The American Civil War proved solidarity for this country while proving to the world that democracy was a viable form of government, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and Civil War scholar said Thursday night.

After witnessing two French republics fail during his era, Abraham Lincoln said the United States was the “last best hope of Earth for a successful government of, by and for the people,” James McPherson, professor of history at Princeton University, said in a speech Thursday at Kansas University. McPherson’s book “Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era” won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for history.

He spoke to a crowd of about 600, the largest draw of the five speeches in the 2004 Lincoln Week Lecture Series sponsored by KU’s Dole Institute of Politics.

Much as the United States’ recent advances in the Middle East have drawn criticism from abroad, countries around the world chose sides as they watched the American Civil War unfold, McPherson said.

The British were the most vocal in debate about the American war, McPherson said. On one hand, thousands of underpaid labor workers held their collective breath, hoping Britain soon would adopt the American standard of more voters’ rights.

Britain never quite adhered.

“Queen Victoria’s throne was safe,” McPherson said. “England did not become a republic.”

Others overseas saw the outcome of the world’s bloodiest war between 1815 and 1914 as a sign to shy from democracy. McPherson quoted a national Spanish newspaper of the time:

“The example is too horrible to stir any desire for emulation,” he read.

After the Union won the war, the United States used its newly toned muscle to oust French troops from Mexico. Napoleon withdrew his troops, and Benito Juarez, a republican revolutionary in Mexico, got his republic.

Despite the controversy over democracy, Lincoln and the triumph of the Union have become widely recognized. People in more than 90 countries celebrated the centennial anniversary in 1909 of Lincoln’s birth, McPherson said.

Now, more than five generations after the war, more than 400 Civil War roundtable groups meet monthly, and more than 40,000 people act as re-enactors of the battles. And some of them are not Americans, McPherson said. His own Pulitzer Prize-winning book was translated into German and French in addition to English.

McPherson also has won the Lincoln Prize for the book “For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War.”