The US Civil War was a major hinge point in American history, the most significant one since the War of American Independence. The Civil War completely revolutionized military tactics and technology in ways that would have tremendous ramifications for the 20th century, while also impacting social and political norms. McPherson thus not only details the war itself, but also its legacy in American society.

The Civil War forced the US government to modernize. McPherson writes how it resulted in a “more centralized polity that taxed the people directly and created an internal revenue bureau to collect these taxes, drafted men into the army, expanded the jurisdiction of federal courts, created a national currency and a national banking system, and established the first national agency for social welfare—the Freedmen’s Bureau” (859). These initiatives helped to strengthen and further centralize the federal government, adding further emphasis on the idea of unified authority instead of the more fragmented authority of different states.

The war also transformed American society. It marked the end of the society of the antebellum South and its strictly hierarchical society presided over by a class of wealthy landowners, the planters, and built on the labor of the enslaved. McPherson also sees significance in how the Union victory ensured that the United States’ future lay in industrial capitalism and a wage economy. McPherson argues that the Civil War resulted in a “‘Second American Revolution” that created a “new America of big business, heavy industry, and capital-intensive agriculture that surpassed Britain to become the foremost industrial nation by 1880 and became the world’s breadbasket for much of the twentieth century” (452).

McPherson believes that the Civil War also gave rise to the idea of the United States as a cohesive nation. He interprets Lincoln’s Second Inaugural speech as describing “a new birth of freedom and nationalism for the United States” (859). The Union’s victory in the Civil War solidified the idea of the United States as a singular nation-state, rather than a confederation of separate states. The mobilization of the home front allowed women, especially Southern women, more of a public role in society as charitable operations or as nurses. In the South, McPherson claims, this would “emancipate [women] from the pedestal of ethereal femininity that had constricted their lives” (480). Similarly, the Civil War did ultimately result in the emancipation of the enslaved and African Americans becoming citizens.

At the same time, however, the Civil War also left behind unresolved issues and crisis points that would shape US history: The struggle for African-American rights and women’s rights and the bolstering of powerful private economic interests. Just as the Civil War itself was made possible, perhaps even inevitable, by the failure of past generations to address enslavement, the unresolved problems from the Civil War and the Reconstruction that followed would set the tone for the next century.