Historian Hugh Brogan, reviewing the book, commends McPherson for initially describing "the republic at midcentury" as "a divided society, certainly, and a violent one, but not one in which so appalling a phenomenon as civil war is likely.

In an interview, McPherson claimed: "Both sides in the Civil War professed to be fighting for the same 'freedoms' established by the American Revolution and the Constitution their forefathers fought for in the Revolution—individual freedom, democracy, a republican form of government, majority rule, free elections, etc.

"[7] Michael P. Johnson regarded the book as an overarching synthesis of evidence that refutes Walt Whitman's claim that the war should primarily be understood from the perspective of the sufferers of battle.

[8] Robert Franklin Durden noted McPherson as "in the nationalist tradition of [James Ford] Rhodes and [Allan] Nevins" and his borrowed view of southerners as "preemptive counterrevolutionaries" from Arno Mayer.

[9] Harold Hyman positively compared its compactness to Peter Parish's America's Civil War (1975), but criticized its misleading phraseology regarding geographic mobility of wage earners, his use of "women of questionable virtue", "troop train" when referring to events in 1861, the exclusive riding prowess of "the sons of Virginia gentry", and including the greying of Robert E. Lee's beard instead of expanding on important issues such as slave marriage.