Printed below are excerpts from America’s Revolutionary Heritage, by George Novack. This is one of Path–finder’s Books of the Month for May. The items quoted appear in the chapter titled "The Civil War--its place in history," written by Novack in 1961. Copyright © 1971 by Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission. Subheadings are by the Militant.

BY GEORGE NOVACK  
The Civil War had deep historical roots. It was the inevitable product of two interlacing processes. One was the degeneration of the First American Revolution, which un–folded by slow stages until it culminated in open counterrevolution. The other was the rise of capitalist industrialism with its contradictory effects upon American social development. The interaction of these two fundamental factors, the first rooted in national soil and the second stemming from world conditions, constituted the principal driving force in American history between the close of the first revolutionary struggle and the outbreak of the second.

It is impossible to understand the necessity for a Second American Revolution without grasping the dynamics of these two interpenetrating processes out of which it emerged. The First American Revolution took place in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The second unfolded in the middle of the nineteenth century. Separated by an interval of almost seventy-five years, these two revolutions are customarily regarded as totally different and completely disconnected events. This view is superficial and false. In reality the First American Revolution and the Civil War form two parts of an indivisible whole. They comprised distinct yet interlinked stages in the development of the bourgeois-democratic revolution in the United States.

The bourgeois-national revolutionary movement in North America had five main tasks to fulfill. These were: (1) to free the American people from foreign domination; (2) to consolidate the separate colonies or states into one nation; (3) to set up a democratic republic; (4) to place state power in the hands of the bourgeoisie; and (5) most important of all, to rid American society of its precapitalist encumbrances (Indian tribalism, feudalism, slavery) in order to permit the full and free expansion of capitalist forces of production and exchange. These five tasks were all bound together, the solution of one preparing the conditions for the solution of the rest.

The First Revolution solved the first three of these tasks. The Patriots’ struggles liberated thirteen colonies from British rule; the ensuing class contention for power (1783-1788) led to the creation of a federal union; the new nation set up a democratic republic. It went quite otherwise with the last two. Although the Revolution cleansed the colonies of much feudal rubbish and cleared the ground for the swift growth of American capitalism and American nationhood, it failed to place the scepter firmly in the hands of the big bourgeoisie or to effect a thoroughgoing reorganization of American society on a bourgeois basis.

These deficiencies of the first bourgeois revolution were not immediately evident and took time to manifest themselves in full force. At first the Revolution seemed entirely successful and its outcome satisfactory to the northern capitalists. They had attained the paramount position in the new republic, which they governed together with the southern planters with whom they had waged the war, written the Constitution, and formed the Union.

But the merchants, financiers, and manufacturers proved incapable of maintaining their hegemony. After a brief though important period in supreme authority during Washington and Adams’s administrations, their direct political representatives were compelled to turn over national leadership to the plantation aristocracy. The bourgeois conquest of political power had turned out to be premature. This was confirmed when the mercantile capitalists subsequently failed to recover the supremacy they relinquished in 1800 to the slavocracy and had to rest content with second rank....  
 
International context of Civil War
For almost twenty-five years [from 1847 to 1871] the entire Western world was a fiery furnace of war and revolution. These were the most turbulent years humanity had experienced since the Napoleonic Wars or was to know until the First World War. With–in this furnace were forged not only the imperialist powers of modern Europe, which were to rule the earth until 1914, but the nation destined to outstrip them as the mightiest of world powers: the capitalist United States of North America.

The Second American Revolution must be viewed within this world-historical setting. Our Civil War was neither an isolated nor a purely national phenomenon. It was one of the most important links in the chain of conflicts that issued directly out of the world economic crisis of 1857 and constituted the great bourgeois-democratic revolutionary movement of the mid-nineteenth century....

American democracy was defended and extended by the coalition of class forces that fought and won the Civil War. But at its best this democracy has remained restricted. At no time since have the masses of American people exercised decisive control over the national government. Whether Republicans or Democrats held the White House and Congress, the plutocrats have ruled the country and determined its major policies in war or peace.  
 
 
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