Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

The Civil war had been in progress four years when Abraham Lincoln said in his second inaugural address, on “the progress of our arms… all else chiefly depends.” Looking backwards towards Gettysburg, the bloodiest battle of the Civil War, we know what the “all else” comprised, but Lincoln certainly had intimations of it, for he was a sharp student of history. According to James McPherson, the author of “Tried By War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief,” Lincoln’s “all else,” certainly included “the fate of slavery; the definition of freedom; the destruction of the old South’s socioeconomic system and the triumph of entrepreneurial free-labor capitalism as a national norm; a new definition of American nationalism; the origins of a new system of race relations; the very survival of the United States in a manner that laid the foundations for the nation’s emergence as a world power.” McPherson begs to differ somewhat with T. Harry Williams’ estimation of Lincoln: “Lincoln stands out as ...