McPherson, James M., 1936-

                        Princeton historian of the American Civil War
                                 Pulitzer Prize-winning historian
 
 
 
 

Name: James M. McPherson
Current Home:  Princeton, New Jersey
Date of Birth:  October 11, 1936
Place of Birth: Valley City, North Dakota
 

Education:
B.A., Gustavus Adolphus College (St. Peter, MN) 1958; Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University, 1963

Awards:
Anisfield-Wolf Award for The Struggle for Equality, 1965; Pulitzer Prize for Battle Cry of Freedom, 1989; Lincoln Prize for Cause and Comrades, 1998
 
 

Barnes & Noble Meet the Writer

Initially moved to study the history of the South as a way of understanding the civil rights movement, James M. McPherson has become the preeminent expert on the Civil War and Reconstruction. His award-winning work provides detail, context and a modern perspective on one of America's most important historical periods.

Interview

What was the book that most influenced your life?
Origins of the New South, 1877-1913, by C. Vann Woodward. It opened a whole new way of looking at the history of the South and of race relations during a crucial period of transformation from slavery to segregated freedom. It also influenced me to come to Johns Hopkins, where Woodward taught, for my graduate work, and he was in important influence in my understanding of history and how to write it.

Tell us about your ten favorite books.

• Woodward, Origins of the New South, as noted before.
• The Strange Career of Jim Crow by C. Vann Woodward. Important interpretation of race relations history.
• Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction by Eric L. McKitrick. Pathbreaking study in portraying the breakdown between President and Congress that led to Johnson’s impeachment.
• The Radicalism of the American Revolution by Gordon Wood. Places the meaning of the Revolution in an important context that has implications for all of American history.
• The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861 by David Potter. Most thorough study of the causes of the Civil War.
• Ordeal of the Union (four volumes) and The War for the Union by Allan Nevins. Most detailed and thorough study of the whole period from 1846-1865, which was of great help in my own research and writing about this era.
• The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara. A novel about Gettysburg that brings the human dimension of that battle and what it meant to vivid life.
• Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. The great American Novel, which can be re-read many times for new meaning each time.
• A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain. I read this as a parable of the conflict between North and South that erupted in a tragic Civil War.
• A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway. The best novel about World War I.

Who are your favorite writers?

• C. Vann Woodward. Best insights into the South; a strong element of the irony of American history.
• Mark Twain. Greatest American writer, uses satire to expose folly of human nature.
• Ernest Hemingway. Powerful writer about the human condition.

What else would you like readers to know about you?
My favorite forms of exercise -- and of unwinding -- are tennis and bicycling. I also like to unwind by reading good (but not profound) mystery and adventure novels. I enjoy playing with my granddaughter (21 months) and look forward to teaching her how to ride a bicycle, play tennis, and do many other things.
 
 
In the Works
"A short book about my experience guiding students and people from all walks of life around Civil War battlefields, to be titled A Walk on Hallowed Ground."
 
 

CIVIL WAR HISTORIAN JAMES M. McPHERSON NAMED THE 2000 JEFFERSON LECTURER IN THE HUMANITIES

WASHINGTON, January 11, 2000 -- Princeton University history professor James M. McPherson, considered among the greatest historians of the Civil War, has been named the 2000 Jefferson Lecturer in the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) announced today.

"James M. McPherson has helped millions of Americans better understand the meaning and legacy of the American Civil War," said NEH Chairman William Ferris. "By establishing the highest standards for scholarship and public education about the Civil War and by providing leadership in the movement to protect the nation's battlefields, he has made an exceptional contribution to historical awareness in America. I am delighted to name him the 2000 Jefferson Lecturer in the Humanities."

The annual NEH-sponsored Jefferson Lecture, named in honor of the scholarly accomplishments of the third president of the United States, is the highest honor the federal government bestows for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities. Dr. McPherson will present his lecture, titled "'For a Vast Future Also': Lincoln and the Millennium," on Monday, March 27, 2000, at 7:30 p.m. in the Concert Hall of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The lecture is open to the public, and attendance is free. Those interested in attending should call (202) 606-8446 or send e-mail to info@neh.gov to request an invitation.

McPherson has authored a dozen books about the Civil War and more than 100 articles and reviews. His Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (1988), is considered by many the best single-volume history of the American Civil War and is credited with generating widespread popular interest in the subject throughout the nation. Published as a volume in the Oxford History of the United States series, Battle Cry of Freedom helped pave the way for the success and critical acclaim of the 1990 PBS documentary "The Civil War," for which McPherson served as an advisor.

In addition to his scholarship, McPherson is a vigorous preservationist. He has served on the boards of two nonprofit organizations dedicated to preserving and protecting Civil War battlefields-the Civil War Trust and the Association for the Preservation of Civil War Sites. The two organizations, which have saved nearly 10,000 acres of endangered battlefield land at more than 50 sites in 15 states, merged in November 1999 to form the Civil War Preservation Trust.

McPherson also served on the Civil War Sites Advisory Committee created by Congress in 1991, which reported in 1993 that "more than one-third of all principal Civil War battlefields are either lost or are hanging onto existence by the slenderest of threads." In 1993 and 1994, McPherson served as president of Protect Historic America, which successfully opposed a plan to build a commercial historical theme park near Virginia's Manassas battlefield.

McPherson has taught for nearly four decades at Princeton, where he holds the title of George Henry Davis '86 Professor of American History. In addition to Battle Cry of Freedom, his books include For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (1997), Drawn with the Sword: Reflections on the American Civil War (1996), What They Fought For, 1861-1865 (1994), Gettysburg (paintings by Mort Kunstler) (1993), Images of the Civil War (paintings by Mort Kunstler) (1992), Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution (1992), Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction (1982; 2d ed., 1992), The Abolitionist Legacy: From Reconstruction to the NAACP (1975), Marching Toward Freedom: The Negro in the Civil War (1968), The Negro's Civil War: How American Negroes Felt and Acted During the Civil War and Reconstruction (1965) and The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction (1964).

Born in Valley City, N.D., McPherson has a B.A. from Gustavus Adolphus College in Saint Peter, Minn., from which he graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, and a Ph.D. with highest distinction from Johns Hopkins University.

McPherson was chosen to be the 2000 Jefferson Lecturer by the National Council on the Humanities, the 26-member advisory board of NEH. The lectureship carries a $10,000 honorarium.

Previous Jefferson Lecturers have been Caroline Walker Bynum, Bernard Bailyn, Stephen Toulmin, Toni Morrison, Vincent Scully, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Conquest, Bernard M.W. Knox, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Bernard Lewis, Walker Percy, Robert Nisbet, Forrest McDonald, Leszek Kolakowski, Cleanth Brooks, Sidney Hook, Jaroslav Pelikan, Emily T. Vermeule, Gerald Holton, Barbara Tuchman, Edward Shils, C. Vann Woodward, Saul Bellow, John Hope Franklin, Paul A. Freund, Robert Penn Warren, Erik Erikson and Lionel Trilling.

Popular interest in the Civil War has led many Americans to trace their family ancestry to the war's participants. Anyone interested in tracing his or her family ancestry is invited to participate in NEH's "My History Is America's History" project, which encourages Americans to do research into their family history and share the results online. The project's guidebook, available for free while supplies last, can be ordered by calling 1-877-NEH-HISTORY (1-877-634-4478). There is a nominal postage and handling charge for delivery. Family stories can be shared online, and the guidebook can also be downloaded for free, at http://www.myhistory.org, the project's website.
 

from the World Socialist Web Site

An exchange with a Civil War historian
By David Walsh
19 June 1995
[Originally published in the International Workers Bulletin, June 19, 1995]

James M. McPherson of Princeton University is perhaps the foremost historian of the Civil War period currently writing and teaching in the United States. For more than 30 years, in many books, articles and essays, he has championed the view that the Civil War was a revolutionary struggle of epic dimensions.

On the basis of an extensive analysis of historical fact, Professor McPherson has refuted attempts to diminish the significance of the great conflict, dismiss its accomplishments and denigrate its leading figures.

Born in 1936 in North Dakota and raised in Minnesota, he graduated from Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota in 1958 and received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1963. Professor McPherson's dissertation, published in 1964 as The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction, was a groundbreaking study of the Abolitionist movement during the Civil War. He has paid particular attention, in works such as The Negro's Civil War: How American Negroes Felt and Acted During the War for the Union (1965) and Marching Toward Freedom: The Negro in the Civil War (1967), to the role of slaves in their own liberation. He is also the author of two comprehensive studies of the Civil War, Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction (1982) and Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (1988), as well as a collection of essays, Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution (1991).

The December 5, 1994 issue of The International Workers Bulletin carried a favorable review by this writer of his latest work, What They Fought For, 1861-1865. I sent the piece to Professor McPherson and he responded in December with a brief letter. Subsequently I requested an interview and he was kind enough to consent.

I spoke to Professor McPherson in late March in his book-lined office in Dickinson Hall on the Princeton campus, where he has taught for three decades. I began by asking if there had been something in his background which predisposed him to be interested in the Civil War—”Nothing,” he firmly replied—or whether the motive force had been the political atmosphere of the late 1950s, the civil rights movement, in particular.

“It was the civil rights movement,” Professor McPherson confirmed. “I was in Baltimore at Johns Hopkins University at the time of the civil rights movement. I grew up in a small town in Minnesota. The problems of urban society and of the South were totally in another world, as far as I was concerned. But this was in the late ‘50s, at the time of the Little Rock school desegregation crisis and the Montgomery bus boycott. I was just becoming conscious of what was going on in the world at this time, so I thought, ‘This is a strange place, this South.' So I decided that maybe I'd like to try to find out more about it, study Southern history, so I really went to Hopkins because [historian] C. Vann Woodward was there. And when I got there, the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, I was suddenly struck by the parallels between the times in which I was living and what had happened exactly, I mean exactly in some cases, 100 years earlier.”

In response to a question about other historians or historical writers, aside from Woodward, who had influenced him, Professor McPherson mentioned Eric McKitrick's Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction and a biography of Edwin M. Stanton co-authored by Harold Hyman. He pointed out that these books appeared at a time “when the whole reinterpretation of Reconstruction was just getting started, and that was where my first interest lay, in the sort of challenges against the [historian William A.] Dunning interpretation of Reconstruction and the fashioning of a new interpretation that was much more sympathetic to the radical Republicans and their goals. And that, coinciding with the civil rights movement, was what set me on the Abolitionists.”

A reference by Professor McPherson to his first work, The Struggle for Equality, prompted me to tell him that I thought it brought out a number of crucial issues. One of these was the rapid transformation in the political fortunes of the Abolitionists with the outbreak of the Civil War. After decades of “crying in the wilderness,” facing official and at times popular hostility, branded a group of fanatics, the antislavery forces almost overnight gained a wide following and access to a mass audience.

I also noted the fact, related in The Struggle for Equality, that during the war Abolitionist leader Wendell Phillips delivered lectures on Toussaint L'Ouverture and the Haitian revolution. These were published in a special edition of Horace Greeley's New York Tribune in March 1863 and distributed to Union troops. I remarked that this was clearly an extraordinary moment, one of the high points of the democratic struggle in the US.

“Obviously you have emphasized over the course of three decades this revolutionary-democratic character of the Civil War, treated in the context of a genuinely liberating movement of masses of people,” I said. “I wonder if your convictions have shifted or if they've deepened in any way over the three decades.”

Professor McPherson thought a moment before answering, “No, I don't think that's changed. What has changed is that I've gained a lot more sympathy for Lincoln. At the time I was doing my dissertation I tended to take the Wendell Phillips view of Lincoln. Why didn't he move more quickly? Why was he so conservative on some of these issues? Why didn't he seize this revolutionary moment? The more I've learned about it, the more I realize that Lincoln was under extraordinary pressure from all sides. In his position he could not have acted like Wendell Phillips. He would have lost the whole war.

“When he said in the first year of the war that he needed Kentucky, that he needed to retain the support of the War Democrats and that to move in a precipitous way would alienate these groups, lose the war and lose everything, I think he was probably right. I've gained more appreciation for the skill with which Lincoln was able to hold together this very fragile coalition. At the same time that he actually moved it gradually in the direction that the radicals really wanted.”

I asked, “Do you think that he himself changed?”

“I think he changed too, yes,” Professor McPherson responded. “Not in his fundamental convictions. He'd said for years that slavery was morally wrong, that it was a violation of the principles on which the country was founded, the Declaration of Independence. But I think he moved more in the direction of seeing that the freed slaves could be incorporated into American society and wanting to do so on as equitable a basis as possible, from an earlier position which held that there would be no chance for peaceful incorporation of 4 million freed slaves into American society. I think in that respect he changed. He changed in his willingness to use, in the latter part of the war, really radical instrumentalities to achieve this.”

I asked Professor McPherson what were the forces at work, in his opinion, which produced the shift in the general sentiment of the country between 1861 and 1864.

“I think it was the war itself,” he replied. “And I think it was a matter of ‘the enemy of my enemy becomes my friend.' The great crisis facing the country was the rebellion and anybody in the North who wanted to preserve the Union now found the principal enemy to be those Southern slave owners who had broken up the country. The institution which sustained them and the institution they went to war to defend was slavery. And more and more northerners became convinced of that. As a consequence, a lot of them went the whole way over, from being conservative, pro-Southern, proslavery Democrats to becoming radical Republicans. Benjamin Butler is a good example, and Edwin M. Stanton is another one.

“Then once the decision was made to use black soldiers to put down the rebellion, the conviction began to grow that blacks who fought for the Union were far more deserving of rights and political power than Southern whites who fought to destroy the country. And I think that is the fundamental reason for the transformation of attitudes of a lot of Northerners. Southern slaves were now friends of the Union, they were fighting, risking their lives to preserve this Union against their masters who were killing northern soldiers and were traitors trying to destroy the great republican experiment of 1776. That sort of attitude persisted through, I'd say, about 1868 or 1870.”

In response to a question about the relevance of the Civil War to the present period, Professor McPherson explained that he felt the connection lay primarily in the unresolved problems of race relations and the role of the national government in promoting social change and justice. “The Civil War really resolved the fundamental issue about which it was fought, which was the survival of the United States as one nation. But then these other issues have not been fully resolved and so I think that's where the relationship lies.”

I asked him at one point if he had given many lectures around the country. “Oh, yes,” he answered. “Do you find interest?” I asked. “It's amazing what popular interest there is in the Civil War. It's a phenomenon that everybody in my field remarks on all the time. Look at the Ken Burns film [the PBS series on the Civil War]; at least 40 million are said to have watched that.”

“What did you think about the Burns series?” I inquired.

“I had mixed feelings about it,” he replied. “For what it did and what it tried to do, I thought it was enormously successful. It certainly tapped into a vein of interest. It struck home in a way that almost nothing that I've ever seen on television has ever done.”

I raised the issue of “political correctness” and the outlook of those who maintain that only blacks can write about blacks, women about women, etc. Such people, I pointed out, deny the possibility of establishing any objective historical truth.

Professor McPherson made his position clear: “I don't believe that only blacks can write about blacks and so on. On the other hand, I think it's probably true that in a literal sense it's impossible to establish objective, historical truth. My feeling about this is ‘let a thousand flowers bloom'—is that the Chinese saying? That's the nature of the writing of history, that it's constantly in flux and in contestation. That's what makes it interesting. The ideal of an objective truth about history is a will of the wisp, I don't think there is any such thing. History is basically what we think about what happened in the past, what we think it means. And everybody is going to have a somewhat different perspective on that, or different schools of interpretation are going to have different perspectives on that.”

As Professor McPherson is no doubt aware, no Marxist would agree with the relativism of such a statement. Honest differences of opinion over the significance of events and individual figures are legitimate and necessary. But that really doesn't speak to the central issues: is history an objective, knowable process and is the goal of historians to uncover its logic and the laws which govern it? Marxists would answer yes to both questions, and would add that advances in historiography are generally made through the exposure of previously-held views whose false or more limited character is often shown to be rooted in vested social interests.

Professor McPherson's own work is a case in point. In order to establish an accurate picture of the Civil War era, he has been obliged to polemicize against various schools of historians. In Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution, for example, he argues persuasively on the basis of economic statistics that the conception of Louis Gerteis and others that the Civil War and Reconstruction produced “no fundamental changes” in the forms of economic and social organization in the South is simply wrong. He also counters, in the same work, the arguments of historians such as James G. Randall and T. Harry Williams, who have asserted that Lincoln was essentially a political conservative and an enemy of social revolution.

A dialectical approach to the question of the relation of absolute to relative truth is essential here. From the point of view of Marxism, the ability of human thought to cognize reality is absolute. The existence of objective truth is unconditional and the fact that human thought, considered as an historical process, grasps objective reality—including history—ever more richly and concretely is also unconditional. Since the absolute coincidence of thought to reality is only conceivable as an infinite process, however, the contours of the picture that human beings have of reality (and their own past) at any one moment are historically limited. So objective truth exists at a given instant in the form of relative or partial truths, which nonetheless contain the absolute within them. No individual has a God's-eye view of world history, but that doesn't prevent the serious historian, such as Professor McPherson himself, from contributing “new grains to the sum of absolute truth,” in Lenin's phrase.

Following up on this, I asked Professor McPherson whether he considered there to be any determinism in history, or such a thing as historical necessity.

He said, “I've often been asked also whether I consider the Civil War to have been unavoidable, irrepressible. Because that's an old debate: was it an irrepressible conflict or a repressible conflict? My usual answer to that question is that some kind of a showdown between a Northern free-labor capitalist economy and the ideology and social structure that it generated, and a Southern plantation slave-labor economy and its ideology and its social structure ... these two societies were on a collision course. In that sense, there is a degree of determinism. But I usually answer the question by saying that the Civil War that happened, that is, the war from 1861 to 1865 that killed at least 620,000 men, that wasn't inevitable, that came about because of cause-effect, contingent developments that could have happened in other ways. Just to take an obvious example. Either Jefferson Davis could have decided to leave those 80-odd Union soldiers at Fort Sumter alone, just wait them out, let the supplies go in. Or Lincoln could have said, all right, in the interests of peace we'll pull out, give you Fort Sumter. That could have happened. But it was policy decisions in a certain political context made by these individuals that brought on the war in 1861 that evolved in the way that it did. So I guess my answer is that there are certain things that seem to be inevitable and determined by long-term historical forces, like the conflict between free labor and slave labor in the mid-nineteenth century in the United States, but that the specific American Civil War that we know happened, didn't have to happen that way.”

Referring back to one of his comments about Lincoln, I remarked, “I wonder if you've given any thought to what it is that leads or allows someone to make very, very difficult and harsh decisions, revolutionary decisions.”

“One example, I suppose,” answered Professor McPherson, “would be General Sherman, who had lived in the South, liked Southerners and did not at all sympathize with Northern racial views, yet became the most hated and feared destroyer of the South and its whole civilization. And I think he did so because he saw that as necessary to win the war. And I think Lincoln made some of his decisions—issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, for example, or turning Sherman loose — because he saw that as necessary to win the war.

“And I think that is the case with any of the Civil War generals, like Lee at Gettysburg who decided to attack, attack, attack, even though he knew that it was going to result in thousands of deaths. He made that decision because he thought it necessary in order to win that battle. And in turn perhaps to win the war, to accomplish his objectives. It's not quite so crude as ‘the end justifies the means,' but I think that all of these extremely difficult decisions, which in the context of a war do mean life and death for tens of thousands of people or destruction of property and the ruin of lives, were made on the grounds of absolute necessity in a crisis situation, not only a war but in some respects a revolutionary situation. The same kinds of things I suppose could be applied to any of the great revolutions in history, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and so on. ‘You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs,' right? That's a standard sort of Marxist justification.”

I agreed, although I pointed out that the aphorism became a justification for something quite different in the hands of the Stalinists in the 1930s.

He continued, “By the way, I think that one of the reasons why McClellan was ineffective in the end as a general was that he was not able to make these decisions. Grant called it moral courage. The decision to order men to their deaths—moral courage may sound like a very callous way of describing that, but that's what it is.”

I added, “Also, of course, you may make decisions which are wrong.”

“Exactly. And the risk of making a decision that's wrong is so enormous that sometimes it just crushes people so that they can't make any decision at all because they're afraid of making the wrong decision. And that's exactly what McClellan's problem was.”

“And he seemed to want to be liked.”

“Yes, he did. And some people are going to dislike you if you make a decision, even if it turns out to be the right one.”

What did he think it was that separated out individuals who could make those sorts of decisions, I asked.

Professor McPherson responded, “I don't know. I guess the willingness to accept the consequences of your decision.” I suggested, “And presumably the depth of your commitment.” He nodded, “That's right. That's especially true of Lincoln. His commitment to preserving the United States was so strong and so deep that he was willing to do whatever it took to succeed. Would you like to be in his shoes? Just think about that for a moment. Not just Lincoln. There are hundreds of examples in history.”

I then raised with Professor McPherson the role of the historian and historical truth in society. I explained that I was raising the question in a particular context, that our party had recently sponsored the tour by the Russian Marxist historian Vadim Rogovin and that we found that there was considerable interest among students—an indication of a change in the political situation—in historical questions, specifically the history of the Soviet Union. I suggested that the impact of work such as Rogovin's objectively altered the political climate in which one operated. I wondered if he had any thoughts about what role the historian played in social life.

He replied that he felt that historians were “the custodians of a people's sense of identity.” He compared the society that didn't have a clear sense of its own history to an individual who wakes up one morning with amnesia. Professor McPherson went on, “There are all kinds of myths that a people has about itself, some positive, some negative, some healthy and some not healthy. I think that one job of the historian is to try to cut through some of those myths and get closer to some kind of reality. So that people can face their current situation realistically, rather than mythically. I guess that's my sense of what a historian ought to do.”

James McPherson is currently working on a major work, from which his slim volume, What They Fought For, was “carved,” which will explore the motives of Union and Confederate soldiers for enlisting and fighting in the Civil War. He expects to focus, in his own words, “on a range of attitudes and motives among these mostly volunteer soldiers, including peer pressure; group cohesion; male bonding; ideals of manhood and masculinity; concepts of duty, honor and courage; functions of leadership, discipline and coercion; and the role of religion, as well as of the darker passions of hatred and vengeance.”
 
 

Historian James M. McPherson and the cause of intellectual integrity
By David Walsh
18 May 1999

Starting tomorrow we will be presenting on the WSWS a lengthy interview with James M. McPherson, probably the leading contemporary historian of the American Civil War era. We hope that readers will find that the subjects of the discussion—the political turmoil of the period leading up to the Civil War, the violence of the war, Lincoln's legacy, the impeachment of Andrew Johnson—are of interest and that they shed some light on contemporary events.

Professor McPherson is a remarkable and admirable figure. Born in 1936, he received a PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 1963 and has taught at Princeton University for more than 35 years. The author of a number of major works on the Civil War, as well as countless articles, reviews and essays, he has paid particular attention to the role of slaves in their own liberation and the activities of the Abolitionists. His Battle Cry of Freedom won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1989.

At a time when the appellation “historian” is loosely applied to ideologues such as Richard Pipes and Daniel Goldhagen, and much of “left” historiography consists of largely subjective and arbitrary exercises in “class, race and gender” analysis, McPherson continues to take the study of history and its responsibilities seriously. He treats facts with respect, as they deserve, and while he clearly has a conceptual framework within which he approaches his raw material, he is not blind to nuance and ambiguity. If there is a problem in Civil War history that he has not fully worked out to his satisfaction, he has the modesty to say so.

Nearly 40 years ago Professor McPherson arrived at a conception of the American Civil War, based on the work of the best of his predecessors and his own researches, as a revolutionary struggle for equality and democracy and he has not, I think, ever deviated from that view. This is noteworthy in light of the fact that the last several decades have not been favorable for progressive social thought. The most noxious notions have gained popularity, which, in the final analysis, justify the adaptation of their advocates to the status quo.

In the formation of an outlook various factors come into play, some of which must remain hidden to the observer. What is evident is that McPherson arrived at certain conclusions about US history at a significant moment in postwar American life, the eruption of the Civil Rights movement. As someone deeply moved by the issues it raised, he set to out to find in historical fact the basis for a deeper grasp of contemporary events. That study convinced him that the key to the problems of the 1960s lay at least in part in an understanding of the great conflict of the 1860s, and he set his intellectual compass in that direction. His earliest work, The Struggle for Equality, examined the activities of the Abolitionist movement following the Emancipation Proclamation.

How has he retained his principles in the course of the intervening years, when so many have not? This is also a complex matter. I think that in any serious figure, historian, artist or political leader, principle is not simply a matter of certain intellectual formulations that rest on top, so to speak, of one's personality. It is more a matter of the coming together of various powerful social and cultural currents at a critical moment in one's life, so that the most positive external influences and what is best in oneself are heated in a crucible, fuse and become one. One is able to retain principles, across time and in the face of all sorts of opposition and setbacks, because they are imbedded in some part of consciousness that is not susceptible to shifts in popular mood. One knows with one's entire being certain things to be true, they are not up for debate, much less sale.

Professor McPherson's conception of the Civil War as a titanic social upheaval remains, as I say, as firm as ever. One need only look at his most recent and excellent collection of essays, Drawn With the Sword (1996), for proof. The volume is introduced by a passage from Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural address, on March 4, 1865, from which it derives its title: “Fondly do we hope—and fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.'”

Drawn With a Sword contains a number of remarkable essays. One is suggestively entitled “The War that Never Goes Away.” After considering a number of the factors that help explain the war's “enduring fascination,” McPherson points to what he holds to be “the most important reason”: “Great issues were at stake, issues about which Americans were willing to fight and die; issues whose resolution profoundly transformed and redefined the United States but at the same time are still alive and contested today.” It is such eloquent simplicity and bluntness that help make Professor McPherson so unusual, and perhaps somewhat unfashionable, in the world of contemporary scholarship.

In “From Limited to Total War: 1861-1865,” one of the volume's most radical inclusions, McPherson returns to a recurring theme in his work, the ferocity of the Civil War and the depth of the political and social transformation it wrought. In regard to the first point, the author writes: “Altogether nearly 4 percent of the Southern people, black and white, civilians and soldiers, died as a consequence of the war. This percentage exceeded the human cost of any country in World War I and was outstripped only by the region between the Rhine and the Volga in World War II. The amount of property and resources destroyed in the Confederate States is almost incalculable. It has been estimated at two-thirds of all assessed wealth, including the market value of slaves.”

“The Civil War mobilized human resources on a scale unmatched by any other event in American history except, perhaps, World War II. For actual combat duty the Civil War mustered a considerably larger proportion of American manpower than did World War II.”

As to the liberating character of the war, McPherson seems more passionate than ever. In this same piece, after explaining the background to Lincoln's announcement of the Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862, he continues: “With this action Lincoln embraced the idea of the Civil War as a revolutionary conflict. Things had changed a great deal since he had promised to avoid ‘any devastation, or destruction of, or interference with, property.' The Emancipation Proclamation was just what the Springfield Republican pronounced it: ‘the greatest social and political revolution of the age.' No less an authority on revolutions than Karl Marx exulted: ‘ Never has such a gigantic transformation taken place so rapidly.'”

How can one fail to be moved by the book's account, which obviously so moves its author, of the exploits of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, one of the first black regiments organized in the Civil War and the subject of the film Glory? The heroic attack by the Fifty-fourth on Fort Wagner in July 1863 set straight any Union supporters who had doubted the willingness of blacks to fight. Moreover, the thought of armed black ex-slaves and free men, “the South's ultimate revolutionary nightmare,” put fear in Confederate hearts.

McPherson pays tribute to Robert Gould Shaw (played by Matthew Broderick in Glory), the white commanding officer of the regiment, explaining that he embodied the finest traditions of New England society. Shaw, along with many of his men, died in the attack on Fort Wagner. After the battle Confederate soldiers stripped his body and dumped it in a mass grave. When a Union commander sent a message requesting its return, as was customarily done with high-ranking officers at the time, a Confederate officer replied: “We have buried him with his niggers.” The remark provoked outrage in the North. When Union troops occupied the fort some weeks later and an officer offered to search for Shaw's body, “Shaw's father wrote an eloquent letter to stop the effort: ‘We hold that a soldier's most appropriate burial-place is on the field where he has fallen.'”

McPherson is attracted to the most democratic strain within the Union camp. His principled outlook obliges him to criticize the various efforts by contemporary “radical” historians to diminish or reject the role played by anti-slavery forces in the North. In an essay entitled, “Who Freed the Slaves?,” he takes up the sophistic arguments of historians, many of them black, who argue that the end of slavery was simply an act of self-liberation. While acknowledging the active role played by slaves in achieving their own freedom (a subject about which, as we noted, he has written extensively), McPherson rejects the argument that Lincoln was more of a hindrance than a help to the cause and demonstrates that emancipation would not have been possible without Union military victory and the enormous sacrifices made by white Northern soldiers.

Professor McPherson forthrightly rejects the method that looks at history through the prism of race. Even while commenting very favorably on Joseph T. Glatthaar's Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance of Black Soldiers and White Officers (1990), McPherson scolds the author for succumbing “to the fashionable practice of condemning all whites as racists.” Glatthaar had written that “Prior to the war virtually all of them [white officers in black regiments] held powerful racial prejudices.” McPherson responds: “Powerful racial prejudices? That was not true of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, or Norwood P. Hallowell, or George T. Garrison, or many other abolitionists and sons of abolitionists who became officers in black regiments.”

McPherson continues: “Indeed, the contrary was true; they had spent much of their lives fighting the race prejudice endemic in American society, sometimes at the risk of their careers and even their lives.... Perhaps by modern absolutist standards of racial egalitarianism (which few could meet today), these men harbored some mildly racist or paternalistic feelings. But to call these ‘powerful racial prejudices' is to indulge in what William Manchester has called ‘generational chauvinism—judging past eras by the standard of the present.'”

Anyone not familiar with McPherson's work will, I trust, have begun to grasp the exceptional character of his efforts. Much more could be said about Drawn With the Sword and his other works, but the reader should discover their insights for himself.

Professor McPherson is not, in the commonly understood sense of the word, a political man. Those who are looking for left-wing pronouncements will be disappointed, legitimately or otherwise. His banner, if one can avoid sounding too pompous saying it, is intellectual integrity. He seems quite determined to remove himself from the immediacy of day-to-day political life, immersing himself in the study of complex, riveting events, but not living in the past or mesmerized by it. He is neither a preserver of trite “Americana” nor a “Civil War buff.” When one speaks with him about the events of the Civil War era they are astonishingly contemporary and alive.

One might wish he were more forthcoming about certain political issues, but one must respect his reticence. One is evaluating him as an historian. Society has a strong need for such people, particularly those who strive to be both authoritative and accessible to a wide audience, as McPherson does, those who “aspire to a general democratic public,” in the words of Allan Nevins, a phrase he cites approvingly.

The serious historian plays an objectively significant role in social life, as the embodiment of historical memory. One need only consider the harmful impact that the general decline in historical knowledge has had on contemporary American society. Broad layers of the US population are prevented at this point from responding to contemporary events such as the war in the Balkans not primarily because they have an extremely limited grasp of the history of that region, although that is no doubt the case. An even greater difficulty is that they do not understand their own history. If masses of people appreciated the revolutionary content of the Civil War and the issues of principle it raised, they would have at least a frame of reference for understanding events in other parts of the world.

Professor McPherson draws meaning and lessons from the most profound, most humane moment in American history. All that the first American Revolution represented in history found a concentrated expression in the Civil War. We are presenting this interview to our readers as part of the effort to effect an intellectual re-awakening that is a precondition for substantial social change.

McPherson's writings, as an intellectual labor, have their own independent significance. They are not simply about the middle decades of the nineteenth century, they are also about the last decades of the twentieth. When, in the future, historians consider the ideological landscape of our time, in all its general dreariness and moral and political renegacy, it seems certain that some consideration will be given to James McPherson, as a contradictory figure of the period itself. And it will be noted—with approval and appreciation, one trusts—that he contributed to an intellectual ferment with far-reaching consequences.
 

An interview with historian James M. McPherson
The Civil War, impeachment then and now, and Lincoln's legacy—Part 1
By David Walsh
19 May 1999

WSWS editorial board member David Walsh recently spoke to James McPherson, the distinguished historian of the Civil War era in his office at Princeton University. Professor McPherson's works include Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution; Battle Cry of Freedom [a Pulitzer Prize winner]; For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War and The Struggle for Equality.

David Walsh: Over the past 15 months or so, the US has been shaken by a severe political crisis, leading to the impeachment of an elected president for the first time and has entered into two wars, one of which is ongoing as we speak.

When we turn to the debates of the 1850s, the first thing that strikes one is the apparently far more substantive nature of the divisions. I wonder if you could discuss briefly the passion that was aroused by the discussions over the fate of Kansas. I'm thinking in particular of the attack on Charles Sumner in May 1856, and the debate on the Lecompton constitution in early 1858. What social tensions were expressed in those struggles?

James McPherson: Kansas became a kind of cockpit and symbol of events that had been building up for a generation, since the 1830s, on the question of slavery. I think it probably started with the increasing polarization between the Abolitionist movement in its militant phase, that got going in the 1830s, and the pro-slavery defenders, those who argued that slavery was a positive good, who also got going in a major way in the 1830s. In the 1830s and 1840s this was a debate over the morality and socioeconomic validity of slavery and the question as to whether slavery was consistent with a democratic society. It was a major issue in the polity because of the controversy over the gag rule, for example, and the barring of Abolitionist literature from the mails, the debates in Congress, and so on.

But I don't think it threatened the stability of the country until the Texas issue came along, this huge expansion of slavery, and then the Mexican War, with an even potentially greater expansion of slavery and the Wilmot Proviso, the Compromise of 1850, the fugitive slave law and, of course, the Kansas-Nebraska Act. All of these had sort of built up in a step-by-step acceleration and broadening of the whole debate, from a situation where it had been an obsessive issue for the two extremes in the 1830s and 1840s to a point where it became something of an obsessive issue for the whole country, focusing on the issue of the expansion of slavery.

I think more than anything else the Kansas-Nebraska Act is what projected that.... Well, first there was the issue of the Wilmot Proviso and the Compromise of 1850, but those measures seemed at least to resolve the issue, even though a lot of people on both sides were unhappy with the resolution. But the Kansas-Nebraska Act just blew the lid off again. Take Lincoln, for example, it brought him back into politics in a major way, after he thought that probably his political career was over.

DW: Do we know what his reaction was?

JM: Yes, he said that the Kansas-Nebraska Act fell on him like a thunderclap. And that's when he went back into politics. Between the passage of the Act and his election as president he gave 175 public speeches, all of them focusing on the issue of slavery's expansion.

And of course the issue of Kansas itself, the contest between the Free Staters and the border ruffians and so on really went on for four years from 1854, when the bill was passed, until 1858 when Congress finally defeated the Lecompton constitution. You had this war in Kansas itself, in which several hundred people were killed. In fact, nobody knows how many. John Brown and so on. And the echoes of it in Congress, more than echoes.

It was a speech on Kansas by Charles Sumner that provoked Preston Brooks' attack on him. The Lecompton constitution split the Democratic Party and ensured that two Democratic parties would contest against the Republicans in the 1860 election. I think that's what made possible Lincoln's election. These issues really engaged passions. There were several occasions in addition to the Sumner-Brooks affair when Congressmen confronted each other on the floor of Congress, threw punches at each other, threatened each other with weapons, and there was as well truly escalating rhetoric. My own feeling is that the 1850s was probably the decade in all of American history with the most passionate and irreconcilable polarization, which foreshadowed the war in many ways. So it went from a moral argument, the Abolitionists versus the pro-slavery forces, to a political argument, to physical confrontation, to war, over the course of a generation.

I don't know if in domestic politics that particular pattern has ever replicated itself on anything like the same level. I don't think the culture wars of the 1960s, of which I think the Clinton impeachment is part, are at nearly the same level for the whole country. There are groups, like the anti-abortion people, extremes on the Right, the Wall Street Journal being the more respectable spokesman for some of these, but I don't think they've engaged the whole country in the same way that the debates and conflicts of the 1850s did.

DW: What was the essence of Sumner's speech?

JM: His substantive argument was that “The Crime Against Kansas” was just the latest effort by what he called the Slave Power, that is, an organized and concerted effort by the planter class through their political leadership, to expand slavery. This was the latest example of their efforts to foist the expansion of slavery on the country. What really provoked Brooks' response were Sumner's references to his cousin, the South Carolina senator, Andrew P. Butler. Sumner is often said to have made offensive remarks about the Senator, but I've read the whole speech and while he did condemn him pretty strongly, and he said he was Don Quixote and that slavery was his Dulcinea, that seemed to me to be the most extreme thing he said about him. Brooks, however, regarded it as an insult to the honor of his kinsman and also to the honor of Southerners and South Carolinians in particular.

And the way a Southerner responded to a challenge to his honor was through violence. And because he did not regard Sumner as an equal, he did not challenge him to a duel. The usual response in that case was horsewhipping, but he said even horsewhipping was too good for Sumner, so he hit him over the head with a cane. Because he said Sumner had insulted the honor of all Southerners and slaveowners through his rhetoric.

This took place in the Senate chamber. Brooks was a Congressman, but he had heard Sumner's speech, or read it, so he walked into the Senate a couple of days later after it had adjourned. Sumner was sitting there writing letters or reading letters from his constituents, and without warning, Brooks started clubbing him over the head with a heavy cane. Congressional desks in those days were like school-desks, Sumner couldn't get up. He was trapped in there, couldn't defend himself. He finally wrenched the desk from the floor. He got up and then collapsed. That's an extraordinary event to take place in the Senate of the United States; and I think a pretty good symbol of the passions that were totally out of control.

Brooks was censured by the House. He then resigned, went home and was unanimously reelected.

DW: What was going on in Kansas during those years? Aside from the military action, what sort of propaganda war was taking place?

JM: The slave-state Kansans were able to get more states, most of them fraudulent votes, in the various elections in 1855 and 1856 because the Missourians would control these votes. But the Free Staters would elect their own territorial delegate and their own territorial legislature, so you basically had two governments in Kansas, the “legitimate” one that was recognized by the president and the Senate, which was controlled by the Democrats, and the Free State government, which eventually was recognized by the House, when the Republicans controlled the House. So you had divided state government, with its counterpart in the Congress of the United States.

The Free State government was located in Lawrence, and one of the things that set off John Brown was when the slave-state faction marched into Lawrence and sacked the town. This was almost simultaneous with Brooks' caning of Sumner, in May 1856. It was part of the build-up to the presidential election of 1856. First [President Franklin] Pierce [1853-57], then [President James] Buchanan [1857-61], kept sending territorial governors to Kansas to try to control the violence with the help of troops that were stationed there, and one after the other they resigned, because they couldn't control the situation. So basically you had political and even civil war on the ground in Kansas for two or three years.

DW: How many federal troops were there?

JM: That fluctuated, according to the level of violence. There were several hundred there.

DW: Did any of those officers go on to play a role in the Civil War?

JM: Yes, Nathaniel Lyon, who was in Missouri at the outbreak of the war, and took the initiative in arresting the pro-secessionist militia in Missouri in May of 1861, which provoked a riot in St. Louis and polarized the state. Lyon was an army captain in Kansas and grew to hate the pro-slavery faction, and that radicalized him in the Missouri controversy of 1861. He was then killed in the first major battle in the Western theater, in August 1861, the Battle of Wilson's Creek.

DW: What significance did the events in Kansas have for the population of the country as a whole? How closely was this followed?

JM: The national press paid a great deal of attention to it, especially the Republican press, newspapers like the New York Tribune. For a while the Tribune, which was the leading Republican paper in the North, and one of the most significant of all Northern papers at the time, Horace Greeley editor, they had a standing headline, Civil war in Kansas, for months. They had reporters out there. So did other Northern and I think some Southern papers. So this whole thing was played out in the media in a major way. Especially in 1856, during the presidential campaign.

Of course both sides tried to use what they called atrocities or “outrages” in Kansas. There was a lot of partisan exaggeration, a lot of name-calling and all the rest of it. I think journalism was even more raw and unrestrained, and certainly more partisan, then. Newspapers were identified directly with political parties or a faction within a political party, in a way that was much more open and unabashed than is the case today.

DW: In your latest book you made reference to Civil War soldiers shooting “as they had voted,” and to the kind of political education they had received over the previous period. The soldiers didn't have to be propagandized, they had some understanding of what they were involved in.

JM: There was no need for Civil War soldiers to have something like Frank Capra's series of propaganda films in the 1940s, Why We Fight, because that generation, I think probably more than almost any other generation in American history, had been totally politicized by these events of the 1850s, which were part of the common political culture of the time.

This is an age in which young men, men in their late teens or twenties, as well as older individuals, were far more involved in the political culture than their counterparts would be today. There was no competition, for one thing. There was no television, no movies, no organized sports, nothing except public events to involve them outside their workaday life. Politics was a form of recreation.

Elections were more frequent; the participation of the eligible electorate in elections was far higher than it is today. In the presidential elections in the middle part of the nineteenth century it was about 80 percent. It was over 80 percent in the elections of 1856 and 1860. So it was about double what it is today. Of course the electorate is much larger today. It was just white males, 21 years and older then, who were citizens. Those immigrants who had declared their intention to become citizens could vote in most states too.

DW: That's interesting, in contrast to today's attitudes toward immigrants.

JM: If they had taken out papers, even if they weren't yet citizens. They had to wait five years, just as it is now. But if they had declared their intention to become citizens, most states then enfranchised them. You had a very high rate of political participation and I think the sense that people had that politics was far more important to their everyday lives than people feel today.

So when the war began, these men were already politicized and socialized to the issues over which the war was fought. And they really saw themselves as citizens in uniform out to accomplish by military means political goals that they had identified before. In a way they illustrate the most famous dictum of Karl von Clausewitz that war is the extension of politics by other means. They clearly would have agreed with that. That's what they saw themselves doing, and from the very beginning, some were very articulate about why they were fighting and what the political issues were.
 

The Civil War, impeachment then and now and Lincoln's legacy—Part 2
By David Walsh
20 May 1999

This is the second part of an interview conducted by WSWS editorial board member David Walsh with James M. McPherson. Walsh spoke to McPherson, the distinguished historian of the Civil War era, in his office at Princeton University. Professor McPherson's works include Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution ; Battle Cry of Freedom [a Pulitzer Prize winner]; For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War and The Struggle for Equality .

David Walsh: How do you explain the enduring fascination with Lincoln? The peculiar thing is that he is embraced by political factions that are diametrically opposed to one another. Do you see him as a man of the Right, or a man of the Left?

James McPherson: I would say that in the context of his own time, he was more on the Left of center, but not a radical. The major issues of his time were slavery and democracy. On the economy, the Whig Party, the party with which he was identified, was in many ways more progressive than the Democrats, in the sense that they believed in economic development as a way of bringing rising prosperity for all classes.

I think Lincoln really believed that if you created a kind of level playing field, and then you had a rapidly expanding economy, with expanding opportunity within that economy, then anybody, like himself, a poor boy, could get ahead, if he was ambitious, worked hard, and so on. But the way to do that was through certain kinds of government activism, to promote economic and social development. So the Whigs were the party at the state level and the local level of public schools, for example, which advocated using government to promote economic growth, through the building of railroads, or canals, or the chartering of banks, subsidies for certain kinds of economic enterprise.

The Democrats were afraid that these kinds of subsidies or special grants to economic development would, in the end, promote inequality. They wanted small government, and they tended to be against large-scale appropriations for schools and that sort of thing. They would say they were for the common man because most of these subsidies, which went toward the building of railroads, or the chartering of banks, were really going to help the rich more than the poor in the end. But Lincoln didn't believe that. He said that the poor man with ambition—he was thinking of himself—could get ahead in a system like this. But these were very lively issues in the 1820s to the 1840s, the Jacksonian period. And you can get into an endless argument over which of the two parties was really Left or Right. I don't think Left or Right had the same connotations as it does now.

By the 1850s, certainly for a generation after that, the major issue in American politics was slavery and race. And on that issue, Lincoln and the Republicans were certainly Left of center. They were the ones who thought slavery was wrong, that it eventually must be brought to an end, and then during the war and Reconstruction period, they were the ones who actually pushed through the legislation that, on paper at least, granted equal rights to blacks, including the former slaves. They were very much in favor of the use of powerful central government to promote this.

Lincoln certainly wasn't on the far Left of the Republican spectrum, someone like Thaddeus Stevens or Charles Sumner would be. But Lincoln wound up going along with many of their measures, and actually promoting them as president. Looking toward the future he would have continued to move in a more liberal direction on these issues. What Lincoln's position might have been in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on issues that became associated with the Progressive period and the rise of giant industry, who knows?

To address his enduring fascination is not simple. Part of it has to do with his martyrdom at the moment of triumph. If he had lived he would still be a giant figure in the American pantheon, but there is a special quality that attaches to his reputation because he was assassinated at the very moment of triumph. Part of the fascination is the sort of rags-to-riches, log cabin to White House image that's associated with him. Part of it is the enduring language of the greatest documents we associate with him, the Gettysburg Address, the Second Inaugural and several others. Part of it is his association with the war, which also has its own fascination, as you know. It's hard to say why he stands out so far above everybody else in popular fascination. More books have been written about Lincoln than anybody else in American history by far, and more books have been written about him in English than almost anybody else.

Because Lincoln has this image of semi-divinity almost, I think people on all parts of the political spectrum ever since the 1860s and 1870s have wanted their positions to be identified with Lincoln. His writings are sort of the like the Bible; you can go to them and find support for almost anything you believe in, in the contemporary world. There's a wonderful essay by David Donald, that he wrote back in the 1950s, called Getting Right with Lincoln, in which he traced this tendency of politicians always to find a Lincoln quote to support their position.

DW: Does it seem sometimes that these were quite recent events?

JM: It does. I had a great grandfather who was born in 1841 or 1842 and who fought in the Civil War, whom my mother knew. When she was a child he was still alive. I think he died in 1924 or something like that. She had known him as a seven- or eight-year-old child.

DW: Turning to the impeachment of Andrew Johnson in 1868, I've been reading various works on the subject. There are different views on it, obviously. In the course of this year's turmoil, I didn't run across much that was in depth about it in the media. Johnson's impeachment is sometimes portrayed in the literature as an entirely illegitimate attempt at a political coup d'état by a group of power-hungry, vengeful radicals. Whether Johnson had broken the Tenure of Office Act as he was charged is questionable, but certainly there were serious political issues at stake. Hundreds of thousands had sacrificed their lives for a cause, and there was reason to believe that this victory would be diminished.

JM: Or even reversed.

DW: How do you view these circumstances—the Stanton issue, the question of black suffrage, the treatment of former slaveholders, the re-entry of the Southern states?

JM: Whether or not the impeachment of Johnson was a legitimate constitutional process or not I think could be endlessly debated. His removal of Stanton in violation, or alleged violation, of the Tenure of Office Act was the issue on which he was impeached, the trigger for it. But the real substantive issue was Johnson's repeated defiance of the Republican majority in Congress on issues that that majority regarded as essential to resolving the outcome of the war and protecting the stability of the restored Union. There was a partisan dimension to this too. The Republicans also saw it as essential to their continued control of the government, but a lot of them could argue that their continued control of the government was the only way to ensure what was often called at the time the fruits of victory in the war. There was still a widespread tendency among many Republicans to see the Democrats, especially the Southern Democrats, as representing the spirit of the rebellion.

Johnson had not been elected president, unlike Clinton. In the only sort of referendum on his presidency, the Congressional elections of 1866, he had been overwhelmingly repudiated by the Northern voters who returned a three-quarters Republican majority to the House of Representatives. Of course Southern states were not voting. But that was the issue, what were the terms on which they were going to be brought back into the Union.

Whether the process was the correct process and was constitutionally valid is one question, but the issues were in many ways pretty serious, almost life-and-death issues in the context of the time. There was enormous substance to the issues involved in the impeachment of 1868 in a way that I think was totally absent from the Clinton impeachment. That was a personal vendetta, and in Johnson's case, I don't think it was personal.

DW: How had Johnson been viewed up to that time?

JM: His tenure as vice-president was pretty short. He had been inaugurated on March 4 and six weeks later, after Lincoln's assassination, he was named president. During the war he was something of a hero in the eyes of the North. He was the only senator from a state [Tennessee] that had seceded who remained loyal to the Union. He gave ringing speeches denouncing secession and denouncing the Confederates. When the Union army gained control of much of Tennessee in the spring of 1862 Lincoln sent him back to Nashville, which remained under Union control for the rest of the war, as military governor. He played a pretty important role, in maintaining Unionism under wartime military occupation of the parts of Tennessee that remained under Union control.

So here's a former Democrat from a Southern state, and in 1864 the Republican Party is trying to broaden its image from a Republican Party to a Union Party; they called themselves the Union Party, because they wanted to attract votes from more Democrats. Johnson seemed to be a perfect vice-presidential candidate to broaden the appeal of the Republican Party.

DW: What was the reaction after the assassination, was there any concern about Johnson?

JM: There was a kind of mixed reaction. Johnson, when he took the oath as vice president on March 4, 1865, had been suffering from a mild case of typhoid fever and he was ill, he was nervous, he had taken a couple of drinks to fortify himself before he took the oath of office, and he apparently was drunk. That created a somewhat bad image in the press. But he lived that down, and when Lincoln was assassinated he came out with strong speeches about punishing traitors and rebels and so on. The radical wing of the Republican Party thought he was a congenial guy who was going to go along with their program that would be pretty restrictive on restoring former Confederates to any kind of political rights and political role.

As time went on, however, Johnson backed away from that and did an almost 180-degree turn. By the fall of 1865 he was identifying himself with Southern rights and making noises about bringing the Southern states back into the government as quickly as possible under the mildest conditions possible.

One interpretation is that the Blair family, which was a powerful political family going all the way back to the Jacksonian period, got to Johnson and tried to persuade him that he could create a middle force in American politics, a new coalition of the center, that would isolate the radical Republicans on the Left and the former secessionist Democrats on the Right, and that he could become the presidential candidate of a revived, middle of the road loyalist-Democrat and conservative Republican Party. I think Johnson was mesmerized by that prospect, and in the end it boomeranged on him. Instead of attracting moderate Republicans to this middle of the road party, he drove middle of the road Republicans to the left on the Reconstruction issue.

DW: What were some of the issues in 1865, '66 and '67 that precipitated the crisis?

JM: Basically it was the terms of Reconstruction and the status of the freed slaves in the Reconstructed South. Johnson's idea, after this early rhetoric about punishing treason, was that Southern states had to fulfill only minimal requirements and then they could come back in the Union, with their full rights, voting rights, property rights. He issued a proclamation of pardon and amnesty. He also issued 13,000 individual pardons. These were political leaders more than anything else. He had exempted wealthy Southerners in his original amnesty, anyone who owned more than $20,000 worth of property.

Johnson represented the poor whites of east Tennessee and he thought the planters were the ones who had led the South into secession and ruined the South, and he was going to show them who was running the country. He was a poor white himself. He had been semi-literate when he was growing up, a tailor, an apprentice tailor. Like Lincoln, he had clawed his way to the top, a self-made man. But unlike Lincoln he harbored resentment against the elite. So he had originally exempted them from his proclamation of pardon. But then when they came on bended knee and prostrated themselves in front of him and asked for forgiveness, he gave it to them and I think felt a sense of power in doing it. They captured him more than he captured them.

He wanted to bring them back on the easiest possible terms and allow them to reorganize Southern state governments, elect Senators and Congressmen, petition for the seating of these Senators and Congressmen in the US Congress, and come back as fully-fledged members of the Union, with only the condition of ratifying the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery, and repudiating the ordinance of secession. Once they did that, everything would be the same again, as it always had been.

The Republicans wanted some kind of guarantees, they wanted minimal rights for blacks, and, as time went on, they moved to the left on that issue and wanted suffrage in the South. They wanted to create a Republican Party in the South, they wanted protection for genuine white Unionists in the South, who they felt would be oppressed if these former Confederates regained political control. Basically, it was a question of who was going to rule the South. Was it going to be the former ruling class, most of whom had been Confederates? Or was it going to be a new, much more democratic coalition of blacks and whites who had not been strong Confederates, either loyal Unionists during the war or reluctant Confederates.

I think the Republicans wanted to create a kind of middle class, small farmer coalition. Those are the people who became Republicans in the South as an offset to the old ruling class in the South. They were afraid that Johnson's policy was going to restore the old ruling class. So that was really what these issues were about. The Republicans passed a civil rights act, they renewed the Freedmen's Bureau and expanded its responsibilities and powers in the South, they passed several Reconstruction acts, to enfranchise the former slaves and to keep disfranchised some elements of the former Confederate ruling class for the time being. Johnson vetoed every one of these acts, then the Republicans would pass them over his veto. Then Johnson would get his attorney general to construe the law as narrowly as possible, and he would appoint officials in the South who did as little as possible to enforce the law. It was this kind of a seesaw battle that was going on through 1866, '67 and into 1868 that really lay behind the impeachment.

He was a president who was defying the will of the majority of Congress in doing all he could to frustrate the legislation they passed over his veto.

DW: Do you think his removal would have made a difference?

JM: In some ways, it might have. Another aspect of this is that because Johnson was defying the Republicans in Congress, he encouraged Southern resistance to Congressional legislation. Johnson held out the hope to former Confederates in the South that if they would only hang in there until 1868, the Democrats would win the presidential election and the Republicans would be out of power. So he encouraged this kind of violent resistance in the South. If he had been removed from office that might have been a far more decisive signal that the Republicans were going to use the full powers of the national government and the army to enforce legislation in the South.

Historian Hans Trefousse argues that the failure to convict Johnson really encouraged Southern whites to continue their resistance, and that may be true. However, Johnson did pull back after he was acquitted. He scaled back his rhetoric, he accepted a compromise candidate as secretary of war, John Schofield; he stopped using the presidency to try to frustrate legislation, so even though he wasn't removed from office this whole controversy pulled his teeth a little bit.

DW: This is perhaps the same question asked in a different way, but what if Lincoln had not been assassinated? Would the course of American history have been at all different, granted that obviously that the US was going to become a modern, industrial capitalist country? Would the conditions in the South perhaps, the conditions of blacks, have been somewhat different?

JM: I think so. For one thing there would have been no impeachment. For another, Lincoln would not have held out the same kind of encouragement to the Southern whites to resist that Johnson did. There clearly would have been ongoing tensions and differences between executive and Congress, there always are even when Congress is controlled by the same party as the president. Nevertheless, Lincoln had worked in general harmony with Congress during the war, although there were some tensions, especially in 1864. As a result there would have been a smoother Reconstruction process, less violence, less confrontation, less polarization in Washington and in the South, maybe in the long run less violent resistance by Southern whites to whatever had to be done to carry out Reconstruction.

Now Lincoln, of course, would have gone out of office in 1869, and much of the violence that eventually made the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments pretty much a dead letter for three-quarters of a century, might have happened anyhow. Under [Ulysses S.] Grant, who probably would have been Lincoln's successor, just as he was Johnson's successor ... who knows. But I think in terms of the other broader developments that you're talking about, the development of the United States as a major industrial capitalist country, that would have happened no matter what. What happened in the impeachment controversy of 1868 was virtually irrelevant to that process.

DW: Could you contrast the two impeachment processes, 1868 and 1998?

JM: The major difference is that the impeachment of the 1860s concerned really serious matters of substance, and the 1990s' impeachment was a more personal vendetta, with a context of the cultural wars, issues like abortion, and going all the way back to the Vietnam War, as well as lifestyle questions. The Right in American politics sees Clinton as a nefarious symbol of many of these changes they don't like in American society, but for the most part the recent impeachment did not have much to do with substantive legislative and political and executive policy matters in the same way that the Johnson impeachment did.

Another thing is that in the 1990s' impeachment there seems to have been a very sharp divide between Congress and the country. All the polls showed an overwhelming majority against Clinton's impeachment, but Congress went ahead anyhow. Whereas in the 1860s, the nearest thing we had to polls was the 1866 Congressional elections and that represented a very sharp repudiation of Johnson's leadership. Johnson didn't have strong political support in the country. Clinton did, although the nature of that political support is a bit ambiguous. The electorate made a distinction between his personal behavior and his presidential leadership. Johnson's personal behavior in 1868 had nothing to do with the impeachment at all.

DW: What was the attitude of the Abolitionists, the former Abolitionists, toward Johnson's impeachment?

JM: They mostly favored it. They saw Johnson as representing the pro-slavery revival, and so they were strongly in favor of getting rid of him.
 

The Civil War, impeachment then and now and Lincoln's legacy—Part 3
By David Walsh
21 May 1999

This is the third part of an interview conducted by WSWS editorial board member David Walsh with James M. McPherson. Walsh spoke to McPherson, the distinguished historian of the Civil War era, in his office at Princeton University. Professor McPherson's works include Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution ; Battle Cry of Freedom [a Pulitzer Prize winner]; For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War and The Struggle for Equality . Explanatory notes to assist the reader follow the article.

David Walsh: Viewing the Civil War in the light of contemporary events, its extraordinary violence certainly stands out. It appears to be a nineteenth century anticipation of total war. Was the violence remarked upon by contemporaries as something remarkable? How was it seen by Europeans?

James McPherson: The British were the ones who paid the most attention to the American Civil War, and a lot of British leaders were appalled by the escalating level of violence and I think that was one of the motives that prompted British political leaders like Palmerston and Gladstone and Russell to try to intervene to end this increasing violence in North America.

Because the level of violence escalated step by step in the American Civil War, it was something that people got used to; got used to is not the right phrase, but found that they were able to tolerate because it escalated step by step. By 1864 there was a powerful sentiment for peace in both North and South, so powerful that both Lincoln and Jefferson Davis had to take it seriously, and to at least allow two peace initiatives, one undertaken by Horace Greeley, and one undertaken by a couple of other Northerners who actually went to see Jefferson Davis in Richmond under flag of truce. This got a lot of publicity, but both sides and both presidents were using this as a way of showing their respective peoples that the only way they could have peace through negotiations was to yield everything that the other side wanted.

Lincoln said: my terms for peace are reunion and the end of slavery. Jefferson Davis said: my only terms of peace are recognition of our independence. There was no common ground there. So these peace initiatives collapsed, but in a way the Confederates won the propaganda war because Northern Democrats said, look, we could have had peace negotiations if the president hadn't insisted on emancipation. Even though Jefferson Davis said, independence is my condition for peace negotiations, and Lincoln said, reunion and emancipation, the Democrats fastened on emancipation and said: it's only Lincoln's insistence on emancipation that blocks peace. They convinced a lot of people of that.

It was only Northern military victories in the late summer of 1864 that prevented what probably otherwise would have been Lincoln's defeat for re-election. So there was powerful peace sentiment because casualties by 1864 had become so high that people were looking for some way out short of total victory. But in the end Lincoln was reelected on a platform of total victory. Extraordinarily, a substantial part of his victory margin came from Northern soldiers, who voted nearly 80 percent for his election, as opposed to slightly over 50 percent of the civilian population.

DW: Were there incidents that were singled out by the hostile British press as evidence of Northern brutality?

JM: They focused on symbolic issues early in the war. For example, Benjamin Butler's famous “woman order” in New Orleans, in which he said that occupying Union soldiers who were being insulted and harassed by Southern women should treat them as ordinary women of the street plying their avocation. And the British thought this was an outrage. Butler also hanged a man who had run up and torn down the American flag over the courthouse in New Orleans, and the British thought that was barbarous. These were the two issues that aroused a lot of very strong anti-American and pro-Southern sentiment in Britain in 1862. More symbolic than real.

By 1864 when [General William T.] Sherman and [General Philip H.] Sheridan were carrying out kind of scorched earth policies in the South, while I think the British press paid a lot of attention to it, there was no danger by that time that the British were going to intervene. That moment had passed in late 1862, or the latest, the summer of 1863. So while they paid some attention to this, and saw it as an escalation in the war, and as a kind of unjustified brutality against citizens, they didn't do anything about it.

DW: Was it not possible to characterize the Northern effort as an attempt to put down a legitimate rebellion? After all, the Union was voluntary. How would Southern historians have written the history if the Union had lost?

JM: They would have written it precisely that way. That this was an illegitimate and unconstitutional effort to put down an independence movement that was not illegal or unconstitutional. The Southern states had the right to secede from their own government, and that the Union was a voluntary association of states.

Of course, the Northern point of view on that was precisely the opposite. They said, if you have a voluntary association of states you have no Union, if any state can pull out you have no country, you have no nation. As Lincoln said, this is the essence of anarchy. And so that was the political theory under which the North fought. It was the outcome of the war that decided the legitimacy or illegitimacy of these points of view.

If the Confederates had won the war, we would now probably say that, yes, secession is justified and the nation is a voluntary association of states. My own feeling is that there would be no such entity as the United States today if the Confederacy had won the war, because that would have constituted a precedent that would have been invoked by disaffected minorities in the future, let's say, in the Populist movement of the 1890s, when a lot of states in the West and the South were just as hostile to what they described as Wall Street running the country.

DW: There have been waves of interest in the Civil War ( Glory, Gettysburg, the Ken Burns television documentary). But to what extent have the lessons of the Civil War been absorbed? There seems to be a tendency to leave it on the level of the re-creation of battles, the vicarious thrill from reliving war, but the bigger intellectual issues are left on the side.

JM: I think that's true. If you're talking about popular interest in the Civil War, I'd say at least 80 percent of it focuses on the military events of the war. There are half a dozen popular history magazines about the Civil War, which come out bi-monthly. They mostly focus on the military events of the war, some on politics and the political issues of the war. The more serious of them try to get into larger issues about the war, but I think there is more interest in the latest tactical insights.

DW: This has its value, but it seems somewhat limited.

JM: That's my feeling about it. Academic scholars are more likely to be interested in the broader questions and I see part of my mission as keeping a foot in both camps and trying to show the interconnection between these things and show each side that there is something important to be learned from the other side.

DW: What has been your own experience with the media? Has it been a happy one?

JM: For the most part. I get calls, people write to me all the time to ask my opinion. I just got a call from [right-wing commentator] George Will yesterday, I should have asked him why he wanted to know this, I suspect he's writing something about Kosovo, but he wanted to know where in my book I told the story of the Confederate soldier captured in the war whose captors asked him, why are you fighting? His response was, I'm fighting because you're down here. He wanted to use this obviously in one of his columns. I should have asked him whether it was a column about Kosovo or ethnic nationalism in eastern Europe.

DW: Speaking of the media and Kosovo, and their tendency to demonize enemies of the United States, was Lincoln demonized in the South?

JM: Oh, yes, absolutely, really demonized. As was Jefferson Davis in the North. In cartoons and caricature, they would have horns, whatever contemporary pejorative visual symbols. Lincoln was often portrayed as swarthy and black, as part-Negro in his ancestry. Jefferson Davis was sort of a Mephistopheles. Both sides imposed a kind of satanic image on the leader of the other side. That happens in virtually any war.

DW: Did the European press do any of that?

JM: Punch, the British humor magazine with a very satirical twist to it, was very anti-Lincoln through much of the war. Their cartoons of Lincoln portrayed him as a kind of malevolent, backwards buffoon. Toward the end of the war, they began changing their tune.

DW: What would have happened, or did happen, if the North had received an ultimatum from Britain during the Civil War? For example, the Trent affair.

JM: There was a lot of chauvinism stirred up by the British. The British did come pretty close to an ultimatum during the Trent affair.

DW: For our readers, could you perhaps recall those events?

JM: The Trent was a British mail packet that was carrying James Mason and John Slidell as Confederate envoys to London and Paris in November 1861. And a Union navy captain stopped that ship on the high seas and took them off. The British government regarded this as an outrageous violation of their neutrality and demanded that the Lincoln administration release the two.

Meanwhile Northern public opinion had made Captain [Charles] Wilkes, who had done this, a hero. In fact, Congress passed a resolution giving him the thanks of Congress, which is the highest accolade that a military officer at that time could get. And the British press and the Northern press stirred up a lot of war sentiment, and there was a good deal of fear and anticipation that Britain and the United States would go to war over this issue. When the Lincoln administration thought seriously about that, they said ... well, Lincoln's words were, “One war at a time.”

Prince Albert, who was on his deathbed from typhoid fever, intervened with the ultimatum, the protest note that the British government was sending to the United States government, and softened it with a phrase suggesting that perhaps Captain Wilkes had acted without instructions. The Lincoln administration seized on that to save face, because in fact, it was true, he had acted on his own. He regarded himself as something of an expert on international law. Wilkes was an egotist, a little bit of a loose cannon, so there was some truth to that. Anyhow, the Lincoln administration backed off. The British had demanded an apology, as well as the release of Mason and Slidell. The Americans released Mason and Slidell and said Captain Wilkes had acted without instruction, and the British accepted that in lieu of an apology. So passions cooled.

But in the meantime, the British navy had sent a fleet to the North Atlantic, to expedite the transport of something like eight thousand troops to Canada. [Secretary of State William] Seward was very cagey about this. This was in December 1861. The St. Lawrence was frozen. And the only way these troops could get to Canada was to march cross-country. Seward said, how about if we ship them across Maine by rail? This was a way of saying, we really don't want war with you.

The Confederates of course hoped that this would lead to war between the United States and Britain, because they could only gain from such a war. They were hoping that the British would offer diplomatic recognition to the Confederacy, which would have conferred an enormous amount of international prestige on the Confederacy, in the same way as when the United States recognized the Baltic countries back in 1990 against Soviet wishes. If the British had done this, the US would have broken off diplomatic relations with them. The Confederates hoped that the British navy would intervene to break the blockade of Southern ports. When the Union government backed off, and the British accepted their action, it was a great disappointment to the Confederacy.

DW: You mention the chauvinism that was stirred up. Presumably as well there was some kind of democratic content to Northern arguments, i.e., that these were the Old World aristocracies threatening the republic.

JM: Yes, yes, that issue was played to the hilt. Here's the world's one republic again being threatened by these Old World monarchies and class-ridden, exploitative societies. Of course, the Northern press made quite a lot of the resolutions of sympathy that were passed by some working class representatives and the support to the Union cause by John Bright and Richard Cobden who were the great spokesmen for middle class democracy in England. Of course most workingmen couldn't vote at that time, but they could pass resolutions and they did. They also raised questions, why haven't you freed the slaves? There was a lot of pressure from British liberals and British working class and middle class constituencies in favor of emancipation as a Northern war aim. And when Lincoln did finally take that step, it made the task of the pro-Union British faction much easier than it had been up until that time.

DW: Aside from the military factor, were there moral and political elements in Lincoln's final decision to free the slaves?

JM: Definitely. He knew that making this a war for emancipation would strengthen the Union cause. He knew that it would strengthen ... Actually, when Lincoln issued the emancipation proclamation, I think he believed it would be as much a political liability at home as it would be an asset. That while it would satisfy the radical wing of the Republican party, it would alienate a lot of Northern Democrats and border-state Unionists, and that its positive benefits would be neutralized by its negative effects. But he still thought it was the right thing to do, and I think, you know, Lincoln said over and over again before the war and during the war, that slavery is wrong, it's a monstrous injustice, it's a social, moral and political evil for the white man, to the Negro. He said, if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong, and so on. This was something that Lincoln believed was right, and when he issued the final proclamation on January 1, 1863, he said he did so because it was a military necessity, but also as an act of justice. And I think those two things, plus the foreign policy dimension, were all factors that he took into consideration.

He was also under a lot of pressure from his own party to do something along those lines. Even though Lincoln knew that while it would satisfy his own party, it was going to make his problem of keeping the war Democrats and border-state Unionists in line behind the war effort more difficult, and indeed that was true for another six to nine months. I don't think it was until after Gettysburg and Vicksburg that that question, whether or not public opinion in the North would support emancipation, was really resolved.

In the two major Northern state off-year elections that were held in 1863, both in October, one in Pennsylvania and one in Ohio, for governor, in both cases the Democratic candidates were anti-war, basically copperheads. In Ohio, there was [Clement] Vallandigham, who was actually running his campaign from Canada, because he had been convicted by military court and Lincoln had commuted his imprisonment to banishment, so he had gone to Canada to run his campaign for governor of Ohio. There was a lot of worry that he might win. And a man named [George W.]Woodward was running for governor of Pennsylvania, he was almost as copper as Vallandigham, even though his son was a captain in the 83rd Pennsylvania, which was in the same brigade as the 20th Maine and fought at Little Rock Top [at Gettysburg] right next to the 20th Maine. Anyhow, the Republicans won both of those elections overwhelmingly, and that was a major turning point. It was partly a referendum on emancipation, because the Democrats ran against emancipation almost more than anything else. And when they won both of these elections it was a big deal.

DW: Turning to the contemporary situation, and the state of public opinion in the United States. Whatever one's attitude is toward the NATO bombing, and we are opposed to it, surely the situation must be more complicated than it is presented by the American media. I would imagine you know people here at Princeton who know something about the history of the Balkans. Are such figures called upon? How do you see the treatment of some of these issues?

JM: I think you're right that they do tend to get oversimplified. I don't watch television news very much. I get most of what I know out of the New York Times, and the Times is generally more balanced and recognizes more of the complexities of the situation probably more than some of the other popular media. I think there's so much confusion and so much lack of knowledge in general about the Balkans and so much uncertainty about what they ought to be doing there.... If you look at polls, there's a pretty substantial support for NATO's policies, and even for majority support for sending in ground troops. But I think that's kind of tendency that always exists to rally behind the troops rather than a considered opinion on the substantive issues at stake. I think people are really confused about this, I'm confused myself.

DW: You mentioned the use of atrocities, or the other side's atrocities, for propaganda purposes.

JM: That's what both sides are doing in this conflict. As it happens in any war, it certainly happened in the Civil War.

DW: As you know, we draw fairly radical conclusions from your books, with or without your blessing, so to speak. It seems sometimes that there is a kind of self-censorship in this country, because of official anticommunism. Do you ever feel that there is a terrible caution in academic circles?

JM: I don't see much of that around here. I think in public universities and in some other parts of the country that's probably still true. I don't see it to be necessarily true here in New Jersey, either at Princeton or at Rutgers. I think people are pretty willing to say what they believe on a variety of issues without too much fear of self-censorship. The old Cold War issues seem pretty well to have disappeared from discourse. They haven't really been replaced by any new certainties. Many different opinions continue to blossom, not only on the Balkans war, but on Iraq and other foreign policy, domestic issues.

DW: What opinions do you hear about the war in the Balkans?

JM: I haven't really talked very much with my colleagues about that. So I'm not quite sure. I don't know if there's any particular pattern in opinions.

DW: I think there is a great deal of confusion. I don't sense any war fever in the general population.

JM: No. But nobody is organizing anti-war protest meetings around here. Of course it's only begun. Who knows what will happen if this goes on for months and escalates.

DW: Nothing progressive is going to come out of dropping US bombs on Yugoslavia.

JM: I wouldn't think so.

DW: Do you think there are aspects of American history, or world history, that if they were more deeply understood, could be helpful to people in relation to contemporary events?

JM: I'm a firm believer in the idea that you need to know history in order to understand the contemporary world, just as a general matter of principle. Certainly you need to know the history of the Balkans in order to understand what goes on there, whether you need to go back to 1389, or only to 1990, to 1945, or 1918, or 1914. Knowledge of the history is absolutely essential to understanding what goes on.