Yet the triumph and the irony of his administration resided in Lincoln's commitment to the Constitution; without that there would have been no promises to keep to 4 million black Americans. Because so many Americans cherished the Union that the Constitution forged, they made war on slave masters and their friends, on a Government that Alexander Stephens claimed rested 'on the great truth that the negro is not the equal of the white man; that slavery...is his natural and normal condition. Without the president's devotion to and mastery of the political-constitutional institutions of his time, in all probablility the Union would have lacked the capacity to focus its will and its resources on defeating the Confederacy. Without Lincoln's unmatched ability to integrate equalitarian ends and constitutional means he could not have enlisted the range of supporters and soldiers necessary for victory. His great accomplishment was to energize and mobilize the nation by affirming its better angels, by showing the nation at its best: engaged in the impertative, life-perserving conversation between structure and purpose, ideal and institution, means and ends. (p.318-19)
As always, you'd do better to stick to actual facts and figures. But you won't because facts and figures make you look bad. Facts and figures show that 38,000 is more than 4,000.
For the record, Paludan's gushy attribution to Lincoln is not even historically accurate. He claims that Lincoln was dedicated to an egalitarian end, however as historian George Frederickson noted echoing Gideon Welles, George Julian, Carl Schurz, Ben Butler and dozens of other men who personally knew Lincoln before him, Lincoln continued to deny political equality between the two races to his dying day. One of the very last acts of his presidency was to begin preparations for a renewed colonization scheme for the freed slaves in Panama. An unintended consequence of his assassination 3 days later was that this fundamentally racist scheme never got carried out.