Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution

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Summary: Enlightening
Review: Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution is a collection of seven related essays by James M. McPherson. Each essay shows us a perspective from which the Civil War can be seen as a "revolution." They are all provocative and intense -- two things that are rare in history. From the first page to the last you'll be saying to yourself "I never thought of it that way before ..." A must for anyone even remotely interested in the Civil War.

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Summary: Without a doubt, a complete revolution of American ideals.
Review: 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.

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Summary: How Lincoln Transformed America
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: How Lincoln Transformed America
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Great Analysis, Poor Editing
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: The Civil War WAS the Second American Revolution
Review: The Southern Confederacy always claimed the Civil War was the Second War for American Independence. In this book James M. McPherson makes a convincing case that there is a very real sense in which the Confederates were right, that from not only a social but a political perspective the nation underwent a radical transformation over the course of the war. McPherson suggests the more proper comparison of the war's alteration of the country is not to our own revolution but to that of the French. "Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution" is actually a collection of seven essays, six of which had been previously published or delivered as lectures, including "Linoln and the Strategy of Unconditional Surrender," "How Lincoln Won the War with Metaphors," and "The Hedgehog and the Foxes" (which looks at how Lincoln stacked up against his competitors). What unifies them is the idea that the Civil War and Lincoln's leadership, like the Great Depression and Roosevelt's New Deal, recreated the nation so that it was essentially unrecognizable to those who lived before those traumatic national events. As with his Pulitzer Prize winning "Battle Cry of Freedom," what makes McPherson stand out from his peers is his ability to offer his arguments concisely. This is a little volume, but it contains big ideas that are easily adaptable to high school history classes.

Rating:
Summary: The Civil War WAS the Second American Revolution
Review: The Southern Confederacy always claimed the Civil War was the Second War for American Independence. In this book James M. McPherson makes a convincing case that there is a very real sense in which the Confederates were right, that from not only a social but a political perspective the nation underwent a radical transformation over the course of the war. McPherson suggests the more proper comparison of the war's alteration of the country is not to our own revolution but to that of the French. "Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution" is actually a collection of seven essays, six of which had been previously published or delivered as lectures, including "Linoln and the Strategy of Unconditional Surrender," "How Lincoln Won the War with Metaphors," and "The Hedgehog and the Foxes" (which looks at how Lincoln stacked up against his competitors). What unifies them is the idea that the Civil War and Lincoln's leadership, like the Great Depression and Roosevelt's New Deal, recreated the nation so that it was essentially unrecognizable to those who lived before those traumatic national events. As with his Pulitzer Prize winning "Battle Cry of Freedom," what makes McPherson stand out from his peers is his ability to offer his arguments concisely. This is a little volume, but it contains big ideas that are easily adaptable to high school history classes.

Rating:
Summary: Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution
Review: This book shows me why Abraham Lincoln should be called the "Father of Our Country" ( rather than George Washington).

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Summary: One of the best American history books I have ever read
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Positive Liberties
Review: This is an acute uncovering of the concealed revolution in the Civil War era with its great transformation, as the released energy 'under a war footing' accelerated the real evolutionary emergence of the freedom declared but never fulfilled in the age of the Founding Fathers.
One of the ironies is that the reification of concepts of revolution can result in confusion,while, here, change happened without the label. It is also true that the last step foundered, and the counterrevolution began and hardened, in the tragic era of reconstruction, leaving still another revolution with an ambiguously sour note.