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

McPherson articulates the ways in which the Civil War transformed the national identity and forged a modern United States. Specifically, he focuses on the transformation from a decentralized republic to a centralized polity and from an economy based on enslavement to a free-labor entrepreneurial capitalist economy. These two transformations are intertwined, as McPherson notes at the beginning of Chapter 7 when he states, “Slavery could not have been abolished without Union victory, and preservation of the United States as one nation became dependent on the destruction of slavery” (97). Chapter 2 indicates that the seeds of free-labor capitalism were present in the years leading up to the war, as evidenced by the fact that the Forty-Niners in California did not want to compete with a labor force comprised of enslaved people. McPherson observes that once enslavement was abolished, the emergence of a centralized economic system became possible. McPherson’s discussion of America’s transformation from a decentralized republic to a centralized polity includes his analysis of the federal government’s decision to tax people directly, to institute an Internal Revenue Bureau, and to create a national currency and a federally chartered banking system. 

The transformation to a centralized polity is also related to the 14th and 15th Amendments’ expansion of the federal government’s power to intervene in the lives of American citizens.