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

“I became convinced that I could not fully understand the issues of my own time unless I learned about their roots in the era of the Civil War: slavery and its abolition; the conflict between North and South; the struggle between state sovereignty and the federal government; the role of government in social change and resistance to both government and social change. Those issues are as salient and controversial today as they were in the 1960s, not to mention the 1860s.”

This quote conveys McPherson’s inspiration for becoming a historian of the Civil War and Reconstruction, for the author articulates his deep sense of the ongoing nature of history and his appreciation for the threads that connect past, present, and future. Just as McPherson found the legacy of the Civil War reverberating in his time as an undergraduate student, he finds some of the same issues still unresolved and up for debate in contemporary times. This quote is designed to assert the ongoing importance of the Civil War in the context of modern politics.

“The Civil War accomplished a historic shift in American values in the direction of positive liberty. The change from all those ‘shall nots’ in the first ten amendments to the Constitution to the phrase ‘Congress shall have the power to enforce’ this provision in most of the post-Civil War amendments is indicative of that shift—especially the Thirteenth Amendment, which liberated four million slaves, and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth, which guaranteed them equal civil and political rights.”

A key feature of McPherson’s text occurs when he highlights the Constitutional amendments that resulted from the Civil War and their impact on American politics and society. The primary point of Chapter 1 is that its relevance today lies in its transformation of the national character. Here, he points out that the transformation of the United States from a decentralized republic to a centralized polity is undergirded by the expansion of the powers of the federal government to intervene in the lives of its citizens, whereas the previous amendments set forth specific limits on federal power.