45 pages • 1-hour read
Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution
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Themes
The Civil War as the Second American Revolution
This book discusses Lincoln’s role in America’s second revolution, the Civil War. To do so, it must first justify the Civil War as a revolution, which requires clearly defining the very word “revolution.” These are not easy tasks, and particularly problematic is “the elastic meaning of the word revolution. The term is often thrown around with careless abandon. The concept has become trivialized” (14).
Faced with a multitude of theoretical definitions, McPherson proposes adopting “a common-sense working definition of revolution” (16). He defines revolution “simply as the overthrow of the existing social and political order by internal violence” (16), and then sets about describing how the Civil War served as a revolution because it reconstituted both the social and political landscape of the United States forever.
In defining the Civil War as a true revolution comparable in US history only with the Revolution of 1776, McPherson also finds the Civil War an upset in national trajectory on par with the British and French Revolutions, which drastically altered the course of their nation’s governments. Importantly, both of those revolutions instituted wholly new forms of representational government, eliminating the unitary control of monarchies. The United States at the time of the Civil War was already a constitutional democracy, but McPherson’s equation with these events, particularly in the first two chapters of this text, positions the changes the Civil War had on the nation as equitable to these more drastic redefinitions of government.
To make this claim McPherson divides the effects of the revolution into internal and external terms (13). The external revolution of the United States was the “transformations in the balance of economic and political power between the North and South” (13). Although significant, this change was secondary to the more drastic internal revolution the Civil War brought about in the nation, the “the emancipation of four million slaves and their elevation to civil and political equality with whites” (13). The freedom of slaves became enshrined in the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments of the Constitution, and this new form of liberty in the nation wholly revolutionized its social, political, and economic model.
“A New Birth of Freedom”: Conflicting Concepts of Liberty Over the Right to Own Slaves
Throughout the text the Civil War is said to have been fought in pursuit of “a new birth of freedom” (137), a phrase uttered by Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address and repeated many times by McPherson. This new freedom was a freedom for black Americans from slavery.
Freedom required a “new” birth in the United States because the nation was divided by two different conceptions of freedom—one that extended civil liberties to black Americans, and one that withheld them. This was a new birth, in Lincoln’s eyes, not a first birth, because this freedom had in fact already been proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence but was not being followed across the nation. Freedom had to be “reborn,” this time as the founding fathers originally envisioned it.
In 1864 Lincoln wrote that “the processes by which thousands are daily passing from under the yoke of bondage [is] hailed by some as the advance of liberty, and bewailed by others as the destruction of all liberty” (136). While “the South professed to have seceded and gone to war in defense of its rights and liberties” (107) to own slaves, these liberties were false in Lincoln’s eyes, and no liberty could truly exist if it oppressed another. This defined the divide in the United States between conceptions of negative and positive liberty (61-62), or what Lincoln called liberty and “licentiousness” (135), with negative liberty being the freedom from limitations on property rights (i.e., owning slaves), and positive liberty being the freedom to fully express one’s natural freedoms of equality with other men.
As the United States was founded on a rejection of monarchic rule, a conception of liberty in the negative was dominant before Lincoln’s revolution. Lincoln’s emancipation of slaves, and protection of them with the 13th Amendment, effectively changed how Americans view the concept of liberty, giving it a new birth.
Realpolitikal Motivations of Lincoln and the Republicans
McPherson presents Lincoln as a steadfastly moral leader of the United States who consistently upheld liberal values from the time of his tenure as a congressman to his death in office. However, the author also works to look beneath the purely moral readings one might ascribe to Lincoln’s wartime decisions and expose how Lincoln’s political maneuvering around certain issues and service to the people of the nation were the same. For example, in Chapter 3 McPherson extensively discusses how Lincoln worked for emancipation only when it became necessary for the preservation of the Republic, which was his main goal and responsibility. Lincoln indeed withheld the decision to emancipate the slaves throughout 1861, despite Republican pressure to do so, as he thought emancipating the slaves at this time would cost him the support of some of the Union’s border states. Deeper into the war, Lincoln consistently elected “political generals” (71) who were overall ineffective as military strategists and cost the lives of soldiers, but who bought Lincoln support from certain ethnic constituencies. Overall, though ultimately serving the right purpose, Lincoln’s decisions did not emerge from pure moralism but dedication to the dual cause of preserving the Union and winning the war.
As we consider Lincoln’s political motivations, we may also begin to understand the South’s motivations to fight for the maintenance of slavery. It is certainly easy to think of all slaveowners as evil abusers of their fellow humans who are now on the right side of history, but we must also remember that slavery was the foundation of the South’s agrarian economy. Without slavery, this economy fell apart. By consistently looking into the motivations beneath what we see as purely moral choices, the text provides a much better picture of the realities of US history.
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