Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution by James M. McPherson

Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution Reviews

• 
  Bob (aka Bobby Lee)

  Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution by James M. McPherson
  Published 1991 by Oxford University Press
  
  5 Bright and Shining Unified Stars
  
  Pulitzer Prize winning author James M. McPherson (Battle Cry of Freedom) delivers another literary treasure - this one a compilation of seven essays on aspects of Lincoln's presidency including among other things the American Civil War as linked to the concepts captured in the founding fathers' Declaration of Independence and codified in the Constitution.
  
  General contents -
  Preface
  Acknowledgments
  1 The Second American Revolution
  2 Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution
  3 Lincoln and Liberty
  4 Lincoln and the Strategy of Unconditional Surrender
  5 How Lincoln Won the War with Metaphors
  6 The Hedgehog and the Foxes
  7 Liberty and Power in the Second American Revolution
  Notes
  Index
  
  My thoughts -
  These essays are jam packed with historical data that convincingly illustrate how Lincoln's thrust as Commander in Chief evolved from solely being determined to save the country to including the annihilation of slavery as well. Although there were hundreds of points made by the author, a few have stuck with me.
  
  McPherson clarifies how the war became viewed as a revolution - as the second American Revolution - in three different senses and illustrates Lincoln's role in defining the outcome of the fighting in each of the three respects. The first of these was the prevailing attitude of many southern leaders to justify their secession - their declaration of independence - from the United States. For example, the Mississippi convention in 1861 that voted to secede proclaimed: "For far less cause than this, our fathers separated from the Crown of England." In Tennessee, the governor advanced the plan to follow the example of our fathers of 1776. The second respect in which the civil War is viewed as a revolution was in the abolition of slavery. Although not an original part of Lincoln's war aims, it was the destruction of that institution that was basic to the southern social order, the political structure, the culture, and the way of life in the South. This leads to the third respect in which the Civil War can be viewed as a revolution: it destroyed not only slavery but also the social structure of the old South that had been founded on slavery, and it radically altered the balance between the North and South.
  
  Even before he committed himself in the second year of the Civil War to emancipation as a war aim, Lincoln repeatedly insisted that it was the North, not the South, that fought to preserve the American heritage of liberty. The republic that the founding fathers had established as a bulwark of liberty was a vulnerable experiment in a world featuring kings, emperors, czars, and dictators. Lincoln's commitment to emancipation, not without criticism from many of his supporters was in furtherance of his goal to establish liberty and freedom for all Americans, not just the white folks.
  
  On February 3, 1865, Lincoln himself and Secretary of State Seward met with three high Confederate officials (including the CSA V.P., Stephens) on board a Union ship anchored at Hampton Roads, Virginia. During four hours of talks Lincoln did not budge from his minimum conditions for peace (seen as unconditional surrender) which included restoration of National authority throughout all the states, no backdown on emancipation related to the slavery question, no letup in the North's war effort until the very end of the war, and the disbanding of all forces hostile to the national government. Lincoln had not wavered one bit in his demands.
  
  There are vast instances captured in this book which make it clear who Lincoln was and what he developed into as the war raged on. This is an informative and meaningful volume in capturing and portraying Lincoln during the American Civil War. Not to be overlooked by American history buffs and those interested in a little better understanding on how we have gotten to where we are now as a nation.
• 
  robin friedman

  How Lincoln Transformed America
  
  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 indispensable 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 which involved individual freedom from government regulation and freedom 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 revisionists who claim that the Civil War failed in its basic aims by the backtracking from Reconstruction and by 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.
  
  Robin Friedman
• 
  Paul Haspel

  Abraham Lincoln’s leadership helped make the American Civil War into a Second American Revolution, moving the United States of America closer to realization of the principle of “all men are created equal” that was set forth at the beginning of the original American Revolution in 1776 – or, to put it another way, four score and seven years before Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. That thematic idea links the essays brought together by James McPherson for his 1990 book Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution.
  
  For readers of Civil War history, James McPherson needs no introduction. His Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (1988) is widely considered the definitive one-volume history of that era, expertly melding details of battlefield combat with attention to the social and cultural history of that time, particularly with regard to slavery and emancipation. He is, for these times, what Bruce Catton was for an earlier time – the go-to Civil War historian, with enduring appeal to both scholars and general readers.
  
  Readers of Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution should not expect a lengthy, sweeping overall history on the order of Battle Cry of Freedom. Rather, this book consists of a series of essays that were originally lectures, book chapters, or scholarly articles. What they have in common, as the book’s title indicates, is a focus on Abraham Lincoln as a war leader who fulfilled many of the promises of the original American Revolution, eight decades after that first revolution ended.
  
  The title essay suggests that the much-remarked-upon “contradiction” between Lincoln the conservative and Lincoln the revolutionary is actually “a matter of interpretation and emphasis within the context of a fluid and rapidly changing crisis situation. The Civil War started out as one kind of conflict and ended as something quite different. These apparently contradictory positions about Lincoln the conservative versus Lincoln the revolutionary can be reconciled by focusing on this process” (p. 25).
  
  In Battle Cry of Freedom, McPherson sets forth his belief in a contingency theory of history – the idea that history is driven by what happens at critical moments of change, as when the Confederate invasions of Maryland and Kentucky were turned back in the autumn of 1862, enabling President Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln’s movement toward emancipation could be said to have occurred in accordance with that process – one contingent moment leading to another, until what had officially begun as a limited war to restore the Union evolved into a much more revolutionary war that ended American slavery forever.
  
  The essay “Lincoln and Liberty” points out that “Lincoln rejected the notion that the rights of liberty and the pursuit of happiness were confined to the white race” – even if “the abolitionists and the radical wing of the Republican party went further than Lincoln in maintaining the principle of equal rights for all people” (p. 51). This belief on Lincoln’s part, with its limitations, found practical expression during the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, when Lincoln responded to Douglas’s expression of white-supremacist beliefs by stating that “I agree with Judge Douglas [that the black man] is not my equal in many respects”, but followed that up by insisting forthrightly that “in the right to eat the bread, without leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal, and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man” (qtd. p. 52).
  
  In “Lincoln and the Strategy of Unconditional Surrender,” McPherson considers Lincoln’s insistence, throughout the Civil War, that the war “was a domestic insurrection by certain lawless citizens, not a war between nations. Throughout the war Lincoln maintained this legal fiction; he never referred to Confederate states or to Confederates, but to rebel states and rebels” (p. 75). The language that Lincoln used in his proclamation of April 15, 1861, in which he stated that he was calling out 75,000 militia to “suppress…combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings” (qtd. p. 74), emphasizes Lincoln’s view that the Civil War was to be a “limited war – very limited, indeed scarcely war at all, but a police action to quell a rather large riot” (p. 75).
  
  The essay “How Lincoln Won the War with Metaphors” looks at how Lincoln used vivid, figurative language, including many animal metaphors expressive of Lincoln’s upbringing in the rural Midwest. This use of metaphor, in McPherson’s reading, not only displays the poetic side of Lincoln’s meaning-making imagination, but also shows the extent to which his thinking was in advance of so many of his contemporaries, both political and military – as with Lincoln’s advice to Union General Joseph Hooker in the summer of 1863, as Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia was beginning the campaign of invasion that would end at Gettysburg:
  
  As Lee began to move north, Hooker proposed to cross the Rappahannock River and attack his rear guard. Lincoln disapproved with these words in a telegram to Hooker: “I would not take any risk of being entangled upon the river, like an ox jumped half over a fence, and liable to be torn by dogs, front and rear, without a fair chance to gore one way or kick the other.” Napoleon himself could not have given better tactical advice or phrased it half so well. (pp. 100-01)
  
  “The Hedgehog and the Foxes” takes its title from “a line by the Greek poet Archilochus: ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing’” (p. 113). For McPherson, Lincoln was surrounded by foxes – men who were too clever by half, but who risked losing sight of what was for Lincoln the “one big thing”: the principle that the Union, founded in accordance with the principles of the Declaration of Independence, had to be preserved in a manner that also preserved those founding principles.
  
  The Declaration of Independence was the foundation of Lincoln’s political philosophy. “I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration,” he said in 1861….These were the principles that for Lincoln made America stand for something unique and important in the world; they were the principles that the heroes of the Revolution, whom Lincoln revered, had fought and died for; without these principles, the United States would become just another oppressive autocracy. (p. 126)
  
  It is for this reason that Lincoln, who despised slavery and believed that the phrase “all men are created equal” meant all people, regardless of color, nonetheless did not attempt to abolish slavery by judicial fiat; when he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, he did so in a strictly constitutional manner, as Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. armed forces, undertaking a wartime measure that would weaken the slaveholding Confederacy. Thanks to Lincoln’s leadership, the United States emerged from the Civil War not only still united, not just more powerful, but also much more free.
  
  And “Liberty and Power in the Second American Revolution” invokes philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s concepts of negative liberty and positive liberty:
  
  “Negative liberty is freedom from interference by outside authority with individual thought or behavior. Positive liberty is freedom to achieve a status of freedom previously denied by disability or law. Negative liberty is vulnerable to power; positive liberty is a form of power” (p. 137).
  
  McPherson applies Berlin’s ideas to suggest that the pre-war U.S.A. was a nation with a culture of negative liberty – “I’m a free American” meant, in effect, “The government can’t tell me what to do.” Most constitutional amendments, before the Civil War, set forth what the federal government could not do. The pressures of war, by contrast, gradually moved the U.S.A. in the direction of positive liberty, with a more powerful and activist government that, by war’s end, was able to pass Constitutional amendments stating what the federal government could do – in the case of the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery forever – with the specification that “Congress shall have power to enforce this amendment by appropriate legislation.”
  
  Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution is not a biography of Lincoln; rather, it is a multi-part consideration of Lincoln’s philosophy with regard to the powers of government and the rights of the citizen. Read in that spirit, it provides a helpful look at Lincoln’s ideas and their considerable impact, both in the United States and worldwide.
  
• 
  Randy

  Lincoln the Revolutionary, Lincoln the Crusader, the Visonary-- this collection of essays addresses a side of Lincoln that is largely overlooked while slapping down the Neo-Confederate Revisonists.
  
  Those who tout the Myth of The Confederacy As Heirs to 1776 ( a popular fable here in the Commonwealth) will read this book and shrilly denonounce it. They will have however have to marshall something more than the "Standing up For Their Rights) argument as McPherson allows the words of the Confederates to speak for themselves.
  More importantly, he strips away the mythology surrounding Lincoln's actions and his goals and assesses them for what they were: the logical progression of the Revolutions of 1776 and 1787 (if you find that reference puzzling- come see me. Bring Bourbon)- at once a revolution that overthrew the existing social and political order, and a fulfillment of the earlier Revolution's philosophical goals.
  I used to assign this book as required reading in my American History classes.
  Go read it and find out why.
• 
  Matt

  Incredibly readable and concise collection of McPherson lectures from an AP US History class in high school. Some interesting points include:
  
  - How the Civil War was more revolutionary than the original American revolution of 1776 (abolition of slavery, destruction and mass redistribution of "wealth", strengthening of the power of the federal government, etc)
  - Lincoln's grand strategies for winning the war, as opposed to specific operational / military strategies
  - The evolution of said national strategies during the early years of the war (ie: limited war vs "total war" for unconditional surrender, supporting the status quo on slavery vs the later Emancipation Proclamation, etc)
  - Lincoln's rhetoric
  
  My only real criticism would be that as 7 stand-alone chapters, the book features more than a small amount of redundancy in the primary source material quoted.
• 
  John Nelson

  As the author points out, prior to the Civil War most people, including staunch Unionists, treated the term "United States" as a plural noun, as in "the United States are . . . ." During the war, it became more common to use this term as a singular, as in "the United States is . . . ." This small change in speech reflected a major change in how Americans viewed their country.
  
  This book includes seven essays discussing the Union's gradually increasing war objectives, and with it the increase in the federal government's power at the expense of the states that took place during the war and immediately afterward. It sometimes is claimed these changes showed a national consensus in favor of a large federal government able to intrude into every corner of American life. That is not so; the post-Civil War Amendments to the Constitution were limited to restricting state action rather than authorizing any regulation of the acts of private persons, and the members of the Civil War generation would be aghast at the far-reaching power the federal government has seized since the 1930s. This fact, however, does not limit the interest of McPherson's book, which is well worth reading.
• 
  Timothy

  Read this book For my Book Analysis in History - I am biased towards President Lincoln so this book could do no wrong and it was not the first book/ collection of essays that I have read on the subject. If you are interested in Civil War era History or Political Science this is a wonderful read its short may take you a couple days to a week(s) to read but offers not really an original but entertaining (no Vampires) look into the Presidency of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War viewed as Americas Second Revolution.
• 
  Erik Graff

  This is by far the best writing I've seen on Lincoln: well written and argued, contentious yet convincing. The general theme of the seven essays, revised for inclusion here, is that Lincoln and his government created a second American revolution with profound impact which survived the 'counter-revolution' of the late 1870s. Most interesting to me was McPerson's restatement of I. Berlin's treatment of the concept of 'liberty', negative and positive.
• 
  Renay

  A wonderful analysis of the impact of Lincoln's presidency and decision making on American culture.
• 
  David Kent

  McPherson has in this short book provided a density of thought-provoking information unsurpassed by other scholars. The book consists of seven essays drawn from presentations and lectures McPherson has given to a variety of organizations. Each delves in its own way into the question of whether the Civil War was a second American revolution. He examines what revolution means, the idea of counterrevolution, the competing concepts of liberty held in the North and South, and even Lincoln as a hedgehog surrounded by foxes. McPherson shows why he is considered one of the, if not the, expert on Civil War America.
  
  This is actually the third time I've read this book. The first was soon after it was published in 1991. I then read it again in 2009, and now again as part of a book discussion group in the Lincoln Group of DC. Each time I've learned more.
• 
  Erik

  Readable essays on the theme that people back then thought that the Civil War was a second American revolution, and that they were right. Mainly because it changed our republic by establishing the principle that America was not just a country for white people but for everybody. As imperfectly as racial equality was enforced as Reconstruction started to break down and well into the 20th century, at least the principle was established that the words of the Declaration of Independence applied to all Americans, regardless of color or previous condition of servitude, to use the words of one of the post-Civil War constitutional amendments. McPherson presents Lincoln as a single-minded fighter for the Union who found a way to during the war to harmonize his duty to uphold the Constitution with his personal belief that "if slavery isn't wrong, then nothing is wrong."
• 
  Daniel Silliman

  This is a lovely little book of essays. James McPherson, an preeminent Civl War historian, thinks aloud about the question, what was at stake in the Civil War? What was at stake in the fundamental character of America?
  
  He finds the answer in Lincoln's political philosophy, his understanding of the meaning of the Declaration of Independence, his rhetoric, and the decisions he made, prosecuting the war. The answer to "what was at stake?", then, tells us a lot about Lincoln, but also lays out a particular vision of America, and the American promise, and whether that promise even makes sense--a question Lincoln wrestled with.
  
  Lincoln's vision of the promise of America is deeply realistic, and yet stubbornly hopeful, that I really appreciate it, in times like these.
• 
  Kerry

  For someone with a limited background in political science, this little book was a revelation. None of the self-proclaimed Constitutional scholars I see on social media ever take time to acknowledge what the Civil War did to the Founding Fathers' vision of the role of the federal government. The twin concepts of positve and negative liberty were new to me, and I'm still thinking about those passages from this book. All that being said, my favorite chapter was the one that analyzed Lincoln's use of metaphors and allegory. Right up my English major alley. This is a small book that delivers big ideas.
• 
  T.B. Caine

  
  My Booktube
  
  3.5/5, but I'm rounding down. Overall this did make me rethink Lincoln & Reconstruction, and frame them in a light that makes them truly seem like a Second American Revolution. However, like the first pages say a lot of the essays in this weren't intended to be collected and thus a few don't feel like they touch on the main theme at all. The ones that most encompass the idea of the Second American Revolution, were the first and last ones, which were written explicitly for this book. So those are great, and I like the idea of this, but the majority of the content in here is just fluff.
• 
  Brian

  A collection of essays about Lincoln's role as president from the perspective of "was the Civil War a Second American Revolution". McPherson, as always is readable. I found the book interesting and picked up a few tidbits that were food for thought. The "Second Revolution" discussion was a bit to academic for me.
  
  Sections of what consitutes "liberty" were also sometimes very academic - "Positive Liberty" versus "Negative Liberty". Lincoln's said it well: “We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name—liberty.” A slave owner's liberty to enslave another, or that man's right to be free.
  
  
  
  Brief coverage of some of the repressive things Union did during the war - Democratic gubernatorial candidate Clement L. Vallandigham spoke out against the war, was tried by a military tribinal for treason and sentenced to imprisonment. Lincoln commuted the sentenace to banishment - Vallandigham had to move to Canada/
  
  It IS interesting to note a Lincoln quote from pre-presidency and the “right of any people” to “throw off, to revolutionize, their existing form of government, and to establish such other in its stead as they may choose” was “a sacred right—a right, which we may hope and believe, is to liberate the world.” The Union was a fragile thing in our first century.
  
  
  
• 
  Mike

  I enjoyed this short book of academic essay by the most famous Civil War historian James McPherson. The essays look at specific aspects of Lincoln as President including his use of metaphors, his single-minded focus on complete victory in the War, and his views on liberty. Great read for people with a deep Civil War or Lincoln background, but probably too heavy for anyone interested in a popular history.
• 
  Ken Peters

  This is a collection of seven essays that explore Abraham Lincoln's approach to leadership, his far-reaching influence on American politics, and the the long-term implications of the American Civil War, which all represent the primary reasons I'm fascinated with the history of that conflict. To many, this would be a boring book; to me, it was a page-turner. Lincoln's leadership style provides a great many lessons, and the American Civil War has had an immeasurable impact on the character and politics of the United States that can be clearly seen to this day, which in turn affects the world in varying degrees. I love exploring such hinge-events in history, upon which so many things turn, and McPherson does an admirable job exploring it as one of the foremost historians for that period.
• 
  Maddy Martin

  Honestly, the formatting of this book was the most irritating thing about it. A bold font with long paragraphs. Very frustrating to read. That and the fact that this book was basically a composition of contradictory evidence with very little conclusions being reached through the evidence provided. It just gives you the background info (and it's a LOT of background info) and says, "well, here you go!"
• 
  Frederick

  This is probably one of the best books you will ever read about the true consequences of the American Civil War. I have never read a more clear appraisal of the way the war's outcome changed the way we look at everything from our rights to the Constitution to the role of government. This should be required reading in any history course on the Civil War.
• 
  Konstantinos Drosos

  Ίσως η καλύτερη δουλειά που έχω διαβάσει για τον Lincoln !
  Αξίζει να το αποκτήσετε!
• 
  Alex

  ISU: Independent Study
• 
  Ben

  Worth reading for the Hedgehog and Fox essay alone
• 
  Christopher Blosser

  Clocking in at around 170 pages,
  Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution is a fairly quick read, offering seven thoughtful essays on the major themes in the thought and governance of Abraham Lincoln. I also found it to be good supplementary reading to McPherson's comprehensive survey
  Battle Cry of Freedom.
  
  There were two chapters which I found particularly interesting and educational — the first "Lincoln and Liberty", which examined the rival concepts of 'negative' liberty (absence of restraint, freedom from oppression) and 'positive' liberty (the freedom to do as assisted by power. The former concept characterized the original American revolution to which both the Union and the Confederacy laid claim, while Lincoln looked to the Declaration of Independence as inspiration to shift the emphasis to positive liberty and expand it to those who did not enjoy it previously, urging the "preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of ALL men, in ALL lands, everywhere … he who would be no slave, must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves." According to McPherson it was Lincoln's "eloquent definition — and redefinition — of liberty that the South most feared."
  
  In "How Lincoln Won the War with Metaphors", McPherson weighs the claim of Southern historian David Potter that so great was Lincoln's powers of persuasion "if the Union and the Confederacy had exchanged presidents with one another, the Confederacy might have won its independence."
  
  On its face it would seem Davis had the upper hand, receiving "one of the best educations that money could buy in his day" and schooling in rhetoric, logic, literature and the classics, all of which should have made him a superb communicator. Conversely, Lincoln had only a year or so of formal schooling and was chiefly self-taught, his favorite books being Aesop's Fables, Pilgrim's Progress, William Shakespeare and the Bible. However, it was Lincoln's "defects in education which proved a benefit" and gave him something which Davis lacked: the skill in using figurative language (metaphors, stories and poetry) to render complex and abstract ideas communicable by "giving them live and tangible meaning." As McPherson demonstrates with copious citations and examples, this was a skill Lincoln employed throughout his terms as President in communicating to his generals and cabinet as well as the American people.
• 
  Jacob Lines

  James McPherson knows Lincoln. This book, a collection of lectures about Lincoln and the Civil War, offers new views of Lincoln even for those that have already read a lot about him. And, after all of these views, Lincoln still emerges as a hero.
  
  McPherson begins with considering what a revolution is, and whether the Civil War was a revolution. He concludes that it was. It changed things dramatically. But then there was a counterrevolution after Reconstruction that undid much of what had been accomplished. The Reconstruction Amendments remained, though, and provided the foundation for the Civil Rights movement – the “second Reconstruction” – in the 1960s.
  
  The next question is who the revolutionaries were – Lincoln and his supporters, or the confederates? The confederates claimed the right to secede in part from the right of revolution recognized in the Declaration. Lincoln repeatedly stated his goal of merely preserving the Union. But in reality, the rebels were not fighting for change but to preserve the status quo. And Lincoln, although he sought to simply conserve the Union at first, later changed the goals of the war to include the destruction of slavery. On top of that, we need to consider the astonishing blitz of new laws that Congress enacted and Lincoln signed. Those laws expanded the federal government’s roles in ways that were not possible while Southern congressmen were present to oppose them. From the evidence, it is clear that Lincoln was the revolutionary.
  
  Another important topic covered is Lincoln and Liberty. First, he was very clear in rejecting the southern view of liberty – the freedom to enslave another human without interference from others. He rejected the southern notion that liberty was intended only for whites. He believed the Declaration of Independence when it said that all men are created equal, and believed that the Framers agreed. Not only did he disagree with the slavers, but also with nativists who would deny liberty to immigrants. McPherson then addresses Lincoln’s actions about civil liberties that can be seen as conflicting with his ideals about liberty. How did he justify suspending habeas corpus and allowing military courts to try civilians? At the risk of oversimplifying it, the answer is necessity. As Lincoln explained, must he allow all the laws to go unenforced, except one? In other words, must he be bound to honor habeas corpus if doing so would mean the nation would cease to exist? The obvious answer should be no.
  
  Another chapter discusses how Lincoln set the overall national strategy of unconditional surrender while also trying to influence military strategy (he was more successful in setting national strategy) and why this was so vital to winning the war. For those who love Lincoln’s words (I hope this includes everyone reading this), there is a marvelous chapter about his ability to communicate call “How Lincoln Won the War with Metaphors.” And another chapter shows how Lincoln was a hedgehog, who knew a lot about one thing – saving the Union – while others around him were foxes, who knew a little about many things and were always running around changing their minds. Lincoln’s single-minded commitment to saving the Union was a main reason the Union was saved.
  
  The final chapter explains the disappointing history of Reconstruction, as the American people lost their interest, and the Republican party retreated from its commitment to establish true liberty and equality for blacks in America.
  
  My verdict of the book: well worth reading. McPherson knows Lincoln like few others do. And he does a marvelous job of communicating that understanding. If you want to understand Lincoln’s work as president – the politics, philosophy, and history that shaped his handling of the massive crisis of the time, this is one of the best books I have found to recommend.
• 
  Gary Hoggatt

  In his 1992 collection, Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution, Civil War historian James M. McPherson draws together seven intriguing essays on Lincoln and the Civil War. The two main threads running through the essays are how the Civil War could really qualify as a revolution, given the massive transformative and and liberating effect it had on the United States, and how Lincoln lead the revolution, both philosophically and militarily. It's a very thought provoking and enjoyable collection.
  
  McPherson makes a persuasive case that the Civil War resulted in changes as large as, and in some ways larger, than the American Revolution. The enormous change wrought be the liberation of the slaves is a major factor, of course, but so was the American regional balance of power shifting, as McPherson demonstrates, from the South to the North.
  
  Another revolutionary concept was how liberty itself was defined. Americans had always regarding liberty as "freedom from" government interference, but this concept of negative liberty was supplanted by a positive liberty approach that granted citizens "freedom to" their rights, and granted the federal government the power to enforce those rights. Also covered is the counter-revolution as Reconstruction ceased and some gains were lost. I have a political science degree, so I really enjoyed the discussions on the political theory liberty and how it applied in America before and after the Civil War.
  
  The essays on Lincoln are also well done. They address his role in guiding the philosophical aims of the revolution over the course of the war, such as the well-known shift from Union to Union and Emancipation as inseparable, his use of language in leading the debate, and his military strategy, including how it changed and how it differed from others of the time.
  
  The military essays are especially interesting, and do an excellent job of explaining how Lincoln arrived at his determination to purse a "total war" approach, completely remaking the South culturally and economically instead of, as he originally framed it, putting down an insurrection. McPherson revisited Lincoln's military role in his 2008 book Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief, but I found that effort devolved too much into a general history of the Union war effort, and lacked the focus on Lincoln that McPherson was attempting to capture. The essays here are very focused and well written. I wish he had kept the same focus he had here with Tried By War.
  
  Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution is a great collection of thought-provoking essays by today's preeminent Civil War historian. Even those who've read extensively on Lincoln and the Civil War will find something new here, and anyone with a political science bent will especially appreciate the political theory in this volume.
• 
  Ben

  Overall, I very much enjoyed McPherson's book. He provided some really interesting and useful insight into Lincoln, his policies before and during the war, as well as the events and actions of those around him. I particularly liked the essays on how the Civil War was the Second American Revolution and Lincoln's use of metaphors. We don't typically think of the Civil War as a revolution, but McPherson provides strong evidence that not only did many people at the time see it as such-- and we often tend to ignore contemporary understandings of events-- but that the changes at the time were quite revolutionary. He points out that it is too hard for most people to view the events of the Civil War and Reconstruction unless through the lens of Reconstruction's failure, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. But if we can remove those lenses from our eyes, it is possible to understand how momentous these evens were at the time-- without the aid of knowing what happened after.
  
  That said, there were several aspects of the book which did not sit well with me. The fact that there is so much repetition between the essays, and not just rephrasing or restating but dead-on repetition, was annoying and struck me as unprofessional. Although McPherson apologizes for this in the introduction and excuses himself since he wanted to keep all of them as stand-alone essays, I think that shows a failure to recognize not only the fact that these essays have been put into a book together, but also belies an ignorance of the power which these essays could wield if properly placed together in this compilation. When one is taking disparate essays and putting them together into a book, especially if they are all by you yourself, you must do serious editing so that they fit together well and do NOT have major overlap like McPherson's do. I feel that he could have taken some of them and spliced them together, or taken the majority of those, gotten rid of the overlap, and added new material that he'd found since their original publication. In my opinion, this would have created a much more compelling, stronger text overall.
  
  Regardless, I both enjoyed and learned a lot from McPherson's book. Each essay was quite good by itself, but McPherson could do well to remember the synergistic effect, whereby the parts do not simply add together but multiply upon each other; thereby creating a whole which is greater than its parts.
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  Paul Haspel

  The challenge facing any author who wants to write about Abraham Lincoln is finding a way to say something new. In Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution, historian James McPherson meets that challenge quite well. By the time this book was published in the early 1990's, McPherson had already published Battle Cry of Freedom, a bestseller and Pulitzer Prize winner. Battle Cry of Freedom is still widely regarded as this generation's definitive single-volume history of the Civil War, and perhaps this book's appearance a short time later reflects a public demand for more of McPherson's work. Whatever the reasons for its publication, Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution makes a valuable contribution to Lincoln studies and to Civil War studies generally.
  
  It is not, mind you, a comprehensive Civil War history on the order of Battle Cry. Rather, it is a collection of seven essays, delivered and published in various scholarly venues between 1982 and 1991; and while McPherson assures us that he has worked to eliminate overlap among the essays, you will see a couple of quotes appearing multiple times. The common denominator that the essays share, an important one, is that all focus on Lincoln as war leader, and on the Civil War as a second American Revolution -- a conflict that, in bringing an end to slavery, fulfilled the promises of American liberty that had been set forth in the original American Revolution, four score and seven-odd years earlier.
  
  The essays deal with topics such as Lincoln's leadership style, his beliefs regarding liberty, his strategy of compelling an unconditional Confederate surrender, and the way in which Lincoln's gift for language contributed to his political success. Two of the essays, "Lincoln and Liberty" and "Liberty and Power in the Second American Revolution," seem particularly applicable to the controversies of modern American life. More than once, McPherson invokes the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin's writings on negative liberty ("freedom from") and positive liberty ("freedom to") as he discusses the way in which American views on liberty changed during the Civil War era.
  
  McPherson's writing style, as always, is mellifluous; his presentation of his evidence is meticulous; his arguments are persuasive. If you enjoy McPherson's works of Civil War history, you will enjoy Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution.