45 pages • 1 hour read
James M. McphersonAbraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution
Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 1983A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Preface-Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Preface Summary
George Ticknor, born in 1791 during the presidency of George Washington, reflected on the “great trauma” (vii) of the Civil War four years after its closure, remarking that the changes to the country seemed to make it a completely new place. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln liberated 4 million slaves, transforming the United States from an economy based on slave labor to one of democratic free-labor capitalism. In this change “liberty took on new meanings for Americans” (vii), and changes to the system of government were extensive: the federal republic became a national polity that taxed citizens, an internal revenue bureau was created to collect these taxes, the jurisdiction of federal courts was expanded, and a national currency and banking structure were established. The changes even extended to the country’s name—after 1865 the United States became a singular noun, where before it was plural.
In this preface McPherson provides a brief thematic introduction to the seven essays that follow, which analyze the scope of America’s transformation in the war and Lincoln’s leadership through it. He argues that alongside his historical impact, Lincoln has had a lasting effect on the American imagination, with public figures today measuring themselves against him and what he might do in regard to current political problems. Indeed, Lincoln’s philosophies remain as relevant today as ever. As McPherson notes:
“The issues that Lincoln grappled with will never become obsolete: the meaning of freedom; the limits of government power and individual liberty in time of crisis; the dimensions of democracy; the nature of nationalism; the problems of leadership in war and peace” (x).
Chapter 1 Summary: “The Second American Revolution”
Was the American Civil War the country’s “second revolution”?
In 1860, Ohio representative James A. Garfield wrote that the ongoing secession of the South from the Union of American States would start a second revolutionary war in America. When this war did indeed begin, Garfield joined the army. Seeing the Civil War as a dual social and political revolution, Garfield drew direct comparisons to the history of the French Revolution (1789-99), which ousted monarchic control in France and instituted democratic government. Theorists like Karl Marx also saw the similarity, understanding the American Civil War as a revolution against the South’s slave oligarchy, which controlled the US economy. Other European intellectuals saw emancipation as one of the greatest single social transformations in the history of any nation.
Comparisons with the French Revolution went both ways: Contemporary critics compared Civil War leaders with the bloodthirsty revolutionaries of France. In 1863 Garfield became a congressman and called for the execution of Confederate plantation owners and the redistribution of their lands among freed slaves, citing similar practices in the English and French revolutions, though he later rescinded these comments.
The Civil War was a social and political turning point in America. Theorist Charles A. Beard saw the war primarily as an economic conflict. The Republican Party, representing the interests of Northern industrial capitalism, destroyed the plantation agriculture economy of the South and drove the Southern aristocracy out of power in the government. This changed the distribution of national wealth and power in the country.
Barrington Moore expanded this argument, asserting that the war between these two capitalist systems was also an ideological conflict. The “contrasting economic systems of the antebellum North and South helped to generate the conflicting proslavery and antislavery ideologies that eventually led to war” (11). By its very nature, the North’s competitive, democratic style of capitalism was inconsistent with the concept of slavery and had to eradicate it to institute its own power in the nation.
In changing America’s economy and its society, the war also changed the face of American politics. The withdrawal of Southern senators from Congress following the secession of their states allowed Republican economic legislation to pass through the system, drastically changing the power dynamics between the South and North. While most American presidents were Southern before the war, no president was Southern for a century after it.
The war also caused the economic blight in the South. The abolition of slavery constituted the greatest confiscation of property without compensation by the government in American history, and this was coupled with the wartime mandate to destroy Southern agrarian resources to further weaken their forces. Freed slaves, trapped in oppressive economic models such as sharecropping, also had to deal with this blight following the war. This and other factors led many to question if the North was truly committed to slave liberty as the driving force of conflict with the South.
However, it is possible that social changes following emancipation were more subtle than the political ones. The rate of literacy among African Americans increased 200% in the 15 years following the war, and 32% more black children began attending school by 1880. Land ownership by African Americans also increased. By the early 1870s, black people were running for public office in the South, and in 1870 black votes comprised three-fourths of the total Southern vote for the Republican Party.
Much of the progress that occurred in the years following the Civil War was reversed by Southern-born counter-revolutionary movements, but the Civil War and its legal aftermath provided the framework that allowed for the 1960s civil rights movement. Overall, the American Civil War was indeed the United States’s second revolution, having manifold social, economic, and political consequences.
Preface-Chapter 1 Analysis
The Preface foregrounds Lincoln’s importance against other historical figures and movements, including George Washington, the Revolution of 1776, and the French Revolution. These comparisons cast Lincoln as a founding father of modern America, in a direct line of descendance from its first leaders. The text also establishes relevance to the present day by connecting Lincoln to contemporary issues that face modern politicians, and by observing the perennial quality of the problems he grappled with. Chapter 1 meditates on the meaning of revolution and whether the American Civil War can be considered the second American revolution.
McPherson immediately introduces the historical United States as a hotbed of revolutionary thought. He does so through James A. Garfield—a significant figure here but ultimately irrelevant to the rest of the text. Garfield saw the events leading to the Civil War as a “‘recent revolution’ of Southern secession [that] was sure to a spark a future revolution of freedom for the slaves” (3). The intense sectarian divide and revolutionary foment of American politics at the time is symbolized through Garfield’s Robespierriean demand to execute plantation owners and redistribute their land, rhetoric that McPherson notes “was hardly unique to Garfield” (5). This America was not the unified country we know today but one divided—and the unknown history of this division will prove to have incredible impacts on the Union of the present day.
In addition to the in medias res entrance into the text, McPherson immediately uses several terms that readers may be unfamiliar with. He discusses secession (the departure of Southern states from the Union), emancipation (the freeing of slaves), and the early history of the Republican Party without any definition. McPherson assumes readers are American and understand these terms, which reveals his text to be not purely historical but argumentative. The history McPherson presents will not be an unbiased survey of the American Civil War, but one that argues for the primacy of Lincoln’s importance in it.
The chapter considers whether the American Civil War can be called a revolution. To answer this question, McPherson defines revolution as “the overthrow of the existing social and political order by internal violence” (14). McPherson furthermore establishes a duality in the war’s revolutionary qualities: it was an “external” (13) revolution of the political power in America through the transition from Southern to Northern control, and it was an “internal” (13) revolution of social change through emancipation.
Citing Beard and Moore helps McPherson locate the Civil War within modern historical theory. His in-depth theoretical analysis of the war examines it from many angles, reading it as embedded in ideological and industrial trajectories that extend deep into the 18th century and across the continental divide into Europe. All in all, the “Civil War era was heir to the radical bourgeois ideologies of the English and French Revolutions” (10). Employed by Karl Marx as an example of radical class struggle, the war clearly had global significance.
McPherson closes Chapter 1 remarking on the legacy of this revolution:
“The second American revolution left a legacy of black educational and social institutions, a tradition of civil rights activism, and constitutional amendments that provided the legal framework for the second reconstruction of the 1960s” (22).
While seemingly a profound leap, the following chapters establish how some of the changes that Lincoln’s administration made to US politics and the Constitution did indeed serve as foundations for these later movements.
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