Abraham Lincoln is still most remembered — and perhaps rightly so — for his role in the Civil War and in the end to slavery. From the perspective of the 1860s, those events and Lincoln's involvement in them can be seen as dealing with the past. To end the potential of secession and to end slavery marked some necessary housekeeping for the United States. At the same time, however, Lincoln was also involved in decisions that would define the future of the country. While the Civil War dealt with the problem of how to keep the existing country together, these decisions dealt with how to expand the United States. When Lincoln looked West, he made decisions that decisively defined how the United States would be formed in and through its relationship to the territory it claimed as its own but did not yet control.