Civil War shaped nation

COEUR d'ALENE - The relevance of the Civil War, which began 150 years ago this year, and ended in 1865, was made clear Thursday by Pulitzer Prize-winning author James McPherson.

McPherson, a Princeton University professor and national Civil War expert, spoke to several hundred people who attended the Idaho Humanities Council's annual Distinguished Humanities Lecture and Dinner at The Coeur d'Alene Resort.

As a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University in the late '50s and early '60s, McPherson said the Civil War of 100 years earlier began to resonate with him.

"I became convinced that I could not fully understand the events and the issues of my own time unless I learned about their roots in the era of the Civil War," McPherson said.

Many of those issues, including the struggle between state sovereignty and the federal government, the role of government in social change, and resistance to both government and social change are, McPherson said, "as salient and controversial today, as they were in the 1960s, not to mention the 1860s."

"The North went to war to preserve the Union. It ended by creating a nation," McPherson said.

Slavery did not become a central issue of the Civil War until it had been going on for two years, he said.

"At first glance, it appeared the northern victory in the war resolved two fundamental, festering issues that had been left unresolved by the Revolution of 1776 that had given birth to the nation," McPherson said. "First, whether this fragile Republican experiment called the 'United States' would survive as 'one nation indivisible?' and second, whether the house divided would continue to endure half-slave and half-free?"

Those questions were openly debated and discussed until 1865, when the war ended, McPherson said. U.S. citizens worried the nation would rupture and come apart, while many European conservatives forecast that it would.

"By the 1850s, the United States which had been founded on a charter that declared all men equal with an equal title to liberty, had become the largest slaveholding country in the world, making a mockery of this country's profession to be a land of freedom and equal rights," McPherson said.

He quoted from a 1854 speech given by Abraham Lincoln: "The monstrous injustice of slavery deprives our Republican example of its just influence in the world, enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites."

The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 and the 13th amendment to the Constitution in 1865 eradicated slavery, McPherson said.

"Yet the legacy of slavery, in the form of racial discrimination and prejudice long plagued the united states and has not entirely disappeared even 150 years later," he said.

Both sides "professed to fight for the heritage of liberty bequeathed to them by the founding fathers," McPherson said, but they interpreted liberty in opposite ways.

McPherson used a parable used by Lincoln to illustrate the difference. A shepherd keeps his sheep from attack by a wolf, and the sheep proclaim the shepherd their liberator. The wolf, in turn, considers the shepherd a destroyer of liberty.

The tension between negative and positive liberty has remained a constant in United States politics and social philosophy, McPherson said.

"In recent years, with the rise of the Tea Party, and other small government or anti-government movements in our politics there has been a revival of negative liberty," he said. "The next presidential election might pit the concepts of positive and negative liberty against each other more clearly than in any other recent election."

The Civil War not only preserved the nation of 1776 while purging it of slavery, it also transformed it, McPherson said.

The rebirth of the nation can be traced in a shift in language usage when referring to the United States.

The year the Civil War began, the United States was referred to as a plural, "The United States have a Republican form of government," McPherson said

Since 1865, the United States is a singular noun, "The United States is a world power."

The shift can also be found by following Lincoln's most famous wartime speeches, McPherson said. In Lincoln's first inaugural address of 1861, he used the word "union" 20 times, and never uttered the word "nation." By 1863, when he gave the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln did not once refer to "the union," opting instead for "nation" five times.

Prior to the war, the U.S. Post Office was the only federal agency that touched the average citizen, McPherson said. The Civil War enlarged the powers of national government. It began taxing people directly and created a revenue bureau to collect the taxes, expanded the jurisdiction of federal courts, created a national currency and a federally chartered banking system, drafted men into the Army and created the first social welfare effort.

The language of the Constitutional Amendments drafted after the Civil War state the federal government shall have the power to enforce provisions, rather than using the phrase used in the first 11 amendments, "The federal government shall not have certain powers."

McPherson said the Civil War created the structure of Modern America, leading to expansion of industry.

"If the Confederacy had prevailed in the 1860s, it is quite possible that the emergence of the United States as the world's leading industrial and agricultural producer in the late 19th century, and the world's most powerful nation the 20th Century, might never have happened."

McPherson has written several bestselling books. "Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era," published in 1988, won the Pulitzer Prize. Although historians had been writing about the Civil War for decades, McPherson's book broke ground in exploring the complexities of the war while maintaining an appealing narrative. Battle Cry has since sold more than 600,000 copies.