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2. The Second American Revolution

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About this Lecture

Lecture

In this module, we explore the idea that the American Civil War was a second American Revolution, focusing in particular on: (i) the extent to which the American Civil War cleared up some of the ambiguity of the Tenth Amendment; (ii) the extent to which the Civil War marked a revolution in economic, industrial, bureaucratic and geographic terms; (iii) emancipation; (iv) the extent to which Lincoln conceived of the confederate states as a separate nation, and why this was important; (v) the extent to which the war was about the abolition of slavery: Lincoln's Gettysburg address, Frederick Douglass' 'What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?' speech; and (vi) what the war was called – was it a 'civil war' or a 'rebellion'? – and why this was important.

Course

In this course, Professor Susan-Mary Grant (Newcastle University) explores the American Civil War (1861-65). In the first module, we think about the immediate background to the secession of South Carolina from the United States in December 1860, including the impact of the Dred Scott case and the rise of Abraham Lincoln. In the second module, we explore the idea that the American Civil War was a second American Revolution, before turning in the third module to look more closely at the issue of slavery and emancipation. In the fourth and five modules, we consider the course of the war from the perspective of the Union and the Confederacy, respectively, before turning in the sixth module to think how the historiography relating to the American Civil War has changed since the 1960s, as well as thinking about the war's legacy to this day.

Lecturer

Professor Susan-Mary Grant is Professor of American History at Newcastle University. She is the author of North Over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era (2000), The War for a Nation: The American Civil War (2006) and editor of Legacy of Disunion: The Enduring Significance of the American Civil War (2003) and Themes of the American Civil War: The War Between the States (2010).