McPherson's book should be commended for its efforts at a one volume account of the Civil War. I still recommend it to people starting to read about the Civil War for the first time. McPherson nevertheless emphasizes the moral rather than political role slavery played in the cause of the war. You can regularly find him on C-Span comparing the 1860's and 1960's, with Lincoln as a Civil rights leader etc.
Of course just about everyone in the CW history field will lean pro North or pro South a bit. For example VaTech's Robertson seems pro South while UVa's Ghallagher leans pro north, yet neither are offensive to most people. For a professional historian (yes I know he's not the only one) he bends over backwards in his anti-South bias. He brags about it. Perhaps he's reacting to criticism from Neo-Confeds. Even so, he's gotten more liberal since Battle Cry came out a few years back. McPherson was originally trained as a Presidential historian. When he dabbled in the CW and it somehow boomed and he found he could make money in it (unlike professors whose expertise is 4th century French agriculture I suppose)he's become some sort of "expert". Now he's somehow the official Civil War Historian Laureate of the United States. He is a sub-par CW scholar amongst his peers. I mean, yes Battle Cry of Freedom is better than Di Lorenzo or those dumbass Kennedey books the Neo-confeds tout, but not that much better.
free dixie,sw
Yes, he certainly does that...sometimes as a commentator for NPR and Pacifica radio, which are not the most confederate-friendly media outlets themselves. If a person wants to quote McPherson, debate McPherson, read McPherson, or discuss McPherson on a factual basis it is his right to do so. But to pretend that McPherson is some above the fray non-biased scholar, as Walt has done directly in the face of evidence of McPherson's biases, is dishonest at best.
Perhaps he's reacting to criticism from Neo-Confeds. Even so, he's gotten more liberal since Battle Cry came out a few years back.
I think he's gotten more openly liberal in the days since that publication. He's been more willing to appear publicly in leftist forums and among radical leftists. This has included activism in defense of Bill Clinton during impeachment, an advisory role among leftist scholars to Bill Bradley, and publication on the website of the Trotskyite Marxist party. He's also become more openly anti-southern, weighing in on political issues involving the confederate flag and the sort. He also recently hosted one of those campus academic "dialogue" (read: left wing whine session) things on slavery reparations, though I don't know if he took a side openly.
I do think McPherson's academic leftism has been strong for some time though. As far back as I can tell he's held the righteous/moralist view of the war you talk of and drawn a comparison between the 1860's and 1960's. In addition his writings have drawn toward the far left in indirect academic senses. I remember reading a journal article he published in the early 1970's that argued 100 years of activism by white liberals was to thank for the civil rights movement and more or less tried to argue that the "black power" movement of the time should not forget white liberals. He also recited a list of what he called successful black leaders in his article, many of them being mainstream like MLK. But he was careful to include radicals like WEB DuBois and, perhaps the most bizarre, Stokely Carmichael. All in all it was a very strange topic for any historian to choose and write about, save of course those on the far left.