In a recent article, Charles Strozier, a Lincoln biographer and co-director of the Center on Violence and Human Survival, argues that the United States' demand for unconditional surrender in World War II, and ultimately the use of two atomic bombs on Japan, found antecedents in President Lincoln's surrender terms in the Civil War.

The crucial term here is not unconditional surrender, a phrase perhaps coined by Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at Fort Donelson early in 1862, but the ideal of totality in war, a concept that comes from our own century. “It was Lincoln, Grant, and the Civil War that incorporated total war into modern experience,” Strozier maintains. “There is a clear connection here between the emerging nation-state, a new type of deadly warfare, and an ending in which an enemy capitulates completely. To put it epigrammatically, the totality of the modern state seems to require unconditional surrender as a necessary correlative of its total wars. The American Civil War brought that into focus.”