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. McPherson identifies the shift in the language of the amendments to the Constitution, noting that the first 12 amendments “limited the powers of the national government” (6) through the use of the phrase “shall not,” while the next 15 amendments, beginning with the 13th, use the phrase “shall have the power” in reference to the federal government. McPherson also observes that Congress used the 14th and 15th Amendments as the constitutional bases for legislation allowing the federal government to prosecute crimes that were under state jurisdiction, but which came under the purview of the federal government when those crimes interfered with people’s civil rights.

The shifting language of these amendments also highlights the shift from an orientation toward negative liberty to an orientation toward positive liberty. McPherson defines negative liberty as “the absence of restraint, a freedom from interference by outside authority with individual thought or behavior” (12), while positive liberty denotes the freedom to do something and connotes expansion “toward notions of equity, justice, social welfare, [and] equality of opportunity” (13). Thus, McPherson contends that the Civil War ushered in a fundamental shift whereby abolition was viewed not as an attempt to curtail the rights of people to enslave other people, but rather as an example of positive liberty, whereby rights and opportunities were expanded to include the formerly enslaved. The discussion suggests that positive liberty is more closely aligned with “the standard maxim for free society” (163) that Lincoln identifies as the founding fathers’ legacy.