Top-notch narrative-style writing on what is possibly one of the most intriguing events in modern history, the American civil war. Proof of the fascination with this era: there have been more pages covering the civil war than all other eras of American history combined. I've been interested in the subject ever since I visited the Gettysburg battleground as a kid.

The 1860s was a period of immense change for the United States, perhaps moreso than any other time period of the same length. The Republican party was formed from the ashes of the Whigs, and elected its first president, Abraham Lincoln. Countless other political changes (including the most well-know, the abolition of slavery) are documented in the book. Vast cultural change occurred during this time as well. Many new terms entered the American vernacular, for example: sideburns, contraband (originally referring to slaves that escaped to the Union lines), and greenbacks. The United States was used as a plural noun prior to the war ("The United States are..."), and afterward, the singular form we use to this day ("The United States is...")

I found this book to be an incredible page-turner, as much as most fiction. Partially this is McPherson's clever writing, stopping to examine interesting details while not getting bogged down in them. (Even the descriptions of battlefield maneuvers, something I would normally find quite dry, were quite exciting in most cases.) But a bigger part is probably just that the events of the war were so unique and intrinsically interesting. The distinctivie personalities of the generals and political figures shines through dramatically, again more like fiction. Generals like Lee, Grant, Jackson, Hood, Bragg, and Sherman execute their orders with unique flair. Lincoln himself is well known for his pithy one-liners: but put in the context of the events of the war, his genius at understanding and summarizing complex situations with simple metaphors and turns of phrase is even more dramatic.

It's also interesting to read of the great political strife in the North during the war. The tide of public opinion and the turnout of Lincoln's second term election has many, many elements that sound quite familiar, like echoes of today's politics with the Bush administration. Lincoln is today regarded as one of the great US presidents, but in his time he was far from popular, and even outright hated by a large portion of the population.

I set down this book not entirely convinced that the war was justified. Lincoln's single-minded determination to prevent states from succession was and still is questionable in both its constitutionality and its morality. The war caused the death of over half a million Americans, more than every other war the nation has fought since - combined. The southern countryside was left ravaged and the economy destroyed.

Naturally one balances this against the largest positive outcome, the abolition of slavery - one of the most heinous institutions ever perpetrated by mankind. But this was almost an accident. Lincoln had no intention of freeing any slaves when the war began. The Emancipation Proclamation was a tactic used to aid the war effort; as proof of this, consider that it did not free any slaves in Northern states!

In any case, the outcome of the war certainly changed the United States as a nation forever. It ushered in the era of centralized government in place of state's rights. The federal government was put on a new course after the 1860s, one of expanding federal power, increased homogenization across the nation as a whole, taxation, social programs, rights and suffrage expanded to new classes of people, a national draft, and so forth. Whether you think each of these elements or the new direction in general was good in the long run or not, it seems likely that very little of this would have been possible without the changes wrought by the civil war.