The term “age of Revolution,” since it was used by Eric Hobsbawm in his trilogy of books on the “long” nineteenth-century in the 1960s, is normally used to describe the period between the American Revolution in the 1770s and the democratic revolutions that swept Europe in the late 1840s. Yet, the interpretation of the American Civil War of 1861-65 as a Second American Revolution suggests that the “age of Revolution” did not die on the barricades in 1848-1849. Historians, consciously or unconsciously, but all too often, consider “revolution” through the lens of Marxist interpretation. Events that have the appearance of being driven by bourgeois or proletarian forces attempting to overthrow the power structures above them are called revolutions, even if they fail. But if we consider a revolution to be something that achieves profound and fundamental change, then the Civil War should be seen as a revolution that was far more successful than any other in its age.
On the face of it, the American Civil War was a rebellion (arguably a failed revolution) of several southern states who seceded, joined the Confederate States of America and waged war against the United States. But it catalysed a more significant northern-driven revolution against the injustices enshrined in the nation’s founding documents. Like other revolutions, it picked up momentum, becoming more radical over time. By the end of the war, its goals had shifted from simply preserving the Union to abolishing slavery and granting the full rights of citizenship to Black Americans throughout the United States. The restored nation was fundamentally different from the one that existed before the war, even if the full ramifications of the change took decades to set in.
Abraham Lincoln was an unlikely revolutionary. Through war as a Commander in Chief, however, Lincoln drove a change that was more radical and profound than any other of the world revolutions that are remembered by that name between the death of Bolivar in 1830 and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. The Civil War’s most revolutionary moment was the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1st, 1863, in which Lincoln announced that enslaved people in the states in rebellion would henceforward be free. Prior to this Lincoln had quashed his own generals’ attempts to emancipate slaves in confederate areas under Union control. The Proclamation did not abolish slavery in the border states that did not secede or in southern areas occupied by the Union army. Far more sweeping was Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, passed by Congress in 1865, which ended slavery throughout the United States, and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments ratified soon after Lincoln’s assassination, in which Blacks gained equality before the law in all parts of the United States.[1]