James McPherson has created a monumental work on the Civil War and its origins. I read it several years ago and recently re-read the first half, which concerns the United States at mid-nineteenth century and the many political and social issues working toward a collision course between the northern and southern states over the cause of slavery. McPherson is very possibly America's highest regarded Civil War author. This book won him the Pulitzer Prize.

The first time I read this book, I was amazed at the complicated political alignments surrounding the slavery issue prior to 1861. I had been familiar with the basic history containing the major events, but McPherson presents the issues and factions of this time in much greater depth than the casual reader may have previously been exposed.

McPherson's premiss is that America was changing by 1850 in ways which would not only affect the dialogue on current events but would inevitably lead to the armed conflict which had been lurking in the background of political compromises for decades. Simply put, the nation experienced tremendous expansion between 1800 and 1850, with its area quadrupling in that time. The issue of whether to allow slavery in new territories, and states, was settled with the fallback position of the Missouri Compromise of 1820. It allowed numerous states to enter the Union by agreeing to prohibit slavery in the former Louisiana Territories north of parallel 36-30, covering most of the Great Plains region, but allowing an exception in the case of Missouri (it also allowed Arkansas to come in as a slave state). This band-aid compromise worked well for a time but became stretched to the breaking point by the war with Mexico.

The event most responsible for elevating the arguing about slavery to open hostilities was President James Polk's war for the purpose of grabbing territory from Mexico in 1846. The United States was militarily successful and forced Mexico to grant its earlier demands for the boundary of Texas, as well as ceding New Mexico and California to the U.S. The latter territory became the center of a firestorm. Northern enemies of Polk tried to get a proviso passed in Congress banning slavery from any new territories, which caused southerners to counter with a proposal to allow citizens living in the territory to decide the issue. The Congressional debate centered around the admission of California to the Union was openly hostile. McPherson describes this time as the watershed for political alignment in America. Previously, the two main political parties differed mainly on banking, tariffs, and funding for internal improvements. Now, the dividing line was sectional, between North and South. The major parties splintered on slavery, with "Conscience Whigs" leaving their party rather than support its 1846 slave holding nominee, Zachary Taylor. The Van Buren faction of the Democrats, nicknamed "Barnburners" likewise bolted their party, whose leadership did not support the above "Wilmot" proviso.

The "free soilers" would become united over their rejection of slave labor for economic and moral reasons. Some were hard core abolitionists who called for the immediate expiation of the evil of slavery; a larger percentage of them found slavery socially repressive and economically backward; and the remainder (including Illinios Whig Abraham Lincoln) supported the Wilmot Proviso but were open to compromise. These distinctions started to disappear under the vehement threats of outraged southern "fireeaters" who declared themselves ready to secede from the Union as early as 1850. The Whig party could not stand up under this pressure and gradually disintegrated. Abolutionists were able to incorporate many Whigs into a coalition with fragments of other parties, including nativist "Know Nothings" to form the Republican Party. The hallmarks of its platform were elucidated in a speech of Abraham Lincoln in 1854 which affirmed the moral opposition to slavery; the right and duty of the national government to exclude it from the territories; and its description as a "cancer" which must be cut out of society.

While this ideology was gelling into a movement which would propel the Republican Party to prominence, the section of the country dependent on a slave economy was taking an increasingly hard position of viewing any opposition to slavery as a direct threat to its way of life. By 1860, it was clear that the only way secession of southern states and possible war could be averted was through the election of a president who would commit the national interest to protecting the rights of slaveholders to take their human "property" anywhere they wanted to. Clearly the electorate was not going to continue any longer in this direction, with putting the likes of the recently departed Buchanan and Pierce into office. Too much damage had been done to the political party structure; too much open hostility had been let loose on the floor of Congress among warring factions; too much blood had already been spilled in Kansas; too many ultimatums had been threatened to allow anyone to back down.

The election of Abraham Lincoln and its aftermath threw the entire country into convulsions of confusion, hurt sectional pride, and war anxiety on an unprecedented scale. Seven states each held conventions and voted to leave the Union, with the ultra belligerent South Carolina leading Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas, in that order. These states met at Montgomery, Alabama in February, 1861 and formed a new nation. After this new nation provoked war against its former nation in Charleston Harbor, they were joined, respectively, by Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina and Tennessee.

Books can be written on just what rationale secession depended on. McPherson explains the Southern ideology as a derivative of the American Revolution. The secessionists were not interested in "egalite or fraternite" in the French model, but "liberte" as in the American Revolution of 1776. A lot of water had flowed over the dam, from the early republic when slave-owning founding fathers like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison could agree that slavery was morally hard to justify but would gradually become extinct with the passing of time, to the present southern position of viewing the rights bequeathed by their fathers as endangered if they were to remain in the Union.


These rights and liberties, McPherson explains, consisted of the right to possess slaves; the liberty to take slaves into the territories; and freedom from central government coercion. With the "Black Republicans" ruling in Washington, the South's liberties would be forever under assault. Staying in the Union would therefore, according to this rationale, be suicidal.

Lincoln saw the issue of basic individual and state rights through a different lens. The Confederacy's success in taking up arms, according to him, would destroy the nation born into Liberty through the travails of the revolutionary founders, as representing the only world hope for preserving republican freedoms. His, and his country's, thinking would evolve from taking a hands-off opinion about slavery in the summer of 1861, to making emancipation of slaves in the belligerent southern states a war policy a year later, to calling for a "new birth of freedom", with Constitutional protection, in the Gettysburg Address of November 1863.

The bulk of this book, occurring from slightly before page 300, involves the events of the Civil War. This section is a definitive one-volume history of the war. It flows from, and complements the events building up to the war in the first section. That's a lot of history to put in one book, but McPherson's mastery of the details makes it all work seamlessly. He reminds us there are 50,000 other titles on the Civil War, so anyone wanting to dig deeper into any event of that period will find an almost endless source of material. The book contains an excellent 17-page annotated bibliography. McPherson, in his Preface, acknowledges the monumental works which influenced him, including the works of Bruce Catton (some of my favorite reading); the, in his words, engrossing three-volume, almost 3,000 page "The Civil War" by Shelby Foote; and Douglas Southall Freeman's "magnificent" multi-volume "R.E. Lee" and "Lee's Lieutenants." It seems the classics never go out of style.

Although all of the war's actions are described in detail, with clear maps to guide the reader, this is not just a blow-by-blow history of major battles. McPherson succeeds in his stated goal of synthesizing current scholarship with his own research and interpretations of political and military events, and important social and economic developments. As he puts it, slavery's future, the nature of northern and southern society, the principles underlying the American economy, the fate of competing nationalisms in North and South, how freedom would be defined, even the survival of the United States, rested on the shoulders of those exhausted men in blue and gray who fought each other during four years of some of the greatest wartime ferocity that ever occurred. This book is a fitting record of their sacrifices.