James M. McPherson

• 1. Introduction

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  James M. McPherson once said that a historian's job is to cut through the myths a people tell about itself, and get closer to reality. That belief runs through more than five decades of writing about the American Civil War. It helped earn him the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era.

  McPherson has done more than write history. He has also fought over how that history gets remembered, from preserving battlefields to challenging a Confederate monument's place in the nation's most storied cemetery. What turned a professor at Princeton into a public combatant over Civil War memory? And why does a decades-old monument still divide historians and neo-Confederates today?

• 2. From North Dakota to Princeton

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  Born in Valley City, North Dakota, on the 11th of October 1936, McPherson grew up far from the Civil War battlefields he later studied. He graduated from St. Peter High School in St. Peter, Minnesota. In 1958, he earned a Bachelor of Arts from Gustavus Adolphus College, also in St. Peter, graduating magna cum laude. He then studied at Johns Hopkins University under the historian C. Vann Woodward, receiving his Ph.D. in 1963.

  McPherson joined the faculty of Princeton University in 1962, a year before he finished his doctorate. He would go on to hold the title of George Henry Davis '86 Professor Emeritus of United States History there.

  Away from campus, McPherson is married and has one child, a private life behind the public battles over memory that came to define his career.

• 3. A Historian's Bookshelf

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  In 1965, McPherson's first major book, The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction, won the Anisfield-Wolf Award. That same year, he published The Negro's Civil War: How American Blacks Felt and Acted During the War for the Union.

  In 1988, McPherson published Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, which won him the Pulitzer Prize the following year. Two years later, his 1990 book, Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution, argued that emancipation amounted to a second American revolution.

  For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War, published in 1998, received the Lincoln Prize. In 2002, McPherson released two books: a scholarly study, Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam 1862, and a children's history of the war, Fields of Fury.

  His other works include The Abolitionist Legacy: From Reconstruction to the NAACP, published in 1975. He followed it with Drawn with the Sword: Reflections on the American Civil War in 1996.

  That same argumentative edge would carry into a later essay collection that turned from Civil War history toward the wars of his own era.

• 4. Myths and Modern Wars

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  In 2007, McPherson published This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War, a collection of essays on the conflict. One essay examines why it is harder to negotiate an end to a war than to start one. This is especially true when regime change is a war aim for both sides.

  McPherson put it plainly: "For at least the past two centuries, nations have usually found it harder to end a war than to start one." He continued, "Americans learned that bitter lesson in Vietnam, and apparently having forgotten it, we're forced to learn it all over again in Iraq."

  McPherson pointed to the American Civil War itself as an example, since both the Union and the Confederacy pursued regime change against each other. It took four years to end that war.

  McPherson has been direct about what he thinks a historian is for. "There are all kinds of myths that a people has about itself, some positive, some negative, some healthy and some not healthy," he said. "I think that one job of the historian is to try to cut through some of those myths and get closer to some kind of reality. So that people can face their current situation realistically, rather than mythically. I guess that's my sense of what a historian ought to do."

  That instinct to challenge convenient myths would win him recognition well beyond the classroom, including honors from prize committees and government institutions alike.

• 5. Recognition and Honors

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  In 1991, the American Philosophical Society elected McPherson to its ranks. In 1995, he received the American Academy of Achievement's Golden Plate Award, presented by fellow historian and Awards Council member David McCullough.

  The National Endowment for the Humanities named McPherson its 2000 Jefferson Lecturer in the humanities. Announcing the selection, NEH chairman William R. Ferris said McPherson "has helped millions of Americans better understand the meaning and legacy of the American Civil War." Ferris added that, "by establishing the highest standards for scholarship and public education about the Civil War and by providing leadership in the movement to protect the nation's battlefields, he has made an exceptional contribution to historical awareness in America."

  In 2002, McPherson received the Lincoln Forum's Richard Nelson Current Award of Achievement. In 2007, he became the first person to win the Pritzker Military Library Literature Award for lifetime achievement in military history, a prize worth $100,000. That same year, the Society for Military History gave him its Samuel Eliot Morison Prize, also for lifetime achievement.

  McPherson was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009. That same year, he was a co-winner of the Lincoln Prize for Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief.

  He served as president of the American Historical Association in 2003. His public profile extended to documentaries too. He appeared as himself in Civil War Journal in 1994, and in The Conspirator: Mary Surratt and the Plot to Kill Lincoln in 2011. He also appeared in a National Geographic program on The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King in 2003, and in The Gettysburg Address in 2015.

  By then, McPherson's reputation for defending Civil War history extended past the page and the screen, into lobbying against development on the battlefields themselves.

• 6. Guarding the Battlefields

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  From 1993 to 1994, McPherson served as president of Protect Historic America. In that role, he lobbied against Disney's plan to build a theme park near the Manassas battlefield.

  He also served on the boards of the Civil War Trust and its predecessor, the Association for the Preservation of Civil War Sites. From 1990 to 1993, McPherson sat on the Civil War Sites Advisory Commission.

  That commitment to protecting how the war is remembered on the ground would eventually pull McPherson into a dispute over a monument, not a battlefield, at Arlington National Cemetery.

• 7. The Arlington Wreath Dispute

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  In May 2009, McPherson joined several other historians in signing a petition. It asked President Barack Obama not to lay a wreath at the Confederate Monument at Arlington National Cemetery.

  The petition stated: "The Arlington Confederate Monument is a denial of the wrong committed against African Americans by slave owners, Confederates, and neo-Confederates, through the monument's denial of slavery as the cause of secession and its holding up of Confederates as heroes." It continued: "This implies that the humanity of Africans and African Americans is of no significance."

  The petition also warned that the monument today encourages the modern neo-Confederate movement and gives it a rallying point. It argued that a presidential wreath enhances the prestige of neo-Confederate events built around the memorial.

  Obama himself never addressed the petition directly. Instead, he sent a wreath to the Confederate Memorial. He also began a new practice, sending a presidential wreath to the African American Civil War Memorial in Washington, D.C. as well.

  The Sons of Confederate Veterans ultimately praised Obama for his handling of the wreaths, the last word in a dispute that started with a single petition signed by a handful of historians.