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Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution

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James McPherson is not only the preeminent Historian of the US Civil War, but one of the greatest historians working today. He offers razor sharp analysis of complicated issues, with fair consideration of all points of view. Best of all, McPherson does all that in clear, concise and at times poetic language, that is remarkably easy to read.

'Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution' enjoys all the benefits of McPherson's considerable scholarship. Its problems are almost exclusively editorial.

This thin volume (152 pages of text; 20 more pages for notes, bibliography and an index) contains seven essays about the two themes in the title - The US Civil war seen as the second American Revolution, and Abraham Lincoln's role in it.

The first essay argues convincingly that the Civil War did radically change the Unites States. From a Slaveholding Republic, it became a free one. Politically, the center of gravity moved from the South to the north. Economically, the Industrial revolution, earlier contained in New England, spread out and defeated the plantation economy. In the South, the prevailing order was weakened, although not surmounted, and the situation of Blacks improved considerably, although equality was still very far. The theme McPherson is most interested in, however, is the change from a philosophy of negative liberty - freedom from government oppression - to one of positive liberty - the right for protection - guaranteed by the Federal government.

The second essay discusses Lincoln's role as the leader of the revolution. Lincoln, McPherson argues, was a pragmatic revolutionary. The revolution, which he brought on America, was caused by Lincoln's accurate assessment of necessities, not by a strong ideological tie to the revolution. Lincoln was no Lenin - he held sternly to the one principle of democracy, and the second American Revolution happened as a by-product of defending this principle.

In the third essay, 'Lincoln and Liberty', McPherson discusses how Lincoln's struggle for positive liberty was seen as despotic by those holding the principles of negative liberty. The Republicans wanted to restrict and ultimately destroy the rights of Southerners to hold slaves - and to enforce these restrictions by government action, if that was what it took.

Lincoln's role as supreme military commander is a neglected issue in Civil War historiography, claims McPherson, and he sets out to remedy that in the following essay. Lincoln's most important contribution, he concludes, was his unyielding hold on the doctrine of Unconditional Surrender. This issue also returns in Essay number 6, which compares Lincoln to Northerners who were not nearly as clear about the goal of fighting as he was.

Lincoln's rhetoric and the use of metaphors is the subject of the fifth essay. In an interesting comparison with Jefferson Davis, McPherson concludes that Lincoln's usage of metaphors in writing and speaking made him a superb communicator, which Davis wasn't. Thus, McPherson agrees with David Potter that had Lincoln been the leader of the South in the war, the confederacy might have maintained its independence.

One weakness of the collection is the lack of coherence in topics. The illuminating comparison between Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln in this essay, for example, is sadly missing from other chapters. Take War Leadership -Lincoln's grasp of the northern grand strategy made him replace popular generals who nonetheless could not follow his concept of total war. Jeff Davis on the other hand, despite his superior military background (as a war hero and a West-Point graduate), never articulated war aims as Lincoln did, and the Confederate war policy was constructed de facto by the decision of its irregularly brilliant generals. Lincoln would have made much better use of Robert E. Lee than Davis did.

The absence of such themes concurring through the book weakens the narrative, and it remains more an anthology than a focused monograph. Another such problem is the repetition between the essays. The final essay repeats almost all of the discussion about Isaiah Berlin's concepts of positive and negative liberty, before launching into the new theme. That theme, the turning away from positive liberty back to negative liberty during reconstruction, is fascinating. During reconstruction, Republicans had to constantly use the military in order to enforce equality for blacks on the unwilling Southrons. The disillusionment from Reconstruction and the resurrected fear from governmental tyranny left the racist policies of the South for another century, when Martin Luther King finished that job that Abraham Lincoln has began.

As any Lincoln fan knows, the struggle that our 16th President endured during the Civil War was enourmous. This book offers more insights into the constitutional questions that dominated the Civil War. And makes it seem that, unlike any other man in our history save George Washington, Lincoln completely loved, admired, respected, and protected American democracy. Yet, the book also gives us an insight into the counterarguements of the time, something many reviews fail to provide. Over all, this book reinforces every notion of courage, intelligence, and sacrifice that Lincoln has recieved since his death. He truly did lead us through a second revolution.

This is an absolute must buy. It is incredibly well written and very persuasive. Using the back drop of Lincoln's administration, it describes the fundamental revolution that took place in the American political structure as a result of the Civil War. It forced me to completely reevaluate my feelings on everything from federalism to political liberty. You will not regret reading it.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN AND THE SECOND AMERICAN REVOLUTION by James M. McPherson has concise and crisp language and deep insights into Lincoln's mind. Each of six essays shows that it was Lincoln's reality anchored character and powerful intellect that transformed the United States to the country it is today. One essay shows how Lincoln's use of metaphor, culled from Aesop's Fables, the works of Shakespeare, and the Bible made him a consummate communicator. His metaphors resonated to the deepest layers of mind of the average American in way that instilled motivation and purpose to a war that seemed impossible to manage or win. Compare to Jefferson Davis who was so highly educated and abstract but was unable to connect with ordinary folk. But it is McPherson who too is able to convey to us this president's great powers with his own metaphors i.e. "barnyard philosophy," and his essay, "The hedgehog and the fox," which compares and contrasts Lincoln's abilities with the "smartest contemporaries." This book is a great distillate of the voluminous Civil War Literature.

James McPherson (Battle Cry of Freedom) is the preeminent Civil War author and scholar of our time. The Princeton University professor provides fresh insight into A. Lincoln in these seven essays.

McPherson demonstrates conclusively that the Civil War was indeed the Second American Revolution - it abolished slavery and smashed the political, economic, and social status quo. Before the War, southerners dominated American politics - after the war it was decades before a son of the south could be elected President. The absence of the south from the national legislature during the war allowed the passage of the great progressive and modernizing legislation; the Homestead Act, enabled a continental railroad, and land-grant colleges. After the war, blacks made great (if far from complete) progress in education, politics, and economics.

Unfortunately, the reactionary forces led a counter-revolution that attempted to turn back the massive changes in society with much success. That counter-revolution eventually yielded to a Second Reconstruction in the mid-20th century.

McPherson repeatedly returns to Lincoln's political evolution as the War changed from a limited war for limited ends to a total war for revolutionary ends. In the end Lincoln insisted on unconditional surrender.

I particularly enjoyed the essays entitled 'How Lincoln Won the War with Metaphors', which contrasts the communication abilities of Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, and 'The Hedgehog and the Foxes', in which McPherson favors us with a description of Lincoln as the single-minded hedgehog outlasting the multifarious foxes such as Horace Greeley and William Seward.

My only small quibble is that similar points are made using the same quotes in multiple essays (perhaps unavoidable in a collection of previously published essays), but the quotes are so evocative of Lincoln's thinking that the repetition is not only forgiven, but enjoyed.

Highly recommended for anyone interested in US history, Lincoln, or the Civil War era.

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 indespensable 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 whcih involved individual freedom from government regulation and freedome 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 revisionsists who claim that the Civil War failed in its basic aims by the backtracking from Reconstruction and 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.

This thin book which contains series of essays on how Abraham Lincoln revolutionized our nation during one of the most important periods of our nation proves to be well written and amazingly easy to understand. James McPherson writes clearly how the American Civil War was truly a revolutionary moment in our nation's history and how Lincoln took steps to ensure these changes. How we lived, our political/racial/social norms that are part of our society today took form during the Civil War. Even the way we waged war, have it roots in the Civil War, all have Lincoln's fingerprints all over it.

The book proves to be easy to follow and read. But in its simple prose, lies amazing insights and perception of Lincoln's influence during the war and his abilities to effect changes in our nation. I would say that this book is a "must read" for anyone interested in American history.

This well-argued collection of James McPherson's occasional pieces focuses primarily on what the author sees as the fundamental changes that the Civil War brought to America's polity, economics, culture, and self-identity. The first, second, third, and seventh of the essays deal especially with this theme. The middle fourth, fifth, and sixth essays are less directly related to it, but nonetheless offer fascinating explorations of Lincoln the total war president, Lincoln the wordsmith, and Lincoln the "hedgehog."

Many of the people who lived through the Civil War thought of it as a revolution. Many historians since have agreed, although for varying reasons. McPherson's main project in this book is to figure out whether and how the Civil War can be considered the "second American Revolution."
He believes that the war was in fact revolutionary on several counts.

First, the war shifted the economic and political power balance in the United States. The war's devastation of southern property and demographics, especially after it evolved from a limited to a total conflict, shifted economic superiority to northern industry and agriculture. Moreover, the southern states' virtual antebellum monopoly of the White House, as well as their immense congressional power, was broken for the next half century. This is what McPherson (and others) refer to as the "external" revolution.

But there was an "internal" revolution too in the realm of legal rights and national self-identity. Four million slaves were freed and granted civil and political rights, and the southern aristocracy, along with the entire way of life and set of values it maintained, disappeared (or at least went underground). Moreover, argues McPherson, the war brought about a shift from early Republic concentration on liberty as "freedom from" (negative liberty), which distrusted strong central government, to liberty as "freedom to" (positive liberty), which emphasized the responsibility of the federal government to guarantee civil rights. This shift helped create a new sense of national identity that focused on the nation rather than the region: hence McPherson's claim that the Civil War moved the country from a "union" to a "nation."

The influence of the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin is present throughout much of McPherson's thinking about liberty, and McPherson also draws on one of Berlin's most famous essays in designating Lincoln (Chapter VI) as a hedgehog in his single-minded devotion to preserving the union. McPherson might be drawing on the work of philosophers of language in his fascinating discussion (Chapter V) of Lincoln's influential talent for creating and manipulating "live" as opposed to "dead" metaphors in expressing his opinions and seeking support for his policies. In both these cases, McPherson nicely weaves some philosophical analysis into his historical interpretations.

Where I find McPherson less helpful is his rather uncritical discussion of Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus (Chapter III). He rehearses the well-worn argument that the suspension was simply necessary from a pragmatic perspective--end of discussion. As Lincoln said in another context, "often a limb must be sacrificed to save a life." But this interpretation begs for a discussion of the moral and political short- and longterm trauma that the amputation inflicted on the body politic. How far can one go in suspending liberties in order to preserve liberty?

Nonetheless, the essays collected in Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution are exactly what readers have come to expect from McPherson: illuminating, gracefully written, well-researched. They aren't the final word, and I suspect McPherson doesn't expect them to be. But they wonderfully enrich the on-going conversation.

These 7 essays were a compelling look at the Civil War, a war that McPherson calls the "2nd American Revolution." Easy to read. Another McPherson masterpiece. Could have been edited down a bit.

Readers should read these essays together with headlines and articles on Confederate History Month observed in some states. Also see Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic. McPherson writes clearly and with knowledge; his other books are highly recommended.