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Foreword
by James M. McPherson
The centrality of the Civil War to
American history is indisputable. At least
620.000 soldiers lost their lives from 1861
to 1865. This number constituted 2 percent
of the American population. If the same
percentage of Americans were to die in a war
fought today, the number of war dead would
be five and one-half millions. The war also
wreaked havoc and destruction in the South.
It wiped out two-thirds of the assessed value
of Southern wealth (including slaves),
destroyed more than half of the region's
farm machinery, consumed two-fifths of
Southern livestock, and killed one-quarter
of Southern white males between the ages of
20 and 40. In 1865 the South presented a
bleak landscape of desolation. Burned-out
plantations, fields growing up in weeds, and
railroads without tracks, bridges, or rolling
stock marked the trail of conquering and
defeated armies.
The consequences of the war for the
country as a whole, however, were more
positive than negative. Northern victory
resolved two festering issues that had
plagued the United States since its founding:
whether this fragile experiment of a
democratic republic could survive in a world
where most republics through the ages had
been swept into the dustbin of history; and
whether the house divided would continue
to endure half slave and half free. Many
Americans had doubted whether the republic
would survive; many Europeans regularly
predicted its demise; some Americans
believed in the right of secession and
periodically threatened to invoke it;
eleven states did invoke it in 1860-61.
As Abraham Lincoln said in his address at
Gettysburg in 1863. the conflict was a test
whether a nation "conceived in Liberty, and
dedicated to the proposition that all men are
created equal" could "long endure" or would
"perish from the earth." It did endure, and
in such a way as to give promise of long life.
Since 1865 no state or region has seriously
threatened secession, not even during the
South's "massive resistance" to desegregation
from 1954 to 1964.
The war also gave America "a new birth
of freedom," as Lincoln put it at Gettysburg.
Before 1865 the United States, a boasted
"land of liberty." was the largest
slaveholding country in the world. "The
monstrous injustice of slavery," Lincoln
had said in 1854, "deprives our republican
example of its just influence in the world—
enables the enemies of free institutions,
with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites."
With the abolition of slavery by Northern
victory, that particular "monstrous Injustice"
and "hypocrisy'' came to an end. As Mark
Twain wrote in 1873, the Civil War
"uprooted institutions that were centuries
old, changed the politics of a people,
transformed the social life of half the
country, and wrought so profoundly upon
the entire national character that the
influence cannot be measured short of two
or three generations."
How did all this happen? That is the
question the four authors of this volume
undertake to answer. In four sections that
weave together the story of military
campaigns in the Eastern and Western
theaters with the impact of the war on
the home front, spiced with stories of
individual men and women who
experienced the conflict, this book sets
forth the essential history of the war. The
four authors are in the top rank of Civil War
historians. Their lucid prose, the clarity of
the maps, and the well-selected illustrations
offer a rich feast for readers, who will take-
away an understanding of how and why
the war came out as it did.