Abraham Lincoln
“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.”
James Macpherson
"There is a big
idea which is at stake"--Corporal in the 105th Ohio, 1864
“Lincoln's significance
lies in his not hesitating before the most severe means, once they were found
to be necessary, in achieving a great historic aim posed by the development of
a young nation.”
― Leon Trotsky, Their
Morals and Ours
Lincoln is not the
product of a popular revolution. This plebeian, who worked his way up from
stone-breaker to Senator in Illinois, without intellectual brilliance, without
a particularly outstanding character, without exceptional importance—an average
person of goodwill, was placed at the top by the interplay of the forces of
universal suffrage unaware of the great issues at stake. The new world has
never achieved a greater triumph than by this demonstration that, given its
political and social organization, ordinary people of good will can accomplish
feats which only heroes could accomplish in the old world.
Karl Marx and Frederick
Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 41 (New York: International Publishers, 1985),
Drawn With the Sword is
an excellent work of historical study and contemplation. It is a book of the
highest historical standard. It is not one continuous book but a collection of 15
essays on different topics. They examine various subjects ranging from the
causes of the war to how the South almost won and why the war still resonates
today. Fourteen of the essays were previously published but were revised for
this edition. The only new article is “What’s The Matter With History?”
Throughout his career,
McPherson has sought to explain complex historical issues in a way that the
general reader can understand without dumbing down the history for his more
academically minded readers. His essays in the book are a critical reexamination
of issues that are still contentious today. For the majority of his career, Professor
McPherson has argued that the American Civil War was a revolutionary struggle
for equality and democracy and still to this day defends that viewpoint. Macpherson
is a serious historian who has played an
objectively significant role in the social life of America and beyond and is
the very embodiment of historical memory.
The Marxist writer David
Walsh explains how Macpherson has maintained his historical principles. He writes,
“How has he retained his principles in 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, the 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 can retain principles across time and in the
face of all sorts of opposition and setbacks because they are embedded in some
part of consciousness that is not susceptible to shifts in the popular mood.
One knows with one's entire being certain things to be true, they are not up
for debate, much less sale.”[1]
Perhaps the best essay
of James M. McPherson's Drawn with the Sword: Reflections on the American Civil
War is entitled "Historians and Their Audiences," McPherson poses the
question, "What's the matter with history?"
This chapter sums up
concisely Macpherson’s historical philosophy. His purpose while writing
scholarly books is to appeal to a wider reading audience while maintaining
historical standards. This complex problem is not new. The prominent historian Allen
Nevins[2] attacked
the academics who wrote for themselves, “His touch is death. He destroys the
public for historical work by convincing it that history is synonymous with
heavy, stolid prosing. Indeed, he is responsible for today a host of
intelligent and highly literate Americans who will open a history book only
with reluctant dread. It is against this entrenched pedantry that the war of
true history must be most determined and implacable.”
Macpherson addresses
this theme of engaging the general public and raising their historical
consciousness throughout the book. In the chapter entitled "The Glory
Story." Thomas R Turner relates, “To
many people, books are hopelessly irrelevant because far more Americans today
get their history from watching movies than reading. However, suppose they
receive their notions about African American soldiers and the 54th
Massachusetts Regiment from the movie Glory. In that case, he believes they are
receiving information from a credible source. He calls the combat footage in
Glory the most realistic of any film dealing with the Civil War.”[3]
The legendary 54th
Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment, led by abolitionist Robert Gould
Shaw, was the second all-black regiment organized in the Civil War. Reactionary
Protesters have objected that the 54th, famously depicted in the film Glory
(1989), have a monument erected to Shaw and his regiment. Because it was
commanded by a white officer, Shaw, Holland Cotter, the New York Times’s
co-chief art critic, slandered the monument and labelled Shaw a “white
supremacist”.
One of the more
remarkable essays is “The War That Never Goes Away.” Macpherson correctly believes
that the war, right or wrong has an “enduring fascination” with the American
and world public.McPherson points to what he holds to be the reason for this
fascination is that “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.”
Macpherson’s defence of Abraham
Lincoln in the book is laudable. McPherson argues convincingly that Lincoln was
the key figure in the struggle against slavery. Macpherson’s stance on Lincoln has
come under sustained attack. One hundred fifty-five years after the first assassination,
Lincoln is facing a second. Race-fixated protesters like Eleanor Holmes Norton,
Washington DC’s nonvoting delegate to Congress, have moved to introduce a bill
to remove the famous Emancipation Monument from Lincoln Park in Washington, DC.
As David North writes, “Abraham
Lincoln was an extraordinarily complex man, whose life and politics reflected
the contradictions of his time. He could not, as he once stated, “escape
history.” Determined to save the Union, he was driven by the logic of the
bloody civil war to resort to revolutionary measures. During the brutal
struggle, Lincoln expressed the revolutionary-democratic aspirations that
inspired hundreds of thousands of Americans to fight and sacrifice their lives
for a “new birth of freedom.”[4]
In the chapter "Why
Did the Confederacy Lose?" he examines the political and economic reasons
behind the South’s devastating defeat. He writes, “Altogether nearly 4 per cent
of the Southern people, black and white, civilians and soldiers, died due to
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.”[5]
As David Walsh points
out, “To establish an accurate picture of the Civil War era, he (Macpherson) has
been obliged to polemicize against various schools of historians. In Abraham Lincoln
and the Second American Revolution, for example, he argues persuasively based
on 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 wrong. In the same work, he
also counters 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.”[6]
Perhaps James Macpherson’s
most important struggle has been to defend his historical principles against the
method that looks at history through the prism of race. Macpherson opposes the “fashionable
practice of condemning all whites as racists.”
To his eternal credit,
Macpherson collaborated with the World Socialist Website(WSWS.ORG) attack on
the falsification of history by the New York Times 1619 Project. In an interview
with Macpherson, The WSWS asked him about his initial reaction to the 1619
Project.
He answered Well, I
didn’t know anything about it until I got my Sunday paper, with the magazine
section entirely devoted to the 1619 Project. Because this is a subject I’ve
long been interested in, I sat down and started to read some of the essays. I’d
say that, almost from the outset, I was disturbed by what seemed like a very
unbalanced, one-sided account, which lacked context and perspective on the
complexity of slavery, which was clearly not an exclusively American
institution but existed throughout history. And slavery in the United States
was only a small part of a larger world process that unfolded over many
centuries. And in the United States, too, there was not only slavery but also
an antislavery movement. So I thought the account emphasized American racism—a
major part of the history, no question about it—but it focused so narrowly on
that part of the story that it left most of the history out.”
According to David North
and Thomas Mackaman, The New York Times 1619 Project was a
politically-motivated falsification of history and presented the origins of the
United States entirely through the prism of racial conflict. They make this
point in their book: “Despite the pretence of establishing the
United States’ “true” foundation, the 1619 Project is a politically motivated
falsification of history. Its aim is to create a historical narrative that
legitimizes the effort of the Democratic Party to construct an electoral
coalition based on prioritizing personal “identities”—i.e., gender, sexual
preference, ethnicity, and, above all, race.”[7]
There is much to admire
in the work of this outstanding Civil War historian. Macpherson writes engagingly
and explains complex historical issues in a way that the general reader can
take in, encouraging his readers to see history in a new light.
[1] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/1999/05/mcin-m18.html
[2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Nevins
[3] Drawn with the Sword: Reflections
on the American Civil War, by James M. McPherson
Thomas
R Turner Volume 18, Issue 2, Summer 1997, pp. 47-54
[4] Racial-communalist politics and
the second assassination of Abraham Lincoln- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/06/25/pers-j24.html
[5] Drawn with the Sword: Reflections
on the American Civil War
By
James M. McPherson
[6] An exchange with a Civil War
historian- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/1999/05/mcp2-m19.html
[7] The New York Times’s 1619
Project: A racialist falsification of American and world history- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/09/06/1619-s06.html
