The War That Forged a Nation: Why the Civil War Still Matters

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2015

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-2

Chapters 3-4

Chapters 5-6

Chapters 7-8

Chapters 9-10

Chapters 11-12

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

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Chapters 1-2Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 1 Summary: “Why the Civil War Still Matters”

Content Warning: Both the source text and this guide use a historical lens to address sensitive and complex issues such as enslavement, racism, war, and violence.

McPherson attributes Americans’ intense interest in the Civil War to its size, its location on American soil, and the toll on human lives. His interest in the Civil War was first piqued during his graduate studies at Johns Hopkins University. After noticing the parallels between the 1860s and the 1960s, he became a historian of the Civil War and Reconstruction. He asserts that because issues of race and citizenship and the powers and responsibilities of federal versus state governments were left unresolved, the Civil War remains relevant today.

McPherson highlights how the Civil War transformed the character of the United States. He finds the transformation of the United States from a decentralized republic to a centralized polity evident in the differences in language in Abraham Lincoln’s presidential addresses and the amendments to the Constitution. He also sees these trends in the creation and expansion of national government agencies that affect the average citizen. He also observes that the Civil War transformed the United States from an economy based on enslavement to a free-labor entrepreneurial capitalist economy.

Finally, the Civil War shifted the country’s orientation toward liberty. Although both the South and the North considered themselves to be fighting for the cause of liberty as set forth by the founding fathers, each region had different interpretations of liberty, as exemplified by the question of states’ rights and the practice of enslavement. Drawing on Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in which Berlin outlines negative liberty as “freedom from” and positive liberty as “freedom to,” McPherson asserts that the Civil War precipitated an orientation toward positive liberty. The tension between negative liberty and positive liberty remains a central feature of American political culture.

Chapter 2 Summary: “Mexico, California, and the Coming of the Civil War”

McPherson sets Southern secessionism and the Civil War against the backdrop of the Mexican-American War. Due to conflict between the Mexican government and American settlers in the Tejas region over enslavement and land rights, the American settlers declared the region an independent republic and appealed to the United States for annexation. The matter of annexation was debated between the United States’ Democratic and Whig parties, with the former being oriented toward expansionism. Democratic contender James K. Polk won the 1844 presidential election. He moved swiftly to annex Texas and insisted on establishing the border beyond the original area. He also convinced Congress to declare war against Mexico on the false premise that Mexico had already invaded American territory.

As the death toll increased and reports of atrocities by American soldiers reached the American public, antiwar sentiment grew, especially around the suspicion that the war’s principal purpose was to increase the territory in which enslavement would be practiced. When politicians such as David Wilmot stipulated that newly acquired territories must be free territories, this declaration transformed party divisions into sectional divisions between free states and states that practiced enslavement. Despite claims by certain politicians that expanding enslavement territory was neither the end goal nor a viable possibility, most of the territory ceded in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo legalized enslavement.

Concurrently, mass migration to California after the discovery of gold prompted the House of Representatives to organize California as a free territory, but this initiative was blocked by Southerners in the Senate. California settlers then petitioned Congress for admission to statehood and banned enslavement in their state constitution. Because Southern politicians were upset by the ban, Henry Clay designed the Compromise of 1850 to include measures in support of enslavement. Although the Democratic Party dominated California politics, the pro-enslavement element of the Party remained uneasy about the balance of power between free states and territories and those allowing enslavement, thus intensifying the sectional conflict that led to Southern secession and the Civil War.

Chapters 1-2 Analysis

In Chapters 1 and 2, McPherson establishes the ongoing nature of history by contextualizing the Civil War within earlier American conflicts of the 18th and 19th centuries and highlighting its reverberation into the 20th and 21st centuries. The link between past, present, and future recurs in the final two chapters, demonstrating that it functions not merely as the self-evident focus of McPherson the historian, but also as a narrative technique for McPherson the writer to unify a collection of essays written over several years about different aspects of the Civil War.

McPherson links the Civil War to the American Revolution by asserting that the two primary issues of the Civil War were previously left unresolved during the founding of the nation. When presenting the foundational and inextricable problems of indivisibility and enslavement, McPherson uses the word “fragile” to point to the instability that arises from the contradiction between liberty and equality as ideals and enslavement as a practice. He emphasizes that the “tragic irony of the Civil War is that both sides professed to fight for the heritage of liberty bequeathed by the Founding Fathers” (9). Combining this idea with his acknowledgment that neither side initially included enslaved people in that vision, McPherson implies that the contradiction itself is the actual heritage of the American Revolution. However, McPherson analyzes the heritage of the American Revolution from a more positive standpoint in Chapter 11.

As McPherson articulates the deepening sectional conflicts over enslavement from the Mexican-American War to the Civil War, it becomes clear that the nation’s equivocation on the matter is insufficient for full resolution. This historical reticence impedes the emergence of a unified national character defined by equal rights to liberty and justice and obstructs a socioeconomic order defined by free-labor capitalism. McPherson supports the point by building a connection between the injustice of enslavement and the injustice of American expansionism. In his view, the “war of choice, not of necessity, a war of aggression that expanded the size of the United States” (15) escalated the tension over enslavement and prompted Southern threats of secession as early as 1850. McPherson also draws the connection between the two injustices in his discussion of filibustering expeditions in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Baja California, which highlights an attempt to spread the contradiction beyond the already-established borders.

In Chapter 1, McPherson introduces the idea that enslavement inhibited the emergence of the free-labor entrepreneurial capitalism that came to characterize the United States after the Civil War’s Transformation of the American National Identity. He expounds on the point in Chapter 2 when he asserts that “[m]ost of the Forty-Niners wanted to keep that institution out of California, not because of moral principle but because they did not want to compete” (25) with a labor force of enslaved people. McPherson’s analysis suggests that the absence of a morally defined stance against enslavement renders the Compromise of 1850 a temporary and insufficient measure, as evidenced by the eruption of violence with the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 and by the Civil War itself. McPherson’s mention of morality foreshadows the issues examined in Chapters 3, 4, and 11, in which he brings key moral convictions into sharper focus.

Overall, McPherson takes a balanced view when analyzing The Ongoing Struggle for Racial Equality. When he draws the link between the 1860s and the civil rights movement of the 20th century, he notes that the successes of the civil rights movement have constitutional bases in the 14th and 15th Amendments. On the other hand, he asserts that the successes can be contrasted with the 1961 incident at the Francis Marion Hotel in Charleston. McPherson’s inclusion of this event reifies his point about the inheritance bequeathed by the American Revolution, given Francis Marion’s legacy as both an enslaver and a celebrated figure of the Revolutionary War.

Similarly, McPherson draws a line from the Civil War to the election of President Barack Obama, implying some semblance of success in bringing the principle of equality from an abstraction to a reality. Subsequently, McPherson notes that complications with the 14th Amendment have arisen with contemporary controversies over immigration and citizenship. This observation suggests that The Ongoing Struggle for Racial Equality is interconnected with The Transformation of the American National Identity. The election of a Black man to the highest office (i.e., a non-white face as the representative of the nation) solidified the idea encapsulated in the 14th Amendment, which is that to be American is not synonymous with being white. The white anxiety and backlash prompted by such an idea recurs in Chapter 8 and Chapter 12.