Title: The war that became a revolution | Socialist Review
Headings: The war that became a revolution
The war that became a revolution
To what extent was the Civil War a war to preserve the Union and to what extent was it a war to abolish slavery?
How did the radicalisation of the North's war aims affect the military conduct of the war?
What role did slaves play in their own emancipation? Around 200,000 eventually fought in the Union armies.
What difference do you think Lincoln made as an individual to the outcome of the war?
Do you think the North's victory was inevitable, given its greater industry and resources?
What do we know about the views of the ordinary soldiers who fought in the Civil War?
Were the Civil War and its outcome the completion of the American Revolution of the 1770s?
Do you see the period of Reconstruction in the South that follows the North's victory as a continuation of the revolutionary process that begins in the Civil War? Why does it end in the racist system of Jim Crow segregation?
How do we explain the transformation of the Republicans from the party of Lincoln and the abolition of slavery to the party of George Bush and the Tea Party?
The level of rehabilitation of the old South seems remarkable, with the toleration of flying the old Confederate flag, the sympathy that often seems to be there in parts of Hollywood and in popular music for the old South.
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Content: In the case of the Confederacy they felt they were fighting, just as their grandfathers had done, for independence from an oppressive government. The Northerners thought they were fighting to preserve the nation founded in 1776 from disintegration and destruction. They all felt they were fighting for democracy and for self-government; that was one of the ironic tragedies of the Civil War. As the war went on and as it became a much more revolutionary kind of war I think Northern soldiers became convinced that they were fighting not only to uphold their government but also to transform it by putting down this, as they would call it, dastardly rebellion. In the case of the Confederacy it was increasingly a fight for survival, not only for an independent nationhood for the Confederacy but also for the survival of what they would have called their institutions, by which I think they meant primarily slavery and the slave society, but it also involved the agricultural order of the South and its way of life and values. Were the Civil War and its outcome the completion of the American Revolution of the 1770s? Well, I call it the "Second Revolution", and I certainly didn'