![]() These were published in a special edition of Horace Greeley's New York Tribune in March 1863 and distributed to Union troops. I also noted the fact, related in The Struggle for Equality, that during the war Abolitionist leader Wendell Phillips delivered lectures on Toussaint L'Ouverture and the Haitian revolution. After decades of “crying in the wilderness,” facing official and at times popular hostility, branded a group of fanatics, the antislavery forces almost overnight gained a wide following and access to a mass audience. One of these was the rapid transformation in the political fortunes of the Abolitionists with the outbreak of the Civil War. And that, coinciding with the civil rights movement, was what set me on the Abolitionists.”Ī reference by Professor McPherson to his first work, The Struggle for Equality, prompted me to tell him that I thought it brought out a number of crucial issues. He pointed out that these books appeared at a time “when the whole reinterpretation of Reconstruction was just getting started, and that was where my first interest lay, in the sort of challenges against the Dunning interpretation of Reconstruction and the fashioning of a new interpretation that was much more sympathetic to the radical Republicans and their goals. ![]() In response to a question about other historians or historical writers, aside from Woodward, who had influenced him, Professor McPherson mentioned Eric McKitrick's Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction and a biography of Edwin M. And when I got there, the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, I was suddenly struck by the parallels between the times in which I was living and what had happened exactly, I mean exactly in some cases, 100 years earlier.” I was just becoming conscious of what was going on in the world at this time, so I thought, ‘This is a strange place, this South.' So I decided that maybe I'd like to try to find out more about it, study Southern history, so I really went to Hopkins because C. But this was in the late ‘50s, at the time of the Little Rock school desegregation crisis and the Montgomery bus boycott. The problems of urban society and of the South were totally in another world, as far as I was concerned. “I was in Baltimore at Johns Hopkins University at the time of the civil rights movement. “It was the civil rights movement,” Professor McPherson confirmed. I began by asking if there had been something in his background which predisposed him to be interested in the Civil War-”Nothing,” he firmly replied-or whether the motive force had been the political atmosphere of the late 1950s, the civil rights movement, in particular. I spoke to Professor McPherson in late March in his book-lined office in Dickinson Hall on the Princeton campus, where he has taught for three decades. Subsequently I requested an interview and he was kind enough to consent. I sent the piece to Professor McPherson and he responded in December with a brief letter. The Decemissue of The International Workers Bulletin carried a favorable review by this writer of his latest work, What They Fought For, 1861-1865. He is also the author of two comprehensive studies of the Civil War, Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction (1982) and Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (1988), as well as a collection of essays, Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution (1991). ![]() He has paid particular attention, in works such as The Negro's Civil War: How American Negroes Felt and Acted During the War for the Union (1965) and Marching Toward Freedom: The Negro in the Civil War (1967), to the role of slaves in their own liberation. Professor McPherson's dissertation, published in 1964 as The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction, was a groundbreaking study of the Abolitionist movement during the Civil War. Peter, Minnesota in 1958 and received his Ph.D. On the basis of an extensive analysis of historical fact, Professor McPherson has refuted attempts to diminish the significance of the great conflict, dismiss its accomplishments and denigrate its leading figures.īorn in 1936 in North Dakota and raised in Minnesota, he graduated from Gustavus Adolphus College in St. For more than 30 years, in many books, articles and essays, he has championed the view that the Civil War was a revolutionary struggle of epic dimensions. ![]() ![]() McPherson of Princeton University is perhaps the foremost historian of the Civil War period currently writing and teaching in the United States. Originally published in the International Workers Bulletin, June 19, 1995 ![]()
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