More than 140 years ago, Mark Twain observed that the Civil War, which had recently ended, “uprooted institutions that were centuries old, changed the politics of a people, transformed the social life of half the country, and wrought so profoundly upon the entire national character that the influence cannot be measured short of two or three generations.”
Five generations have passed, and we are still trying to measure that influence. The long shadow cast by the Civil War continues to affect us today. More Americans died in that conflict than in all the other wars this country has fought combined, right through the latest casualty reports from Afghanistan. Several new books about Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, and the movie Lincoln, have offered important insights about presidential leadership in a time of crisis and have raised questions about the political and constitutional constraints on executive powers. The film Twelve Years a Slave powerfully dramatized the pain and cruelty of an institution that lay at the root of American society and brought on the war. The close relationship between the abolition of slavery and the subsequent evolution of race relations in the United States has received a great deal of attention, especially since the election of Barack Obama as president.
Since the publication of my first book fifty years ago, I have sought to dissect the Civil War’s impact at several levels and in several dimensions. The twelve chapters in this volume represent a continuation of that effort. One of the essays is published here for the first time (chapter 1). The others have appeared in various venues and formats during the past eight years, but several have been substantially revised and updated. Each chapter is complete in itself and can be read independently of the others, but I have also tried to fit them together in a cohesive pattern so that they can be read consecutively from beginning to end. Although the essays are grounded in many years of reading and research, they are more interpretive than monographic, and I have therefore confined the endnotes mainly to citations for quotations. My interpretations are sometimes stated strongly, and some of them may disagree with the reader’s own judgments. I welcome disagreement and dialogue, for that is how scholarship and understanding advance.
James McPherson
Princeton, New Jersey