Northern forces may have then eventually won the war, but the hatred of them by southerners would have been so strong at that point that attacks on them and their representatives would not have ceased, even long after the formal surrender. The north would have to had occupied the south and kept it under "martial law" for an indefinite time. Likewise, martial law would have been extended to the north due to the fear of "collaborators". Lincoln would have eventually been assassinated, a more "hard-line" person taking his place.

Then say a decade or two later, after countless numbers of drones strikes and "retaliation bombings", civil liberties and the constitution no longer existing in any shape or form, the north would have decided that it can no longer sustain the occupation of the south and allowed secession. The country would have split and both halves would not have recovered from the war for over a century. The USA would as a result today be somewhere in the ballpark of Somalia in terms of development, the balkans in the best case scenario. It would never have been in the shape of contributing to WWII in any meaningful way. All of Europe and Asia would be communist, Hitler having been defeated by the Soviets alone.