How Lincoln Transformed America
Books on Abraham Lincoln and on the Civil War abound, but few books explore their significance with the eloquence and erudition of Professor McPherson's "Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution." This book is a compilation of seven essays which discuss the transformations the Civil War brought to the character of the United States and the indispensable role Lincoln played in bringing these transformations about.
In these essays, Professor McPherson explains that the changes the Civil War brought about can be summarized in two words: Nation and Liberty. First, The Civil War transformed a Union of States into a single Nation. This change is exemplified in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. As Professor McPherson points out in the preface to his essays, in the Gettysburg Address Lincoln spoke of the American "nation" rather than of a "union" in order "to invoke a new birth of American Freedom and nationhood." (p. vii)
Second, the change of America from a union of states to a nation was accompanied by a change in the concept of liberty on which the nation was founded. In a word, this change involved emancipation, the abolition of slavery, and the application to all people of the principle articulated in the Declaration of Independence that "all men are created equal". In several essays, Professor McPherson uses the work of the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin to develop a distinction between negative and positive liberty. Before the Civil War, liberty was understood primarily in a negative way which involved individual freedom from government regulation and freedom from interference with private property. With the Civil War, the concept of liberty changed to allow the Federal government to assume a positive role in promoting human freedom and human good. The most striking example, of course, is the abolition of slavery. But the concept of the government's role in creating a positive concept of liberty has continued.
Professor McPherson's essays show how Lincoln unified the ideals of Nationhood and Liberty as the Civil War progressed and thus effected a revolution in the basic nature of the United States. The essays explore these basic themes masterfully as Professor McPherson discusses Lincoln's political skills, his insistence on the unconditional surrender of the South, the development of Lincoln's ideas on emancipation, the significance to the second American Revolution of Lincoln's eloquence as a speaker and a writer, and much else.
Professor McPherson also discusses the Reconstruction period in a thoughtful way. He takes issue, in part with modern revisionists who claim that the Civil War failed in its basic aims by the backtracking from Reconstruction and by the reinstitution of Jim Crow that occurred following 1876. A "second reconstruction" proved necessary in the mid-20th Century to realize fully the aims of the first. But this does not derogate, Professor McPherson argues, the significance of the Revolution that was wrought by Lincoln and the Civil War.
This book will help the reader to think about Abraham Lincoln and to understand why the Civil War remains the pivotal event in our Nation's history.
Robin Friedman
