The book, "Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution",
looks largely at the Civil War and the role that Lincoln
had in many of the transformations that came about from it, such as the slaves that were liberated and the political and social order in the South. The
paper discusses McPherson's claim that the 16th president was a conservative and a revolutionary. The paper shows, too, that one of the most significant things about this book is that McPherson
looks at something that many other Civil War scholars and historians tend to ignore, Lincoln's war leadership ability and strategy.