The War That Forged a Nation: Why the Civil War Still Matters

The War That Forged a Nation places the Civil War within the broader context of American history. While the long-term impact of key historical moments remains a central concept in the text, McPherson also uses narrative techniques to create cohesion among the different essays. Together, the first two chapters and the final two chapters locate the origins of the Civil War in the Revolutionary period and emphasize its lasting impact on the 20th and 21st centuries. Chapters 1 and 11 particularly emphasize the contradiction between the nation’s ideals and its practice of enslavement as well as Lincoln’s awareness of that contradiction and his need to resolve it. These chapters also highlight the transformational aspect of the Civil War, with Chapter 1 identifying specific changes to the national character and Chapter 11 discussing America’s role as a leading proponent of democracy and equality. Similarly, Chapters 2 and 12 connect key points in history by focusing on the decades immediately leading up to the war and the years immediately following the war, respectively.

However, linearity is not the only defining feature of McPherson’s presentation of the course of history, for he also makes it a point to illuminate the cyclical nature of history from the very outset of the book. In Chapter 1, for example, he discusses his recognition of the parallels between the 1860s and the 1960s. Likewise, the discussion in Chapter 12, which focuses on the Reconstruction period, highlights how the nation’s issues are never quite resolved; instead, they merely take different forms and must be dealt with repeatedly in new iterations. Thus, McPherson’s emphasis on the Revolutionary period and the 14th and 15th Amendments throughout the middle chapters of the book is a deliberate choice. The author uses this approach to convey the idea that a defining characteristic of the United States is the use of its founding documents and political process to strive toward its ideals and correct its instabilities.