The Civil War in the Age of Nationalism (Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions of the American Civil War) 080718151X, 9780807181515

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THE CIVIL WAR IN THE AGE OF N AT I O N A L I S M

CONFLICTING WORLDS: NEW DIMENSIONS OF THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR T. Michael Parrish, Series Editor

THE

C I V I L WA R IN THE AGE OF

N AT I O N A L I S M NIELS EICHHORN & DUNCAN A. CAMPBELL

Louisiana State University Press 

  Baton Rouge

Published by Louisiana State University Press lsupress.org Copyright © 2024 by Louisiana State University Press All rights reserved. Except in the case of brief quotations used in articles or reviews, no part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any format or by any means without written permission of Louisiana State University Press. Designer: Michelle A. Neustrom Typeface: Minion Pro, text; Brandon Text, display Cover photograph: Detail of Goddess of Victory and Peace from the Pennsylvania Monument at Gettysburg, PA. Photograph courtesy John Legg Photography. Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Eichhorn, Niels, 1984– author. | Campbell, Duncan A., 1968– author. Title: The Civil War in the age of nationalism / Niels Eichhorn, and Duncan A. Campbell. Description: Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, [2024] | Series: Conflicting worlds: new dimensions of the American Civil War | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2024004564 (print) | LCCN 2024004565 (ebook) | ISBN 978-08071-8151-5 (cloth) | ISBN 978-0-8071-8182-9 (pdf) | ISBN 978-0-8071-8181-2 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Civil war—History—19th century. | United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865. | Crimean War, 1853–1856. | Franco-Prussian War, 1870–1871. | Peru—History—War of Independence, 1820–1829. Classification: LCC JC328.5 .E33 2024 (print) | LCC JC328.5 (ebook) | DDC 303.6/4—dc23/eng/20240131 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024004564 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024004565

In memory of Phillip Earl Myers (April 26, 1944–­November 3, 2017)

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There are many and various lusts, of which some have names of their own, while others have not. For who could readily give a name to the lust of ruling, which has yet a powerful influence in the soul of tyrants, as civil wars bear witness? —­S A I N T A U G U S T I N E , City of God, XIV, 15

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction 1

1. Nations and Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century 13

2. Secession, Independence, and the Limitations of Nation-­States 35

3. Transforming Liberalism and Representative Government 62



4. Emancipation as a Transnational Phenomenon 84



5. Three Modernizing Wars 105



6. Mediation and Intervention in Theory and Practice 122



7. The American Civil War and the Evangelical Century 138



8. Realpolitik beyond Otto von Bismarck 157



9. Imperial Frontiers and Indigenous Peoples 174



10. Reconstruction(s) 190



11. Remembrance and Reconciliation? 205

Conclusion 224

Notes 235

Bibliography 283

Index 327

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AC K N O W L E D G M E N T S

S

cholarship is often an isolated affair. Coauthoring a book, however, brings together two distinctive sets of ideas, styles, and personalities that need to work collaboratively. Working together on this project was a great joy and experience as we both saw eye to eye on many issues. A number of new books and articles on the subject came out during the time of writing and revising the book, and it was always a delight to engage in hour-­long conversations, sometimes by messages, to incorporate the latest scholarship into our own work. From the first moment that we sat down at the Consortium of the Revolutionary Era in High Point, North Carolina, this proved to be an exciting project, and we afterward presented several papers on panels together, showcasing our ideas. As such, we are very grateful to Sabrina Cervantes, David Prior, Andre Fleche, Gregory Downs, and Mark Summers for their insight and feedback during those panel discussions. Special thanks also to the audiences at those presentations—­the Society of Civil War Historians, the Southern Historical Society, and the Southern Conference on British Studies—­and those who asked thoughtful and challenging questions, including Beau Cleland, Kate Masur, and Wayne Wei-­Siang Hsieh, among others. We also want to thank our friends and colleagues who humored our inquiries, questions, and the all-­too-­often run by of ideas. This roster would include Patrick Kelly, John Legg, David Schieffler, and Ryan Jordan, who also offered assistance (especially with chapter 7) and encouragement. We also wish to thank T. Michael Parrish for inviting us to write this book and Rand Dotson for his editorial support as well as that of the Louisiana State University Press team, including freelance copyeditor Kevin Brock, who made this book a reality. While we are

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responsible for any errors or omissions in here, the contributions of the above greatly improved this work. No book is complete, however, without the patience and support of the author’s family. For Niels, the process of writing and editing was interrupted by little Olaf. His giggly personality and ever-­increasing demands for papa’s attention were a welcome distraction, as he frequently intruded on editorial meetings and conversations. Special thanks to Georgia, Virginia, and Walter, whose requests for walks and hikes were essential for my physical and mental health. Of course, the most special and important thanks go to my wonderful and lovely wife, Stephanie, as we embark on our crazy new adventure in Austria. Duncan remains grateful to his parents, Dr. Neil and Mrs. Sheila Campbell, for their advice and encouragement and to his wife, Bobbie Jo, for her love and consistent support in all aspects of his life for twenty years now. Special thanks are also owed to the twins, Emma and Neil, who are always quick to remind their father that it is no longer the twentieth century, and to Mia, the family dog, who ensures that Duncan gets regular exercise.

Early in the process of writing this book, we decided to dedicate this global history of the Civil War era to the late Phillip Earl Myers. Phil was a dear friend and mentor to both of us. He received his PhD from the University of Iowa and was a leading scholar of nineteenth-­century British-­American diplomacy. Phil’s two books, Caution and Cooperation: The American Civil War in British-­American Relations (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2008) and Dissolving Tensions: Rapprochement and Resolution in British-­American-­ Canadian Relations in the Treaty of Washington Era, 1865–­1914 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2015) were an inspiration to both of us. Unfortunately, Phil passed too early and sadly never finished the third book of his planned trilogy. Previous scholars of American Civil War diplomacy had begun their works with southern secession in 1860 and portrayed the conflict as an international crisis that nearly precipitated a third Anglo-­American, if not a world, war. Phil, by placing the subject within a wider chronological timeframe, convincingly demonstrated otherwise. During the conflict, British and American xii

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statesmen, regardless of occasional genuflection to the widespread Anglophobia and anti-­American public sentiment on each side of the Atlantic, carefully adhered to the modus vivendi established by previous administrations’ resolution of the territorial disputes over the U.S.-­Canadian frontier, the imperial rivalry in Latin America, and their quarrels over the international slave trade. Further, their following the contours of this diplomatic legacy during the Civil War allowed them, in turn, to successfully settle their outstanding differences in the Americas and elsewhere. Indeed, they succeeded to such an extent that, if it was not a foregone conclusion that the United States would join the Triple Entente in the First World War, it was virtually inconceivable that it would side with the Triple Alliance. At the same time, Phil demonstrated that there was nothing preordained or inevitable about this outcome. Generations of British and American politicians from 1815 to 1914 had to make difficult decisions and accept unsatisfactory compromises—­often in the face of their respective public’s antagonism. Equally, he pointed to the fact that the United States and Great Britain did not exist in a vacuum—­at the same time they engaged with each other, they had relations with, and concerns about, other nations to weigh in the balance. The nineteenth-­century world was an interconnected one, and by demonstrating this, Phil considerably deepened our understanding of American Civil War diplomacy. Through his wide circle of historians interested in nineteenth-­century diplomacy, Phil introduced us. While both of us have published on the era’s diplomacy, we are more interested in the wider social, cultural, and political interconnections of the nineteenth-­century Atlantic World in which the American Civil War took place. As such, we were delighted when T. Michael Parrish invited us to produce this volume for his series at Louisiana State University Press, allowing us to place the Civil War era within a global context. Phil was an incredible human being and mentor. We exchanged many project proposals and ideas with him. On numerous occasions Phil devoted hours of his day to reading draft publications and provided incredibly helpful feedback that strengthened the works in question. It was a pleasure to return the favor and read and provide advice for his last project, Dissolving Tensions. We have never met a scholar as generous with their time and support as Phil. He was a gem among Civil War historians. xiii

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It was while we were in the process of researching and writing this book that news came of Phil’s unexpected passing. Having both benefited from his counsel in the past, we bitterly regret not being able to take advantage of it for the purposes of this study. It is thus out of recognition of Phil’s scholarly accomplishments and gratitude for his mentorship of us both that we respectfully dedicate this work to his memory.

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INTRODUCTION

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n 1867, during the height of Reconstruction, the New York Herald opined, “We shall not allow ourselves at present to forecast the future; but we cannot conclude without repeating the statement, that the situation of affairs on the European continent is fitted to inspire alarm.” It went on to list all the issues that had occupied Europe for the past decade, principal among them increased tensions between France and Italy caused by Italian demands that Rome be made the capital of their newly unified nation-­state and the French intervention in Mexican affairs just as the Germans neared the completion of their own national-­unification project. Using its typically prejudiced reasoning, the Herald identified the source of all of Europe’s problems: Napoleon III.1 Yet these complex international interactions that threatened the global peace had grown out of longstanding issues and developments, which are a major focus of this work. Just as the American Civil War had its antecedents, so, too, did events elsewhere, and the conflict between the rebellious states and the federal government resembled many such struggles abroad. The general experiences of nation-­state formation, secession, industrialization, emancipation, frontier and imperial expansion, the changing nature of modern warfare, and political realignments were all part of a nineteenth-­century global shift.2 This comparative study of the Civil War era explores how the American conflict fit into global trends and helped craft our own contemporary world.3 The Civil War in the Age of Nationalism is partially in response to the Twenty-­Ninth Annual Robert Fortenbaugh Memorial Lecture at Gettysburg College given by Carl Degler in 1990. Entitled “One among Many: The Civil War in Comparative Perspective,” Degler’s talk explored the conflict within the context of other contemporaneous events, noting that “if we recognize its similarities to other examples of nation-­building of that time we may obtain 1

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fresh insights into its character and its meaning then and now.” Confined to just a lecture, he could only examine a few possible avenues of comparison but clearly assumed that by looking at comparable events in other parts of the world, he could help broaden our field of vision.4 Some of Degler’s comparisons were well known, some of them having been made at the time, such as that the southern war for secession resembled the struggles in Hungary and other wars for independence or that the modernization struggle in Meiji Japan bore some resemblance to the rebellion in North America. At the same time, while dismissive of comparisons with Italian unification, Degler thought there were many analogies between German unification and the reunification of the United States. Otto von Bismarck united independent German states into a nation following Abraham Lincoln’s unifying of semiautonomous American states into a nation—­both of whom Degler described as “men of blood and iron.” He also perceived a fruitful comparison between the American Civil War and the Austro-­Prussian War in 1866 and the Sonderbundskrieg, a civil war in Switzerland in 1847.5 While Degler acknowledged the importance of comparative nationalisms in cases such as the attempt by British North America to form a stronger union in the Dominion of Canada and Mexico’s fight against foreign occupation by the French in the 1860s, such movements in the rest of the Americas, to say nothing of Asia, were conspicuously absent. Degler made brief mention of the Meiji Restoration but not of the far more devastating Taiping Rebellion in China (1850–­64) or the mutiny among the soldiers of the British East India Company in Bengal (1857–­58). Again, Degler was presenting a lecture and therefore had limited time with which to work, but he nonetheless raised the possibility of comparative opportunities for American Civil War scholarship. Unfortunately, his proposal and his call have remained largely unanswered. As Enrico Dal Lago pointed out in his 2021 historiographical essay, some groundbreaking new works have taken comparative and transnational approaches to the American Civil War that have greatly enhanced the understanding of the conflict in its global context. He also observed, however, that “transnational and comparative scholars have only briefly mentioned the interpretation of the US Civil War era as a local iteration of this global phenomenon that occurred in comparable ways in different countries such as Germany and Japan, and this idea [of empire and nation building] has never 2

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been the object of a specific study.” 6 While the essay focused primarily on the notion of global empire building, Dal Lago has himself acknowledged Degler’s call with a series of excellent comparative works, ranging from juxtaposing William Lloyd Garrison and Giuseppe Mazzini to pointing out similarities between the agrarian southern parts of Italy and eastern Tennessee.7 This makes him a leading proponent of the comparative approach to history. Other historians have used a transnational methodology. One of the leading voices regarding this approach is the Australian historian Ian Tyrell. Tyrell views it as a method to move the study of history beyond the nation-­state and to challenge the notion of the “reigning primacy of the nation as a legal and political fact.” 8 His study Transnational Nation: United States History in Global Perspective since 1789, covering American history up to the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York in 2001, contains a ten-­page chapter on the American Civil War. As with Degler, Tyrell agrees that there were many similarities between the conflict in the United States and the unification of Italy and Germany, the Meiji Restoration, and the union of British North America. In contrast, however, Tyrell points to the similarities in global emancipation processes, not just to end chattel slavery in the Americas but also the end of serfdom in Russia, as well as the economic consequences of the brief stoppage of the flow of cotton and the migration of former Confederates away from the failed state experiment to other parts of the Americas. These pioneering scholars opened the door to thinking about the American Civil War era in a larger global framework. As more historians approach the United States from a comparative perspective, different forms of transnational scholarship have emerged.9 The most common examines how foreign events as presented by newspapers, in travel literature, or via personal experiences shaped the United States. These studies sometimes embrace comparative modes of study, but more often rely on the experiences of immigrants and their activities within the United States to illustrate how foreign examples were used to advance its own nation-­building process. In most cases the individuals examined are Europeans who represent the Irish, Polish, Hungarian, German, or Italian national experiences, with the occasional inclusion of the French following France’s political upheavals.10 Rarely do Latin America or Ibro-­Europe make an appearance in these transnational histories.11 Such studies, however, do have an advantage over those 3

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whose discussion of the U.S. place in the world rely entirely on American sources and thus do not bring a truly foreign perspective to the conversation.12 What is clear, however, is that two distinctive schools of thought have emerged in the small but growing field of transnational American Civil War history, which we will term the “exceptionalist” and the “integrated” approaches. The integrated approach to transnational scholarship views the United States as a nation among nations. Acknowledging that the United States has unique aspects, it points to the fact that the same may be said of every other nation. Further, while the United States was undeniably a consequential nation in the nineteenth century, so, too, were others that were, at certain times, far more so. Thus, with respect to the American Civil War, the integrated transnational approach sees the conflict as very much akin to other wars of national unification and secession globally, with obvious similarities and connections between emancipation and its aftermath in the United States and other former slave-­owning societies. This approach is unsympathetic to the idea that the Civil War was a crisis for republicanism globally and that its future, as well as the maintenance and expansion of democratic electoral systems, depended upon the Union’s victory. It also rejects the notion that there was some sort of imperial conspiracy to destroy the republics in the Americas, not the least because some illiberal empires, such as Russia, were wholly supportive of the Union. Similarly, the integrated transnational approach tends to consider domestic factors contributing to changes abroad as well as international influences.13 The exceptionalist approach, by contrast, essentially places the United States at the center of world events, making it, as Tyrell points out, the base measurement for any comparison.14 Or in its most extreme form, the United States becomes the sun around which other nations orbit. This approach simply assumes that it is the world’s first modern nation-­state and the birthplace of modern democracy—­in short, the pathfinder nation for all the others. As Benjamin Schwarz observes of this, “we [Americans] have made ourselves at home in the world, characteristically, by regarding it as America in the making.” 15 While this approach does not necessarily claim the United States was the first to do everything—­it will, for example, concede that other nations abolished slavery earlier—­it nonetheless tacitly assumes a progressive landmark has not actually been achieved, or come into existence proper, until 4

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after the matter has been settled in the United States. Looking at the American Civil War from this vantage, the future of democracy and even modernity itself depended upon the Union victory—­not only would the “American experiment” be undone by a Confederate victory but so, too, would all human progress be set back—­an argument made repeatedly by nineteenth-­century Americans, including Lincoln himself.16 This “shining city upon a hill” narrative depends upon a very narrow reading of historical events, to say the least, and has a habit of excluding people of color.17 Even if one is to overlook that problem, however, the fact remains that it rarely considers in any depth the national experiences of others within their own context. Instead, the tendency is to place their complex and contradictory aspects upon a procrustean bed that stretches or amputates facts running counter to its narrative. In the final analysis it Americanizes world history instead of globalizing American history. The shortcomings of this approach have been made manifest by, among others, the American Civil War historian Peter J. Parish. After providing a list of disparate nineteenth-­century personages from several nations and from across the political spectrum who were alleged to favor one side or the other in the Civil War, Parish admitted: “Clearly it [the conflict] provided no litmus-­ paper test for separating the forces of progress and reaction, liberalism and conservatism. Its message was confusing and full of ironies and paradoxes.” 18 These “ironies and paradoxes” were replicated elsewhere in other events and similarly attracted a disparate and diffuse audience of supporters and denigrators, all of whom viewed their own conflicts and those of others differently.19 In any case, the United States was certainly not alone in embracing a narrative of national exceptionalism. The British embraced a similar narrative in which their country prided itself on its unique place in Europe. After all, the United Kingdom was for a long time the most liberal and most stable government in Europe. A different kind of national exceptionalism, but one equally deeply held, was that of France, which regarded its revolution as the birthplace of modernity. All its subsequent political struggles were thus transformed into either a repudiation or vindication of the most important event in human affairs: the French Revolution. France’s political upheavals were thus, like America’s, those of all mankind’s. Another nation at the time that had a belief in its own exceptionalism was Russia, which was reinforced in the nine5

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teenth century—­as with Britain—­by its victory over Napoleon. Ideas of national exceptionalism are not even uniquely Western, as evidence of national exceptionalist beliefs may be found in China and Japan as well. No country is safe from a certain level of self-­centered and self-­satisfied self-­glorification. Transnational and comparative scholarship, however, must challenge, not explicitly or implicitly promote, notions of national exceptionalism, and this study takes that approach. The United States is thus viewed as being a nation among nations, part of a global communication, migration, and economic network that allowed for an open exchange of ideas and people. The contested narratives of national development, political liberalization, imperialism, and so on were all part and parcel of the mid-­nineteenth-­century world’s experience. A comparative study of the American Civil War era illustrates that the United States experienced many of the same issues that affected Europe, Asia, Africa, and the rest of the Americas. Comparative history has a lengthy record and many important proponents, from Marc Bloch back to early modern and Renaissance scholars like Vico and Machiavelli.20 Furthermore, this approach continues to enjoy scholarly interest because of the valuable insights it can provide.21 As Raymond Grew noted in 1980, however, there are potential pitfalls with comparative history, as “suspicion may result from methodological naïveté, intuitive nominalism, or sheer prejudice; but weightier concerns informed by an awareness of the common nineteenth-­century roots of all of the social sciences also seem to be involved.” 22 Furthermore, comparative history does assume a certain universality of the human condition—­that people across the world share certain conditions. Despite some challenges, including ethnocentrism, Grew sees much value in comparative studies. In the end, the greatest benefit from comparisons is opening people’s mind to narratives beyond the nation-­state. Two decades later, however, Philippa Levine sadly observed that Grew’s call remained unheralded, and few had done comparative history despite its promise.23 Levine then provides a basic explanation for what the discipline entails: a “historical investigation that works at multiple sites” and can look at both similarities and differences.24 Expressing concern about the easy conflation of world, global, transnational, and comparative approaches, Levine notes that historians often use comparative history to explore imperial projects and the relationship between local and metropole. Scholars are faced with 6

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the difficult decision of whether to present their story as a set of case studies or thematically grouped stories, the latter being favored by Levine. In closing she affirms, “we remake comparative history through an attentiveness to the interplay of local and global, to the meaning of rupture as well as communality, and always with an eye to the teleologies of essentialism that plague not just comparative but all forms of historical endeavor.” 25 Therefore, a thematic approach that explores continuities and differences on various levels provides a good approach to comparative history. With respect to Levine’s concern that transnational and comparative history are used interchangeably, transnational history’s primary goal is to better understand the nation-­state, inspired by the recognition of its fragility. As David Thelen explains, “We wanted to explore how people and ideas and institutions and cultures moved above, below, through and around, as well as within, the nation-­state, to investigate how well national borders contained or explained how people experienced history.” 26 Thus, transnationalism does embrace a certain comparative approach and, like comparative history, challenges the exceptionalism of the nation-­state narrative. Nation-­state historians, however, have often been reluctant to accept this challenge.27 The difficulty of comparative history is that it requires the historian to know more than is usually expected for a single-­topic endeavor. Relying on others’ works, the focus of which are not necessarily aligned with those of the comparative historian, brings its own challenges. Maurice Mandelbaum notes that the comparative historian “must rely on knowledge drawn from similar situations found at other times and places.” 28 He delineates between four different types of comparative history. First is the “social evolutionist” approach, which observes that all societies progress through similar stages of development allowing for the comparison of societies at similar levels of development. Second, the “genetic approach” looks at one specific society, exploring the similarities and differences it has with other societies and allowing for a deeper understanding of the subject society and potentially shared lineages and ancestries with the others. Third is the “phenomenological form,” influenced by other social sciences, in which two or more events, often at different historical times, are put into conversation with each other based on analogies to better understand a similar progress of events or origins and relying on “directly observable resemblances.” Fourth and finally, there is the “analytical 7

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form,” with scholars looking for points of communality to explain why countries, for example, developed in a similar form, especially if there is no shared origin or direct influence between each other. At the end of his elaboration, Mandelbaum provides a powerful reminder that comparative history “may help protect us against false analogies which lead us either to overestimate or to underestimate some of our accomplishments.” 29 While comparative history is practiced by many scholars of different eras and regions, historians of the United States and the oft-­assumed exceptional character of the country stand the most to benefit. Degler made this observation in 1968, noting that much of earlier U.S. historical scholarship was comparative, such as Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis, which postulated a difference between the United States and Europe. Degler’s essay was part of a series of articles in the Journal of Southern History on comparative history, and he took aim at his U.S. history colleagues, whose alleged comparative histories hardly made any comparisons despite that being essential to their topic.30 In the end, however, Marcus Gräser is correct: “The internationalization of historical writing is here to stay.” 31 Therefore, this study will embrace comparative history to illustrate the similarities and differences among various national and transnational developments during the Civil War era. The scope of this book raises some obvious terminological questions that are worth considering. In his lecture Degler pointed out that the conflict in the United States has gone by several different names. Usually today we simply use the term “American Civil War.” Yet the term “civil war” is really defined as two parties contending for the control of a national government by military means, such as in Spain during 1936–­39. Southern secession was about creating a new and separate nation from the United States—­not taking control of the federal government. This was in part why contemporaries employed the term the “War of the Rebellion,” which accurately underlined that the conflict was aimed at countering the South’s repudiation of federal authority. For a period after the conflict, the term the “War between the States” came into use, largely by southerners, who also coined the term “War of Southern Independence”—­both are still used by neo-­Confederates today—­which illustrated their perception about the war’s origin.32 Recently, Steven Hahn has suggested a return to the term “War of the Rebellion” to describe the conflict and avoid the ambiguities of the meaning of civil war.33 Although the authors 8

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agree with Hahn and use both terms in this work, the “American Civil War” remains the more frequent descriptor throughout on the grounds that it remains the more common term. The approach taken in this book is thematic rather than chronological. Instead of each chapter addressing a specific nation or event and comparing it to the American Civil War, a topical approach is used. While this has led to some events being discussed more than once, it also highlights their multivalence: just as the Civil War represented a wealth of issues, the same was true of events elsewhere in the world. The list of topics included in this study is hardly exhaustive; there is no possibility of covering everything. The goal is to explore the War of the Rebellion from a comparative perspective, looking at how the conflict’s various aspects mirrored those in other parts of the world. While the focus is, as the title states, to explore the Civil War in the age of nationalism, we consistently consider our comparisons to apply to the “Civil War era,” thus allowing for the inclusion of the antebellum, Reconstruction, and memory stages, which is in line with recent scholarly calls to study this era holistically and not in isolated sequence.34 The Civil War in the Age of Nationalism begins with a discussion of the nation-­state in chapter 1. The rebellion in the southern states was in large part the result of diverging notions of nationalism. The South had, over the decades before the war, developed its own separate identity that helped precipitate the conflict. The problem faced by the United States was one shared around the world: what constituted a nation and how does it form into a unified state? Despite being a sovereign entity for almost eighty years, the United States still lacked a cohesive national identity. Throughout the Americas but also in Europe, the development of national identities and nation-­states caused numerous conflicts with sometimes devastating consequences. Thus, the southern states were not alone in embracing secession, as chapter 2 illustrates. Ireland, Hungary, and many other peoples in the world similarly attempted to secede from larger political unions and create new nations and nationalities. Nationalism, however, contributed in other ways as well. As states struggled with the creation of nation-­states, political conflicts increased. Even before the late eighteenth century, people had demanded some form of political representation. The liberal state remained an unfinished edifice in the nineteenth century, as the revolutions in 1848 in Europe 9

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and the American Civil War demonstrated, and is the subject of chapter 3. Although ideas pertaining to the rights of individuals greatly shaped the arguments regarding slavery and emancipation, it was a slow road to freedom for the enslaved during the nineteenth century, with Saint Domingue and the United Kingdom examples both countering and supporting each other. Nor was the United States alone in freeing enslaved people during a civil war. As shown in chapter 4, however, American emancipation did not preordain the end of slavery in the Spanish or Brazilian empires, nor did abolition immediately follow in either location on its heels. A significant part of the modernization of the American Civil War era was visible in the technology used in the war itself and how military leadership was conducted, as explored in chapter 5. Although some Civil War historians have argued that the conflict was the first modern war, the Crimean War (1853–­56) half a decade earlier could be equally so described. So, too, for that matter, could the Franco-­German War (1870–­7 1), which took place five years later.35 All three struggles helped modernize warfare, making it increasingly destructive, yet all of them demonstrated antiquated notions regarding war and often relied on outmoded technology. Paradoxically, then, all three wars relied on technology that would be used with even greater devastation in the conflict of 1914–­18 while their battlefield tactics were often more reminiscent of the Napoleonic era. The American Civil War, like the Crimean and Franco-­ German Wars, was at a crossroads between the modern and the outdated. Something similar was the case with respect to international relations. The conflicts of the nineteenth century, including the American Civil War, all contributed to arguments and ideas regarding neutrality, mediation, and intervention, and this forms the basis of chapter 6’s discussion. The wars around the turn of the nineteenth century had created an international legal framework to settle conflicts peacefully. While those frameworks from the very start were flawed, rebellious states always faced an uphill struggle with respect to convincing the international community of their legitimacy and right to exist. The bar was deliberately set very high, and international support was rarely forthcoming for revolutionary or secessionist movements inside and outside of Europe. In this age of nationalism, government leaders were determined to enhance the power of their state by any means, often in direct contradiction to 10

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the international legal frameworks long established. Chapter 7 examines how national leaders, responding to demands for greater political involvement and rising levels of nationalism, embraced a more aggressive style of politics, sometimes described as realpolitik. Lincoln at times adopted unconstitutional policies to achieve his goals in a manner not unlike Bismarck. Both men were willing to do whatever it took to achieve their objectives regardless of the consequences and legal limitations. The nineteenth century has been referred to as the “Evangelical Century,” and competing sides in the era’s struggles frequently conscripted God into their ranks, as chapter 8 demonstrates. Religion was often a cornerstone of a national identity and usually served as contentious terrain. In the United States, religious leaders presented each side’s causes as divinely ordained—­ those in other nations did likewise. Additionally, in Europe political reformers mistrusted the religious sway of the Roman Catholic Church as an antiliberal and antireform organization, resulting in events such as the German Kulturkampf and Swiss Sonderbundskrieg. Similarly, in the United States, Protestantism was seen to be threatened by Catholic immigration and Catholicism’s alleged reactionary nature. Furthermore, the growing sense of nationalism added also to the desire to expand into neighboring territories and across the world—­nationalism and imperialism are deeply connected. Chapter 9 explores the imperial developments of the mid-­nineteenth century as European nations and settler societies expanded their domains and increasingly clashed with Indigenous peoples in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. The idea of the frontier grew in salience as the imperial powers rationalized their assaults on less-­well-­armed peoples. So, just as the United States during its civil war continued to fight Native Americans, at the same time on the other side of the world, the British fought a series of pitched engagements against New Zealand’s Māori people. Chapter 10, meanwhile, explores Reconstruction in a global context, as the struggle to reconstitute the United States politically and economically resembled other postemancipation societies’ experiences. There was also the question of how to regain the loyalties of formerly estranged peoples and to what extent these goals were compatible with political and economic objectives and the desires of those formerly enslaved. While several of the subjects covered in this book have been given com11

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parative attention by historians, the one glaring omission is the study of memory, which has grown exponentially in recent years among American Civil War historians. As chapter 11 illustrates, other countries erected monuments to their dead war heroes while veterans formed organizations to commemorate their work and lobby for pensions and other benefits. The commemoration of past war successes and the heroes of those conflicts was an essential part of the imaging of the national community and thus of growing importance. How wars were commemorated had broader consequences in the political realm in nations as far apart as the United States and South Africa. A work of this nature cannot, by definition, be the final word on the subject. At best, it can only be a starting point for further exploration and discussion. While transnational and comparative history is about looking beyond the limits of national boundaries, we are placing the nation-­state at the front and center of the narrative. The rise of national identities caused separatist movements, imperialism, and various forms of war remembrance. The strong desire to enhance the nation-­state also contributed to the emergence of ruthless politicians and ever more heavily armed and technologically advanced militaries. This was an age of identity searching and defining, something in which the United States was very much involved. The American Civil War, as Degler pointed out, was one among many conflicts that arose from debates about the very nature and identity of the nation-­state. By recognizing that people everywhere struggled with the same problems and came up with similar solutions, we can begin to overcome the inevitable insularity inherent in nation-­state history.

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1 N AT I O N S A N D N AT I O N A L I S M IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place. . . . Ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government. . . . Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation. You, who were deputed here by the people to get their grievances redressed, are yourselves become the greatest grievance. Your country therefore calls upon me to cleanse this Augean stable, by putting a final period to your iniquitous proceedings in this house; and which, by God’s help, and the strength he has given me, I am now come to do. —­O L I V E R C R O M W E L L ,

Dismissal of the Long Parliament, April 20, 1653

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. —­A B R A H A M L I N C O L N ,

Gettysburg Address, November 19, 1863

S

eparated by two centuries and an ocean, Oliver Cromwell and Abraham Lincoln nonetheless had in common leading their side to victory in their nation’s respective civil wars. Each man viewed his cause not as a mere political dispute over constitutional authority, but instead as an existential contest about the nature of his nation. Each also believed—­with the utmost conviction—­that his cause was one that transcended his respective political entity. Cromwell delivered his speech, above, after the English Civil War was won. Following his dismissal of the so-­called Long Parliament, “Old Ironsides” went 13

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on to become the English republic’s “Lord Protector,” essentially a dictator. Lincoln’s speech was given during the American Civil War itself but, unlike Cromwell, he did not long survive his victory. Although made less frequently today, comparisons between the English Civil War and the American one were once relatively common.1 U.S. historian James Ford Rhodes claimed of the American Civil War, “The most interesting and instructive parallel to this period of our history is the great Civil War in England.” 2 British historian Sir Charles Firth, in his 1910 Rede Lecture, made a host of comparisons between the conflicts, including their regional and sectional differences, the raising and maintaining of mass armies in nations that had no tradition of so doing, and above all, the issue of authority: parliament versus the king and the states versus the federal government. He concludes by noting similarities between the sixteenth president and the Lord Protector: “Each regarded himself as the champion of the people. Each used precisely the same phrase about the nation he ruled: both style it ‘the best people in the world.’” Sir Charles rounds out his comparison by noting that in “both countries wise men blundered when they had to deal with racial questions. We Englishmen have still to reckon with the consequences of the policy of Cromwell and the Puritans in Ireland. . . . The people of the United States have still to reckon with the consequences of giving the suffrage to the negro race.” 3 Isaac Foot, writing in 1944, drew upon these earlier studies in his comparison between Cromwell and Lincoln. Noting that neither man originated from their societies’ elites, and while both were physically ugly, they were also both notably tall for their time (six-­foot Cromwell, six-­foot, four-­inch Lincoln). Both men were attuned to the need for public support, with Cromwell noting, “for in the government of nations that which is to be looked after is the affections of the people,” while Lincoln stated, “with public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed.” 4 Both men referenced “liberty” or “freedom” so frequently in their speeches that it is difficult to distinguish which of these statements belongs to which man: “They that have stood so much for liberty of conscience if they will not grant that liberty to every man—­I think there is not that equality that is professed to be among us”; “Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and under the rule of a just God, cannot long retain it.” 5 Foot noted that the leading national poets of their time commemorated each leader in similar terms. John Milton called 14

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Cromwell “our chief of men”—­“To peace and truth thy glorious way hast plough’d”—­while Walt Whitman immortalized Lincoln as “My Captain”—­ “From fearful trip, the victor ship, comes in with object won.” 6 Historians have been borrowing from both poets ever since. Similarly, while Lincoln has been called the “greatest American,” so, too, has Cromwell been called the “greatest Englishman.” While Foot admired both men, he acknowledged that each faced plenty of opposition—­and stirred plenty of hatred—­in his day. While not dwelling overmuch on the ruthless streak found in each man, Foot does concede, “Both men were called upon to exercise emergency powers, both were confronted with the claims of Magna Carta and Habeas Corpus, and both men defended themselves along the same lines.” He even goes so far as to acknowledge that “if Cromwell imprisoned ‘his thousands’ by way of arbitrary arrest, Lincoln imprisoned ‘his tens of thousands.’ . . . Responsible American opinion, even today, does not altogether exonerate Lincoln, and the charge of dictatorship is fully as valid against him as against Cromwell.” 7 While opinions on both men have developed somewhat in the decades since Foot’s lecture, to what extent each man overreached his authority, even to the point of authoritarianism, remains a valid question.8 Leaving aside nationalist mythology regarding America’s or Britain’s contribution to political liberty, the fact remains that Cromwell ended royal absolutism in England, while Lincoln freed the enslaved peoples of the United States. There were other aspects to them as well. Lincoln opposed the nativism of his era, while Cromwell allowed Jews to return to England. That said, both men were viewed as conservatives by significant minorities of their respective populations: the radical abolitionists, in the case of Lincoln, and the Levellers and Diggers in the case of Cromwell. Further, their critics both of their time and since have raised legitimate charges. That Lincoln destroyed the voluntary nature of the American Union is indisputable, as is that Cromwell established what amounted to a military dictatorship. Further, if Cromwell was magnanimous to the Scots in victory, he was far less so to the Irish, to say the least. Similarly, if Lincoln appeared inclined to be magnanimous to the South in victory, the same is not true with respect to Native Americans. Both men’s admirers have frequently played down their cruelty to both peoples. There were definite limits to their benevolence toward their fellow men despite their rhetoric.9 15

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Thus, when Cromwell declared that England had upon its shoulders “the interest of all Christian people in the world,” he was not merely excluding non-­ Christians but Roman Catholics too. Similarly, while Lincoln asserted that the Declaration of Independence “gave liberty not only to the people of this country, but hope to all the world for all future time,” it is unlikely he meant Black Americans, let alone Africans or Asians or Native Americans.10 As with Cromwell, Lincoln did not mean humanity as a whole but a specific subgroup. The two men’s causes invite broader comparisons. While the “American Civil War” is the broadly accepted term, its contemporaries tended to call it the “War of the Rebellion.” It was also known by unreconciled southerners as the “War between the States” or the “War of (or for) Southern Independence,” among other names. Finally, given the political upheaval of the war and Reconstruction, some historians refer to it as the “Second American Revolution.” Meantime, the term “English Civil War”—­or “English Civil Wars,” for there was more than one—­for the events of 1642–­51 is contested, involving as they did the peoples of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales as well. Given this, the terms “British Civil Wars” or the “Wars of the Three Kingdoms” are sometimes preferred, as was at one time the “Great Rebellion.” Nor do these terms form an exhaustive list. Given the political upheaval of this period, some historians prefer the term “English Revolution.” 11 All the above relates directly to, among other things, the question of the nation-­state and nationalism—­each the subject of intense scholarly debate.12 As this chapter’s analyses are determined by the position taken in this debate, a brief digression is necessary. To simplify somewhat, historians of the nation-­state and nationalism fall into two very broad camps: the modernists and the premodernists. The modernists argue that the nation-­state was born in the late eighteenth century, although some date this as early as 1750, usually with the French Revolution (although some contend the American War of Independence). They insist that this upheaval was an invention born of prior developments such as democratization, secularization, and the emergence of widespread literacy, all resulting in the creation of strong national identities. Nationalism was a necessary ingredient of modernity and could not exist without it. By contrast, the premodernists insist that the nation-­state was, in fact, an early modern creation, although some trace it back much earlier, even to the Middle Ages, whereby the rise of the printing press and the vernacular 16

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helped create a sense of a people with a shared history and culture.13 Important in the premodernist literature is Steve Pincus’s 1688: The First Modern Revolution, which makes the case that England’s Glorious Revolution was, in fact, a nationalist revolt, with an English national identity already existing by the sixteenth century.14 From the premodernist point of view, then, rather than it being the product of modernity, the nation-­state predates modernity, making the latter a product of the former. In response to these examples and others, the modernist response has been to refine the definition of “nation” and “nationalism.” They argue that such early modern nationalism was adulterated by religion, autocracy, or some other contaminant, whereas genuine nationalism should be broadly secular and popular, if not democratic. Premodernists such as Philip S. Gorski have responded that, while it is easy to show that premodern movements fall short of such criteria, “few, if any examples of modern nationalism meet it either.” From Gorski’s perspective, the shortcoming of the modernist position is thus: “Modernists have tried to paint a clear and sharp line between modern nationalism and pre-­modern national ‘sentiments,’ ‘identities’ and ‘discourses.’ In doing so, they have painted themselves into a corner. The nationalist tests that they have constructed are so stringent that even modern nationalisms do not pass them.” 15 This dispute will not be settled here, nor any debate related to other aspects of nationalism studies. Yet many scholars nonetheless accept the case put forward by the modernist Benedict Anderson that nationalism is a process of imagining a community. The nation is imagined because it creates a sense of communion, or “horizontal comradeship,” among people who usually do not know each other. Despite this, they imagine belonging to the same collective and attribute it to a common history, traits, beliefs, and attitudes. This imagined community is further defined as sovereign and limited: limited because all nations recognize boundaries of one kind or another; sovereign because the nation replaced the former kinship ties as the state’s foundation. Implicitly, nationalism in the imagined community is constructed by an elite and disseminated to the masses.16 Imagining is needed regardless of whether it is applied to an ethnic, racial, or civic national identity. When exactly this “imagining” came into existence, therefore, is perhaps less important than that it exists in the first place. 17

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Thus, this chapter, instead of insisting on a specific birth date, or “year zero,” for nations and nationalism, posits that they are actually protean concepts that have undergone significant transmutation over time. This allows us to acknowledge modernity’s contribution to the development of both and to recognize the significance of subsequent changes. After all, the modern welfare state, common throughout the West, is a very different species of animal than the nation-­states of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, so much so that scholars talk of the “postmodern” state.17 This approach allows us to avoid splitting hairs over what, exactly, constitutes a nation-­state or nationalist beliefs while providing greater freedom on the matter of the American Civil War with respect to the question of when the United States became a nation. It allows us to see the Confederate States of America as a nation-­state as well, and it permits us to see the Civil War as consolidating the American nation, thus enabling a more effective comparison to other national experiences. Although some historians maintain American nation-­building and nationalism were fundamentally different to others, the evidence suggests otherwise, especially when we recognize that all examples of national construction have their own unique aspects.18 Erich Angermann argues that the American Civil War demonstrates that despite the Union of 1787, the United States was still an “unfinished nation” in much the same way as Italy and Germany were not yet fully fledged nation-­ states.19 Carl Degler points to the fact that insofar as an American nationalism existed, it was largely confined to the North—­hence the explosion of popular support elicited by Lincoln’s call for volunteers to impose federal authority upon the seceding South following the fall of Fort Sumter: “When we recognize that in 1860 only a truncated nationalism existed among Americans despite the 80-­year history of the Union, then the American Civil War suddenly fits well into a comparison with other nation-­building efforts of those years. The Civil War, in short, was not a struggle to save a failed union, but to create a nation that until then had not come into being.” 20 Other scholars have agreed with Degler on this point.21 George P. Fletcher, for example, chides Civil War historians for overlooking “the consolidation of the United States as a nation in the mid-­nineteenth-­century European sense of the term.” 22 One area in which the United States resembled most European nation-­

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states was in having a dominant ethnic-­linguistic-­cultural group that imposed its language and cultural norms upon everyone else, namely the Americans of English origin. As Benjamin Schwarz points out, although only about two-­ thirds of the white American population was of English ethnicity in 1790, the United States was relatively culturally homogeneous. The cultural distinctiveness of most other European settler ethnicities were greatly diminished, being dominated by the English language, customs, and institutions: “The American ‘nationality’ was not a blending of all the peoples that populated the United States, or even an amalgam of the white Europeans inhabiting the country. An ‘American’ was a modified Englishman.” 23 This in many respects appeared to be case over a century later in 1916, when after millions upon millions of immigrants had arrived in the United States—­both before and after the Civil War—­Randolph Bourne complained that American culture was still a fundamentally Anglo one: the “Anglo-­Saxon element is guilty of just what every dominant race is guilty of in every European country: the imposition of its own culture upon the minority peoples.” 24 In this respect the creation of an American identity did have elements in common with European nations. This raises the question of “ethnic nationalism” versus “civic nationalism,” whereby citizenship is determined by ethnicity or race instead of by allegiance to a political order regardless of ancestry. As the example above demonstrates, the United States was a combination of the two, and although civic nationalism has tended to become the norm, at least among modern Western democracies, the opposite was true in the nineteenth century. Among nationalists then, ethnicity was a common means to craft a national identity. As early as 1807, the German intellectual Johann Gottlieb Fichte drew a tie between the soil and nationalism. His ethnic identity provided a base for European nationalists for decades to come and eventually dominated Europe. Laying out a chronology all the way back to the Roman Empire, Fichte argues, “we, the immediate heirs of their soil, their language, and their way of thinking—­for being Germans still, for being still borne along on the stream of original and independent life. It is they whom we must thank for everything that we have been as a nation since those days, and to them we shall be indebted for everything that we shall be in the future, unless things come to an end with us now and the last drop of blood inherited from them has dried up in our veins.” 25

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Blood, land, and identity became closely intertwined as means to craft nationalisms in Europe. But Fichte never witnessed the fulfilment of his brand of nationalism. Bringing ethnic and civic nationalism together was Italian thinker Giuseppe Mazzini in the early 1830s. For Mazzini, a successful national program also required a national identity. Opposing the notion of a divinely ordained monarchy, he instead emphasized a government ordained by the people. Framing his ideas around the long-­desired, and what he believed inevitable, Italian nation-­state, Mazzini suggested that the new state embrace a liberal form of government. “Republican—­because theoretically every nation is destined by the law of God and humanity, to form a free and equal community of brothers,” continuing, “and the republican is the only form of government that insures [sic] this future. Because all true sovereignty resides essentially in the nation, the sole progressive and continuous interpreter of the supreme moral law.” 26 Mazzini’s political nationalism was universal, giving him acolytes across the European-­influenced world. Similarly, nation-­state building involves the use of history, for better or for worse, in the service of nationalism, a phenomenon sometimes referred to as the “creation of a usable past.” We see this use of retrospective interpretation, or “the mystic chords of memory” as he phrased it elsewhere, in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Garry Wills’s examination of the speech notes the absence of several key terms, including slavery. The “great task” referred to is the preservation of self-­government, not emancipation, and at the time of the speech, Lincoln was not advocating even eventual suffrage for African Americans. Although his advocacy of a “new birth of freedom” is usually interpreted as the abolition of slavery, fundamentally, the Gettysburg Address is a defense of the United States as a nation and a dismissal of the states’ rights claim that the thirteen original states ratified the Constitution as independent, sovereign republics. Lincoln’s “Fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation” dates the birth of the United States as a nation to the Declaration of Independence. The American nation thus predated the Constitution, meaning on July 4, 1776, the United States as a single entity—­and, crucially, a single people—­was born, not thirteen independent sovereign states but one single nation. While Lincoln’s speech was probably the most eloquent defense of this interpretation of American history, it was 20

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not original. Among his predecessors was Daniel Webster, who had argued this point against John C. Calhoun’s claim that the Constitution was a compact among the states, not one above them.27 Nor, it should be noted, was Lincoln’s “government of the people, by the people, for the people” particularly original either. Steven Béla Vardy makes a reasonable argument that the origin of those words could easily lie in the speech Lajos “Louis” Kossuth (to whom we shall return) gave to the Ohio Legislature on February 7, 1852, in which he described democracy as “all for the people, and all by the people. Nothing about the people, without the people.” 28 That aside, the Gettysburg Address was part of a larger trend with respect to this claim that the American nation was born with the Declaration of Independence. As American Civil War scholars have pointed out, when the conflict began, Lincoln referred to the United States as a Union. As the war progressed, he preferred to refer to it as a nation. Equally, whereas before the war, the United States was a plural noun—­the United States are a nation—­ afterward it became a single noun—­the United States is a nation.29 The popular demonstration of national pride, flying the U.S. flag from homes and businesses—­private, as opposed to state, property—­also appears to originate from the Civil War, as people did so to identify with the Union.30 Finally, in constitutional terms, the powers of the federal government greatly increased at the expense of the states following the introduction of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments during Reconstruction. The United States did not become a unitary state, but the authority of the individual states was diminished while the federal—­that is, national—­authority was enhanced. The term “other” when applied to people needs to be used with both grave reservations and due caution, given its frankly nebulous nature and resulting dubious application. In the final analysis, everything and everyone is an “other” to each person. It is, however, a useful term with respect to a discussion about nations. They are, after all, not just about inclusion but also exclusion; some belong to the nation, while others do not.31 Furthermore, most nations in history have, at one point or another, defined themselves against another—­ or other. There need be no consistency with respect to the identity of the other, but one does seem to be necessary, no matter how temporary. In addition, this other need not be an external entity but can be an internal one; indeed, it can even be both at once. 21

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In the case of the United States, the initial other required for founding at least a proto-­American identity was Great Britain.32 One way at the time of the American Civil War in which the United States was an “unfinished” nation was with respect to the economic colonial relationship it still had with Britain, despite winning its political independence. Even after the 1780s, the United States continued to ship raw materials to Britain in exchange for manufactured goods. In this respect, as D. P. Crook has pointed out, the Civil War completed the War of Independence because the North’s victory confirmed the implementation of tariffs against cheaper, mostly British goods, instead prioritizing American manufactures.33 It had been the antebellum South that had upheld this colonial relation most strenuously of all, shipping raw cotton to Britain in exchange for British manufactures instead of American (northern) ones. Indeed, one can argue that the South’s unofficial “King Cotton” strategy was a fundamentally colonial one—­Britain would intervene in the Civil War on the side of the Confederacy to defend a vital source of raw materials.34 One can argue further that with the Confederacy’s defeat, the southern states, in many respects, exchanged one form of economic colonialism for another. For the United States to become its own single, national market, the destruction of the South’s economic independence was required. From then on, the United States moved in an autarkic—­that is, economically self-­sufficient—­direction.35 If the question of Britain as an external other still needed to be settled to complete the construction of the American nation, there were also two consistent internal others—­African Americans and Native Americans.36 Initially, the building of the American nation required the annihilation of preexisting Native American ones. Representative Richard Wilde of Georgia, who, when faced with the destruction of Native American society in 1830, acknowledged this by asking, “What is history but the obituary of nations?” 37 With respect to African Americans, historians have long established that race was central to the formation of a U.S. national identity and citizenship. Lincoln’s longstanding belief in colonization—­that is, encouraging Black people to leave the United States following emancipation—­demonstrated an inability on his part to imagine African Americans as partakers in nationhood; they could not, in the final analysis, be Americans. Exactly when or if Lincoln abandoned the idea of colonization in favor of citizenship for African Americans remains a disputed point.38 Regardless of his views, however, the Civil War itself— 22

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a­ nd more so Reconstruction—­involved an attempt not simply to abolish slavery but to integrate African Americans into the national fabric as citizens. This, however, required a different, temporary, other—­namely the Confederate States of America. While slavery undeniably underpinned the conflict, the sectional differences between North and South were understood and recognized long before. Very broadly and oversimplified, the largely slave-­free North was liberal-­ bourgeoise and protectionist-­capitalist, favoring tariffs to build its own industry, while the largely slave South was considerably less egalitarian, more paternalist and anti-­protectionist-­capitalist, preferring free trade for its slave-­grown cotton crops. The initial constitutional compromises, through the three-­fifths clause and other devices, guaranteed the southern states an effective veto with respect to key policies. That compromise broke down because the North, growing more economically powerful in part thanks to the rise of the Great Lakes region, would no longer adhere to arrangements based on an outdated measure of strength, while the South, although shrinking in influence, would not accept a diminished position.39 Needless to say, the North’s vision of a more centralized Union proved victorious, not because its cause was more moral, but because it won a contest of strength. As Eugene Genovese notes: “General Sherman, not the indomitable ideology of liberalism, marched through Georgia. The notion that America has always united on liberal principles breaks down here.” 40 Reconstruction was the attempt to impose upon a conquered people a new political, cultural, and social order: the Americanization of the South. As for the Confederacy itself, historians such as Drew Gilpin Faust have directly compared it to other new nations, noting how its citizens actively fashioned a sense of nationhood in the wake of secession.41 Certainly, the Confederate States of America had all the necessary trappings of the modernists’ conception of the nation-­state: it was a constitutional, secular republic headed by an elected president (Jefferson Davis) with, by the standards of its day, a wide electoral franchise, slavery notwithstanding. Others have noted how the war transformed antebellum ideas about southern “exceptionalism” into a Confederate nationalism—­another example of an identity, a national one, preceding a formal nation-­state—­which involved, among other things, the creation of a national literature and the replacement of northern textbooks 23

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with southern ones. Former American heroes from the North, such as John Adams, were demoted, while those from the South, such as George Washington, were elevated even further. Once again, the other, both external—­the Union—­and internal—­African Americans and southern unionists—­helped cement this nationalist contraption. Moreover, as Anne Sarah Rubin points out, like other failed states, Confederate nationalism continued even after the secessionist cause collapsed in 1865.42 In many respects, the construction of Confederate monuments and the myth of the Lost Cause are the hallmarks of a defeated nationalism. Without stretching the point too far, one could argue that the early twenty-­first-­century campaign against Confederate monuments is intended to deal the final deathblow to this defeated nationalism.43 The defeat of the Confederacy has spawned a rich literature, but two reasons for its downfall, aside from the fact it was the weaker party, consistently arise. The first was lack of foreign intervention, which had won the independence for the original thirteen American states. The second was the South’s internal divisions, including hostility from the enslaved African Americans as well as resistance from governors in Georgia and North Carolina to the centralizing aims of the Richmond government.44 These highlight the problem all new nations face, that while they can define themselves against the internal or external other, the same could terminate their nation-­building endeavor. Certainly, that seems to be the case with respect to another failed national venture, that attempted by Hungary under the leadership of Lajos Kossuth, or, to use the Anglicized version of his name, Louis Kossuth. Since 1526 the Habsburg dynasty had ruled Hungary in a personal union, making the Hungarian kingdom part of the Austrian Empire. By the nineteenth century, Hungary had a degree of sovereignty with its own separate parliament. Furthermore, its elite had stimulated a sense of national identity by promoting the Hungarian language and the composition of a Hungarian anthem. Kossuth, who remained in key respects a quintessential nineteenth-­ century European liberal, was largely tolerant of both linguistic and ethnic pluralism and, as a Lutheran married to a Roman Catholic, opposed to religious sectarianism. When the Hungarian rebellion against Austrian rule began, Kossuth called for greater autonomy from the empire. Stefan Franz Viktor, Erzherzog von Österreich, the nominal ruler of Hungary, arranged for auton-

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omy under a moderate political leadership. This new government rewarded Kossuth’s national role with the appointment to minister of finance. With the escalating conflict with Austria, Kossuth, as leader of the Hungarian autonomy movement, evolved from reforming liberal to revolutionary nationalist, issuing a separate currency for Hungary and laying plans for a national economy. Before the Hungarian legislature, he highlighted the importance of the nation and its sovereignty, stating: “This nation possesses liberty and all its members want to be free. Just as the word ‘nation’ cannot be arrogated by one caste, it cannot be arrogated by one city either. Fifteen million Hungarians together make the fatherland and the nation.” 45 Kossuth’s statement was part of the slow process of crafting and disseminating the Hungarian national identity to the people. Unfortunately for Kossuth, Hungary’s ethnic-­linguistic-­religious divisions would contribute to his downfall. When a more conservative Austrian government, headed by the new emperor, Franz Josef, felt secure enough in its power after defeating other revolutionary national groups within the empire, it determined to end the experiment in Hungarian autonomy that they believed should never have happened in the first place. Some of Hungary’s ethnic-­linguistic minorities (such as the Serbs and Croats) sided with Austria against the Hungarians. In response, the revolution radicalized, Kossuth assuming the position of kormányzó-­elnok (governor-­president) and issuing a declaration of independence in April 1849. Just like Jefferson Davis, Kossuth was a micromanager. In contrast to the good relationship between Davis and his principles generals like Robert E. Lee, however, Kossuth quarreled and mistrusted his most successful general, Artúr Görgey. Regardless, like Lee, Görgey initially managed to hold the stronger side at bay by winning some unexpected victories. As with the Confederacy, however, no other state would formally recognize, let alone intervene to assist, Kossuth’s upstart nation-­state. With the international and domestic situations aligned against him and the population reluctant to support the national cause, Kossuth had to abdicate on August 11, 1849, and go into exile. Soon after, the Hungarian government surrendered, the independence movement crushed.46 If the South and Hungary failed in their bids for independence and the American nation-­state remained unfinished, Great Britain (or the United

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Kingdom) was another nation under construction during the nineteenth century. As the discussion on Cromwell and the English Civil Wars above should make clear, there was no British nation, still less a United Kingdom, in the seventeenth century. Great Britain itself only dated from the 1707 Act of Union between England and Scotland, while the United Kingdom itself, now including Ireland, came into being in 1801. As several historians have demonstrated, originating as it did from a collection of much older national identities, the British national identity had to be constructed from 1707 to 1837.47 Several of the key ingredients included Protestantism, the utilization of France (or Catholic Europe) as an other to define and defend oneself against, and a series of wars cementing said identity, whether internal (the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745), internal and external (the American War of Independence), or external (the Napoleonic Wars). Buttressing all of this was the creation of a large maritime empire.48 Many historians, however, insist that the cultural, political, and economic integration of the nations of the British Isles was driven and directed primarily by the largest national group, the English.49 According to this school of thought, British nationalism is, in fact, English nationalism writ large, with the British nation a greater England. Certainly, one of the nations within the United Kingdom, Ireland, essentially remained in a virtual colonial state, although some recent scholarship has moved away from this Irish nationalist interpretation and instead emphasized its involvement with pan-­British reform and cultural movements.50 While this scholarship reminds us not simply to dismiss Ireland as a mere appendage, there is still no denying that it was in a very different, distinct, and ultimately disadvantaged position compared to the rest of the United Kingdom, a point underlined by the Great Famine (1845–­49). In many key respects the Irish had imposed on themselves the role of internal antagonist in the manner that African Americans and Native Americans did in the United States. Thus, if at the time of the American Civil War there was indeed already an extant British national identity in contrast to an unfinished American one, it had not been long completed. If the American and British national identities were problematic, Germany seems to be a clearer case. Notions of a pan-­German identity clearly preceded the foundation of the unified German state. One can see this in the account of Lieutenant H. A. Vossler, whose state of Württemberg, ruled by 26

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Herzog Friedrich II, allied with Napoleon Bonaparte. Vossler, who had the misfortune to participate in the invasion of Russia, was later captured by the Prussians. Marched past the latter’s commander, he reported: “The General [Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher] in person, in full rig, mounted and smoking a long pipe, watched us go by and made some acid remarks about South Germans still fighting North Germans.” 51 Clearly, by the early nineteenth century, many Germans supplemented their regional and state identity with a wider national identity. Judging by Vossler’s comments, however, Prussia, or for that matter Württemberg, was a mere region of a still nonexistent wider German nation. At the same time, there was a significant mistrust among South Germans of their North German counterparts and vice versa. As for the lieutenant, while he undeniably had a sense of a wider German identity—­this is clear throughout the diary—­ultimately, his belief in fealty to a sovereign’s authority, in his case Herzog Friedrich II, and not a national one determined his actions. To a certain degree, however, Vossler understood that the German national view was the future, not the parochial regionalism and small statism of many of the Germanic princes. Indeed, his sense of a national identity is far stronger by the diary’s end than at its beginning. One suspects his German identity grew even stronger after the Anglo-­Prussian victory at Waterloo. Certainly, with the beginning of the Franco-­German War in 1870, Württemberg was among the first German states to ally with Prussia; there would be no alliance with a Napoleonic France—­albeit led by a different Napoleon—­this time around. In terms of national identity and nationalism, Waterloo itself invites a brief digression. The battle took place after the modernists’ claim that national identities and nationalism had come into existence. Yet only about a third of the Duke of Wellington’s troops were British (and almost a third of that Irish), the majority consisting of Germans, Dutch, and Belgians. Wellington thus led a pan-­national army containing men who, like Vossler, had at best nebulous national identities.52 Nor was this restricted to Europe. Just prior to Waterloo, Britain and the United States had fought the War of 1812. Yet Americans were severely divided by that conflict. These divisions were such that the New England states, which opposed the war and essentially declined to participate in it, considered secession from the American union. One of them, Massachusetts, went even further. The state governor, Caleb Strong, sent an official en27

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voy to the British governor of Nova Scotia to negotiate an end to the hostilities. In other words, the state government of Massachusetts intended to initiate independent peace negotiations with the British government in the manner of a sovereign nation exhausted by its allies.53 Perhaps Governor Strong mistook himself for Herzog Friedrich II, but in any case, in the early nineteenth century, national identity—­and authority—­was still ambiguous for many on both sides of the Atlantic. This chapter began with a comparison between Cromwell and Lincoln, but historian Degler sees instead a similarity between the sixteenth president and his contemporary Otto von Bismarck, going so far as to call them “two men of blood and iron.” Whereas Lincoln unified a collection of semiautonomous states into a nation proper, Bismarck would do the same with independent German states. While Bismarck was slow to embrace constitutionalism, he did support the unification of Germany, but from his perspective it was an enlargement of Prussia. His attitude changed somewhat with respect to German unification, just as Lincoln, too, adjusted his thinking and language from “union” to “nation.” 54 Appointed minister president of Prussia in 1862, Bismarck launched the first war of German unification against Denmark to secure the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, allying with Austria to do so. Although more attention tends to be paid to the Franco-­German War with respect to German unification, Degler points to the conflict that preceded it, Bismarck’s war against Austria for German supremacy. By fighting and winning that conflict, he secured Austria’s exclusion from any wider German nation, instead ensuring that it would be a Prussian creation. There remained the irony, however, that by excluding Austria from the new German Empire, Bismarck was also leaving some Germans outside of it. Interestingly, many observers at the time, and historians since, have referred to the Austro-­Prussian War as a Bruderkrieg—­literally, “brothers’ war” but can be translated colloquially as a civil war. The result was the annexation of some of the German states that had sided with Austria, such as Hanover and Nassau, and the creation of the North German Bund in 1867 under Prussian hegemony. The Bund would serve as the model for the future German Empire. This, however, left important southern German states, such as Baden and Bavaria, independent of the Prussian-­led union—­Blücher’s North Germans versus South Germans again

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comes to mind. Creating a genuine pan-­German sentiment was required, and that needed an other of a different kind, in this case, France. Just as Lincoln was very careful to corner the South into firing the first shots of the Civil War at Fort Sumter, Bismarck ensured that France declared war on Prussia and the German states. The German peoples could thus be persuaded that they were united in fighting a defensive war against an aggressor and thus more easily identify themselves as a single people. Although American Civil War historians have claimed that Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman stunned the world with their military victories, Prussia’s Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke overshadowed both.55 Unlike the Union, the North German Bund was the underdog, with far less manpower at its disposal. Foreign observers, including the Americans, fully expected France to win; instead, it was defeated in six months. With respect to German unification, this stunning victory proved effective at persuading the wavering states. On January 18, 1871, the German Empire, under former Prussian king Wilhelm I, was proclaimed. Not all Germans, of course, favored either unification or the form it took—­far from it—­any more than all Americans supported the Union cause or the way it was imposed. The unifiers, however, had the numbers—­more importantly the military power—­and a united Germany was constructed along Prussian lines. To look at it another way, Prussia proved to be to Germany what England was to the United Kingdom or what the northern states were to the United States: the dominant region that determined, on behalf of the other members, the terms and conditions under which the new nation would constitutionally operate. Degler noted that American historians have not appreciated the comparison between Lincoln and Bismarck, but the fact remains their similarities, insofar as achievements went, were recognized by their contemporaries. None other than President Grant wrote to Bismarck, congratulating the German government for having completed the long-­desired unification of its territory and for its decision to create a new federal union like the United States. Grant further indicated, perhaps with too much self-­satisfaction, that this meant Germany intended to become a democracy, also like the United States. According to one historian, amused as Bismarck may have been, he nonetheless subsequently made a point of assuring visiting Americans that he had been

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“much influenced by the United States constitution when making his own plans for Germany.” 56 Modern American historians have preferred to look at Canada, rather than Germany, as an imitator of the United States, this despite the fact that English-­speaking Canada’s constitutional origins and national identity were based as much on an explicit political rejection of the United States as the United States was of Great Britain, a verdict upheld by the American failure to annex British North America during the War of 1812.57 Perhaps for this reason, political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset was fond of claiming that the American War of Independence created not one nation-­state, but two, the other being present-­day Canada.58 English-­speaking Canada, however, recognizes 1867 and Canadian Confederation created by the British North America Act (BNA Act) as the nation’s birthdate and birth certificate. By contrast, French-­ speaking Canada tends to look back to the establishment of New France (1534–­1608)—­an important distinction discussed later. Given the American Civil War’s undeniable contribution to Canadian Confederation, some comparisons can be made here as well. That the BNA Act created a nation is a problematic assertion. If the southern states still had a colonial relationship with Britain with respect to economics at the time of the American Civil War, what we now call Canada was British North America, a collection of British colonies, including the Province of Canada, created from Upper and Lower Canada plus New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island. While Confederation granted more autonomy, it essentially meant a single consolidated colony. The Dominion of Canada—­its correct title—­did not gain control of its foreign policy until 1931, while Canadian citizenship did not come into existence until 1947.59 That said, the Union victory in the Civil War compelled British North American politicians to make the compromises to reach the agreement necessary for Canadian Confederation. Anglo-­American animosities resulting from the conflict—­the Trent Affair, the escape of the CSS Alabama, the Fenian raids, the U.S. withdrawal from the 1854 Marcy-­Elgin Reciprocity Treaty, among others—­combined with the loose talk by some politicians south of the border demanding revenge for British policy during the Civil War, reignited longstanding concerns regarding U.S. annexation and imperialism. (Canadi-

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ans had noted the conquest of Mexico in the 1840s). Once again, fear of the other proved essential to nation building.60 As with the United States, the Province of Canada was largely divided by two sections, or two “solitudes,” to use the Canadian term. In this case, the two distinct peoples were the French Canadians, descendants of French-­ruled Canada, and, for want of a better term, British North Americans, who were largely descendants of the United Empire Loyalists and more recent British immigrants. As Paul Romney points out, the impetus for Confederation was that both groups wanted to undo the union imposed on them by Britain in response to the 1837 rebellions and return to the days of Upper and Lower Canada as separate entities.61 There, they would once again be in control of their own respective territories—­“masters of their own house.” They were thus, in their own way, like the southerners, secessionists keen to dissolve a union. Mindful of 1837, however, Westminster simply would not allow the reestablishment of Upper and Lower Canada, and thus Confederation was the necessary compromise. Westminster would only accept a separate “British Canada” and “French Canada” under the auspices of a larger colonial unit, the Dominion of Canada. It is commonly asserted that the BNA Act created a more centralized federation than that of the United States, as Canadians blamed the states’ rights doctrine for causing southern secession. Whereas the Tenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution stipulates that any powers not delegated to the federal government are subject to the authority of the states, Section 91 of the BNA Act awards all residual powers to the federal government and not the provinces. Of Canada’s Founding Fathers who recorded an opinion on the American Civil War, however, most believed slavery was “somehow the cause of the war,” as Lincoln put it.62 There is, moreover, a more credible explanation for the greater centralization found in the BNA Act. While the federal elements of Canadian Confederation were owed to the rebirth of Upper and Lower Canada operating under a new name and management, the more unified component was almost certainly imposed by Westminster. Again, these were British colonies, meaning that despite the confederation conferences at Charlottetown and Quebec, the 1866 conference in London was the most important meeting—­it was here that the final draft of

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the BNA Act was decided upon. While British officials largely approved most of what had been agreed to at Quebec, it also appears that they strengthened the centralizing aspects of Canadian Confederation further. British officials were not looking at any U.S. model (with which, in 1866, most of them were unfamiliar anyhow) but instead at colonial precedents such as the New Zealand Constitution Act of 1852, which granted self-­government to New Zealand as a unitary entity.63 Another obvious precedent to the British was the 1707 Act of Union between England and Scotland. This would have resonated not only with the disproportionate number of Scottish-­born and Scottish-­descended members of the British North American delegates—­among them, crucially, the “ruling genius and spokesman” John A. Macdonald—­but also with the French Canadians, who interpreted Confederation as a compact between two distinctive national groups or nations. As Romney points out, French Canada was “indifferent to the prospect of wider union: they accepted Confederation not as a first step to a transcontinental Canadian empire, but as the closest they could get to national independence without having to fight the redcoats again.” 64 For French Canadians, both at the time and since, Canada was thus not founded as a federal union of states (or provinces) of equal stature in the manner of the United States, but as a compact between two distinct groups of people.65 This interpretation, by contrast, became less and less popular with the rest of Canada as nationhood developed and English speakers, buttressed by large numbers of immigrants, gradually outnumbered those who spoke French. In this sense, like the North and the South, Canada was—­and remains—­divided between two cultures. The challenging process of transforming a people into a nation was not only a difficult one in the North Atlantic region but also in Latin America. Having shed their imperial ties with Spain and Portugal during the first quarter of the nineteenth century, these former colonies could rely on a unifying Spanish, or in Brazil’s case Portuguese, identity. They still had to determine beside their shared history and language what constituted a person being, for example, Peruvian or Brazilian. The elites had to bring peasants, the enslaved, Indigenous people, and newly arriving immigrants under one umbrella. Despite Brazil’s uniqueness as an empire with a royal family, a federal system and ethnic and racial diversity were common in Latin America. At the 32

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same time, the empire provided an unusual level of stability in the region. For example, instead of a revolution, government change, and civil wars every few years, Brazil could focus on the creation of a national identity, but even that took a long time to accomplish. After the ascent of Dom Pedro II to the throne and his coming of age, Brazil slowly developed a national identity with an emperor who saw himself as the first citizen of his country. When Brazil became an independent country, the new parliament created five national holidays, four of them related to the emperor, including the day Dom Pedro I had declared independence, and the fifth being the annual opening day of the legislative session in early May. The creation of national holidays, writes Hendrik Kraay, helped “perpetuate the collective memory of their nation’s institutional origins or to create what Pierre Nora has called lieux de mémoire, or memory space, to anchor the new nation.” National festivals were a mechanism by which the political elite could integrate the people into the nation and craft an identity. While the rituals certainly reinforced national identification, they also created a tie to monarchy and “reinforced state power.” 66 Brazil’s trajectory to a national identity was not without its problems. The ten-­year-­long Farroupilha conflict, the uprisings in Sao Paulo and Minas Gerais in 1842, and the liberal revolt in Pernambuco in 1848 illustrated the fragility of the Brazilian nation. Nevertheless, as Roderick Barman notes, by 1852, the first generation that had never had a colonial experience, having ties only to the new Brazilian and not the old Portuguese empire, came to maturity. The relatively limited political turmoil and the increasing stability by the late 1840s raised hopes for the country to reach its full potential. During this time, Great Britain, with its treaty demands for an agreement to abolish the slave trade, provided Brazilian politicians with an easy other to use to unify the country. Having to accept a treaty imposed by Britain, however, also raised questions about Brazilian weakness. Nonetheless, by 1852, Brazil could celebrate its thirtieth anniversary. By then, only a minority of its people had experienced anything other than their own empire.67 Brazil’s national identity was further strengthened by the conflict against Paraguay in 1864–­70. Recruiting a biracial army in the various parts of the empire to fight a foreign war helped form the people into a cohesive unit. A postwar crisis, however, undermined the Brazilian monarchy.68 33

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The American Civil War was one of the many wars of national unification, secession, and independence that took place in the nineteenth century, causing the era to be referred to by some historians as the age of nationalism. Competing and unfinished national identities were based on a host of issues religious, linguistic, ethnic, and racial. Despite slavery being the cause of the Civil War, it remained very similar to the other nation-­building and nation-­ breaking conflicts of the nineteenth century. When Lincoln redefined it as a war not just for union but for nation, his vision for the United States clashed even more forcefully with that of a Confederate nationalism. This was not the first time in history that two competing visions for the future clashed. At the same time, it is too easy to dismiss the slaveholding Confederacy’s growing sense of nationalism as running counter to global trends. Around the world during the nineteenth century, local nationalism and overarching state nationalism were at odds with each other. The uncertain definition of the nation and the constant imagining and reimaging of it were part of how the Civil War came to be. At the same time, this continual process of change and the multiple factors contributing to nationalism, including religion, memory, and others, persisted. Yet nationalism did not always mean unification; it could easily mean separation instead.

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2 SECESSION, INDEPENDENCE, A N D T H E L I M I TAT I O N S O F N A T I O N -­S T A T E S The people of the State of South Carolina, in Convention assembled, on the 26th day of April, A.D., 1852, declared that the frequent violations of the Constitution of the United States, by the Federal Government, and its encroachments upon the reserved rights of the States, fully justified this State in then withdrawing from the Federal Union. . . . Since that time, these encroachments have continued to increase, and further forbearance ceases to be a virtue. And now the State of South Carolina having resumed her separate and equal place among nations, deems it due to herself, to the remaining United States of America, and to the nations of the world, that she should declare the immediate causes which have led to this act. —­South Carolina’s Ordinance of Secession, 1860

O

n December 20, 1860, South Carolina took a pivotal step, three decades in the making, to leave the United States and become the cornerstone of the yet-­to-­be-­established Confederate States of America. Its secession precipitated that of initially six other states—­all well before the inauguration of the newly elected Republican presidential candidate, Abraham Lincoln. For the next four years, in a long and bloody war, both sides insisted that theirs was the correct interpretation of the Constitution regarding secession. Nonetheless, although South Carolina was the birthplace of the secessionist movement that precipitated the American Civil War, it certainly did not invent the concept of secession, nor was the action of December 20, 1860,

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unique. Once a group of people or a region had developed a national identity and established that this imagined community was in some way oppressed, the gates were open for a secessionist attempt. Looking for inspiration as far back as the independence declaration of the thirteen colonies in 1776 and earlier, separatist movements sought inspiration from each other to explain their state of oppression and justify the legitimacy of their rebellion. Southern secession did not occur in a vacuum, and several previous secessionist movements informed the American rebels’ decision. The cynic might argue that the difference between secession and independence depends upon the venture’s failure or success—­that is, failure is described as “secession,” while success is termed “independence.” The reality is that there is no fundamental difference. Both terms simply mean one jurisdiction within a wider body politic, whether empire or nation-­state, that breaks away from said body and assumes sovereign authority unto itself. To put it more simply, secessionists—­or separatists—­attempt to ensure that they have the final sovereign political authority. While the secessionists may ultimately intend to transfer final authority to another body beyond themselves (as with Texas, from Mexico in 1835–­36 to the United States in 1846), even in such a case the separatists must argue—­and more importantly demonstrate—­that they possess the authority to effect said transfer. This transfer of authority can take many forms—­King Henry VIII of England effectively seceded from the authority of the pope through the Act in Restraint of Annates in 1532 and the Act in Restraints of Appeals the following year, the latter denying all Welsh and English subjects the right to appeal to an authority outside the country on legal matters. A later measure declared in 1563, “the Bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this Realm of England,” jurisdiction being the key term. Essentially, then, the issue was—­and remains—­ one of sovereign authority. Of this last the great Tudor historian Geoffrey Elton argued that Henry’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, was the driving force behind the break from Rome, believing in a sovereign kingdom whose monarch should have no rival authority outside of the state. In other words, as much as the break was owed to the pope’s refusal to grant Henry a divorce, the issue of the ultimate source of political sovereign authority was involved as well, a cornerstone of secessionist demands.1 The idea of separation or secession could be traced back even further 36

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than this. Secessio plebis described a peaceful Roman plebeian protest. In 494, plebeians withdrew to Mons Sacer to demand political changes in the government and the social system of Rome.2 In contrast to what was largely a strike in Roman times and usually a religious struggle in the medieval and early modern era, there then being no real separation between church and state, secession by the nineteenth century was primarily associated with both political and national demands. Certainly, secession/separatism in the purely political sense was an outgrowth of nationalism. With the emergence of the printing press and scholarship, identities based on cultural, linguistic, and historic connections became increasingly important. The idea of the nation and the emergence of nationalism existed by the seventeenth century, but the later eighteenth century and the nineteenth century dramatically advanced the perception of unique identities. The nineteenth century is usually seen as a period of national unification to create coherent nation-­states, but national identities cut both ways. Some peoples felt that the new overarching identity or the political entity governing them did not provide adequate protection or freedom. As a result, regional nationalist movements challenged the larger states to form separate, often more ethnically coherent, nation-­states. The connection between the rise of the nation-­state and separatism in European history appears as early as the Protestant Reformation, with various political entities accepting or rejecting the overarching authority of the Roman Catholic Church. These struggles for political independence would continue and develop increasingly national aspects, from the Dutch struggle for independence from Spain during the Eighty Years’ War (1568–­1648) and continuing through the seventeenth century, with the Portuguese Restoration War (1640–­68), which ended the Iberian Union. Secession based upon race and slavery—­more about that below—­began earlier than is often recognized. The first Maroon War against the British took place in Jamaica from 1731 to 1739. The Maroons, escaped slaves who banded together to maintain their freedom, can certainly be regarded as a secessionist and independence movement. Under the inspired military command of their leader, Cudjoe, they forced Britain in 1739 to agree to a treaty that recognized the Maroons as a free people with sovereign authority over some 1,500 acres of Jamaica; the treaty remained in force until Jamaican independence in 1965. True, this created an autonomous province within the British Empire rather than an independent 37

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nation, but the Maroons were fully part of the developing tradition of secessionist and independence movements.3 There were, therefore, precedents to the American War of Independence even as it was an early example of modern secession. Although the rebellion of the thirteen colonies is sometimes seen as a colonial struggle reminiscent of those of the second half of the twentieth century, there was a major difference: rebellion was not led by the Indigenous peoples. Those in rebellion were settlers, most of whom (roughly 70 percent) were ethnically and culturally British.4 Indeed, within these colonies, most of the Indigenous peoples, to say nothing of the African-­derived population, tended to sympathize with the Crown.5 In this respect the War of Independence was a struggle within a wider British political and cultural sphere rather than a colonial rebellion in the manner of the post-­1945 world. It was, in fact, far more of a precedent for southern secession in 1860–­61. By contrast, the independence movements of the Spanish colonies in the first quarter of the nineteenth century were very much more akin to the later colonial rebellions, having in some cases Indigenous support, as well as being struggles within Greater Spain.6 Nonetheless, the Declaration of Independence established a template that others would follow. The first paragraph of the document declares in starkly political terms that once people “dissolve the political bands which have connected them,” separation was necessary. After a long outline of political and constitutional rights the British monarch had infringed upon—­including his stirring up “domestic insurrections” (meaning rebellions by the enslaved) and siding with the Native Americans against the colonists—­that included frequent invocations of terms like “tyranny,” the representatives announced their states’ independence. The declaration remained a template well into the twentieth century, inspiring such very different individuals as Ho Chi Minh of Vietnam and Ian Douglas Smith of that other example of settler secession from the British Empire, Rhodesia.7 Often overlooked is that the second nation in the Western Hemisphere to declare its independence and establish a republic was not in Latin America, but in the Caribbean. This was the Republic of Haiti. Originally Spanish, the French acquired what would become Haiti in 1697. Called Saint Domingue, its enslaved population numbered about 500,000 by 1789. At that time the island was divided into three groups: white French colonists and enslavers; gens 38

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de couleur libres (free people of color), usually of mixed racial heritage and sometimes referred to as affranchis; and the enslaved, consisting of 90 percent of the population.8 As in Jamaica, some of the enslaved escaped, established small free societies, and launched rebellions. None were as successful as Cudjoe’s in Jamaica, however, until 1791. The causes of rebellion in Saint Domingue were simple enough. The gens de couleur, who numbered some 30,000 residents, started to face reductions of their rights. Whereas they had enjoyed all sorts of privileges, they were now barred from marrying white people, wearing European clothing, and attending social functions where whites were present. Essentially, they found themselves demoted from second-­class citizens to barely third-­class ones. This gave them cause to unite with the enslaved population, with whom they had previously had little in common. When the French Revolution began in 1789, the gens de couleur saw their opportunity and joined the enslaved in a rebellion in 1791.9 In 1792, as part of an attempt to end the revolt and to match the doctrines of equality being promulgated at that time, the French legislature proclaimed that all free people in the colonies now had equal rights. The situation was complicated by a Spanish attempt to capture the French colony, which was thwarted in 1793 largely by a former enslaved commander, Toussaint Louverture, who agreed to assist the French on the condition that slavery be abolished. Once victorious, however, Louverture did not trust the French to uphold their agreement and established himself as governor for life, producing a constitution. His position was apparently solidified when he defeated a British expeditionary force in 1798 and leading a successful invasion of neighboring Spanish Santo Domingo, freeing the enslaved there in 1801.10 At this point France, now under the rule of Napoleon Bonaparte, sent a military expedition to deal with Louverture. In 1802 Louverture’s forces were defeated, and the governor for life was sent to a French prison, where he died. The flames of freedom and independence, however, remained in full blaze. When Napoleon attempted to reintroduce slavery, there was another revolt, and the French were defeated by forces led by Jean-­Jacques Dessalines in November 1803. In January 1804 Dessalines, now leader, declared the newly named Haiti a free and independent republic—­the second nation to do so after the United States. Freedom did not come cheap, however. Surrounded by slave-­owning states—­among them the United States—­that effectively placed 39

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the island under a blockade, Haiti was compelled in 1825 to make restitution to their former French enslavers, eventually amounting to 90 million francs in gold—­some $21 billion in the 2020s. It took more than a century for Haiti to pay off this extortion, which placed a huge burden on a state devastated by war and with a largely illiterate and unskilled workforce.11 Secession or independence, whether led by the privileged or the oppressed, was now a cause fully embraced across the Atlantic World. Venezuela issued two declarations, one that partially broke from Spain in 1810, the other in 1811 that definitively did so. Venezuela’s declarations were as much religious as political, but they pointed to the political oppression suffered by people in Caracas, Cumana, Barinas, Margarita, Barcelona, Merida, and Trujillo under Spanish rule.12 Across the Spanish Empire, other Latin American societies followed this lead. On February 12, 1818, Bernardo O’Higgins announced the “emancipación de Chile” from the abuses of and submission to Spain.13 Mexico and Peru issued similar declarations to terminate Spanish rule in their territories.14 Between 1811 and 1825, most of Spain’s American colonies declared and won independence. Unlike British North America, which essentially divided into two parts, present-­day Canada and the United States, Spanish America broke up into a multiplicity of separate republics, each of which would struggle to forge its own national identity. It is sometimes observed that the price of secession is partition; that is, the breakaway entity itself breaks into separate components. Independence may thus be followed by secession, or further independences. Secession and independence are apparently contagious. There was no guarantee that the United States might not have followed the example of Latin America and fragment further as it, too, faced politically minded separatism. So, for example, with the changes taking place in the 1800 election, New England Federalists found themselves politically on the outside and increasingly in a minority status. During the Thomas Jefferson and James Madison administrations, New England questioned the powerful position Virginia had within the Union, and Timothy Pickering predicted an eventual splitting of the country. Federalists worried about the growing number of foreign migrants to the United States and how those individuals allegedly diluted the character of the country, especially the Irish and Germans. The attempts by New England Federalists to secede became serious in the winter of 1814–­15, based on their opposition to the 40

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unsuccessful War of 1812. Indeed, had it not been for the termination of the war in 1815 and, more crucially, Andrew Jackson’s victory at New Orleans—­ which allowed the Madison administration to sell the conflict as an American triumph—­New England may well have preceded the South with an attempt at secession by some forty-­five years.15 Where New England had felt oppressed during the period of Jeffersonian dominance, by the late 1820s, it was increasingly southerners who started to feel isolated and being reduced to a minority status. The growing northern perception of a slave-­power conspiracy that had questioned the sectional balance of the country during the Missouri Compromise crisis indicated to southerners their future as a minority and the danger of political challenges to their social fabric. The growing desire to protect the infant northern industry with high tariff walls also irritated southerners.16 Commencing with the “South Carolina Exposition and Protest,” John C. Calhoun had started, with others, the process to develop a distinct southern political and national identity. Insisting on the sovereignty of the individual states based on their coming together under the Articles of Confederation, Calhoun complained that a corrupt government intent on destroying the liberties of the country was emerging. It was therefore important to protect the southern minority against “the oppression of the majority.” 17 Added to a growing perception of political alienation came the emergence of more belligerent and radical abolition movements—­most northerners generally, and President Jackson absolutely, had little sympathy with these. The differences culminated in the Nullification Crisis. On November 24, 1832, a convention in South Carolina nullified the tariffs of 1828 and 1832 based on their intention of favoring northern special interests and placing an undue burden on southerners. The state claimed that both acts were unconstitutional and therefore “null, void, and no law.” 18 South Carolina appeared willing to embrace secession if the federal government did not accept this action. Jackson had no intention of letting any state embrace a dramatic separatist policy and threatened to use force to bring South Carolina back in line. Although a political breakdown beckoned, cooler heads prevailed, and the first southern secession crisis was settled by compromise.19 In this situation a localized, state-­centered imagined community clashed with the still ill-­defined national community of the United States. 41

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South Carolina, however, was not alone with respect to a growing separatist identity. Nations south of the United States faced separatist tendencies, too, one example being Mexico.20 When newly elected, President Antonio de López de Santa Anna claimed that the Mexican federal system no longer worked and changed the constitution to centralize power. In response, eleven Mexican provinces rebelled, one of which, the northern part of Coahuila y Tejas, succeeded in seceding entirely from Mexico. Tejas, a province whose population consisted mostly of American settlers, gained its independence with assistance from the United States. Mimicking the Declaration of Independence, Texans claimed that the Mexican government no longer “protected the lives, liberty and property of the people.” Using a much stronger array of words like “oppression,” “tyranny,” and “despotism,” Texas also claimed that “the necessity of self-­preservation, therefore, now decrees our eternal political separation.” The demand for separation followed a long list of grievances, which included political concerns about constitutional violations, abuses of civil liberties, and anarchy.21 Yet the reality underpinning Texas secession was that the inhabitants, being American settlers, were very different linguistically, culturally, and even religiously from most Mexicans. A significant portion were enslavers who defied the country’s ban on the institution. Equally, many of those behind this movement fully intended to join their former nation—­the United States of America— ­at first opportunity. In the end, they did just that.22 Independence and secessionist movements were not confined to the Americas, where they were mostly based around the relative cohesion of a local identity. Europe witnessed, in the late 1820s and early 1830s, several separatist attempts to create new nation-­states based on long, historically established communal ties. The Greeks in the early 1820s, both in their homeland and from Russian exile, challenged their Ottoman overlords in a ten-­year struggle for independence. The conflict became something of a cause célèbre for liberal Europe. It also was one that eventually involved the European powers, just as America’s earlier struggle for independence had done. This time, when the independence struggle successfully concluded in 1832, the allies imposed a constitutional monarchy on the Greeks.23 The overthrow of the Bourbon Restoration and installation of the Orleans

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Citizen-­King Louis-­Philippe in France in 1830 had precipitated uprisings in other parts of the continent.24 South Carolina’s objections to tariffs, meantime, were shared in present-­day Belgium. Located in the southern provinces of the Netherlands, Belgians were upset about the tariff policies as well as language and social legislation implemented by the Dutch government that undermined the region’s constitutional freedoms. In 1830 an uprising started outside of the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie following a nationalist play and brought about a struggle between the southern provinces and the Dutch government. Only intervention by neighboring powers ensured Belgium’s successful secession and independence under a constitutional monarchy.25 The Irish, by contrast, achieved somewhat less success, although it is untrue to claim they achieved none, as the career of Daniel O’Connell demonstrates. Like the thirteen colonies, the Irish rebelled against British rule in the 1790s. Also like the American colonies, France provided military assistance to the Irish rebels, although this time it was Revolutionary and not Royalist France. Despite this, the 1798 uprising against British authority by Theobald Wolfe Tone failed. In response to the rebellion, the 1801 Act of Union took effect, formally incorporating Ireland into the wider British Union, thus creating the United Kingdom. The autonomous Irish parliament in Dublin was abolished. Although there were cultural differences, religion lay at the heart of Irish secessionism, as Roman Catholics had for decades suffered under the religious limitations on officeholding, which meant Protestants represented Catholic Ireland.26 Irish nationalism would be an outgrowth from this. Under the leadership of Daniel O’Connell, Irish Catholics challenged religious discrimination. As early as 1811 he had called for Catholic emancipation and the end of the domination of Ireland by the Anglican Church. Focusing on political challenges, he stood for election in the County Clare by-­election. In winning O’Connell created a conundrum because he was required, as a member of Parliament (MP), to take the Oath of Supremacy (which originated with Henry VIII), acknowledging allegiance to the Church of England. O’Connell as a Catholic refused to do so. Recognizing that either charging him with treason or denying him his seat in Parliament would simply inflame tensions within Ireland, the British government in 1829 abolished all religious qualifications for officeholding. Without firing a shot, Irish nationalism had ensured

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Catholic Irish access to elected office.27 Ireland, however, remained part of the United Kingdom, and nationalists increasingly sought separation rather than accommodation. Far less successful than the Irish were the Poles. Poland had been partitioned in the late eighteenth century, with Russia controlling most of it. Russia regained control of most of the country in the settlement of Vienna of 1815. While Russia had promised them a constitution and legislative autonomy, the Poles quickly discovered that their rights would remain elusive. As the perception of oppression and bad faith on the part of the Russians grew among Poles, radical elements demanded further freedoms in addition to those they had been promised. In November 1830 the Poles rebelled and demanded that their autonomy be properly enacted.28 The Polish revolutionary movement faced a difficult task of showing loyalty to the Russian tsar, avoiding a devastating war, and all the while maintaining political peace between moderate and radical elements in Poland. Their desire to restore their nation-­state and achieve sovereignty faced an uphill battle, as radicals frequently undermined the region’s political stability and eventually forced the cause of independence upon the reluctant moderates. With a demand for Polish independence, Russia unleashed its military superiority against the unprepared, unsupported, and ill-­equipped Poles. By early September 1831, the tsar’s army was outside of Warsaw; within a month the Polish revolutionary government collapsed. The 1830s were a period of mixed results for separatist and independence movements, challenging the established order, not to mention authority. The language utilized was usually the same, with rebels pointing to wrongs suffered to justify their rebellion. Often unspoken, however, or presented in euphemisms (“domestic insurrections”), were other, frequently less noble grounds for separation. As the Poles and South Carolinians discovered, successes were few and far between. Yet around the world, rising new national identities, whether based in race, religion, ethnicity, language, geography, policy, or a combination of these, started to demand sovereign authority from the over­ arching authority, sometimes authoritarian and sometimes not. One rebellion of the decade remains problematic, and although rarely considered a war of secession, it nonetheless involved declarations of independence. This was the struggle in Upper and Lower Canada in 1837–­38. 44

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Upper Canada was primarily English speaking and Protestant, while Lower Canada was primarily French speaking and Catholic. These divisions perhaps contributed to the fact that the two colonies had separate rebellions rather than one, coordinated effort, even if overlap occurred. In Lower Canada economic, social, and religious tensions were to blame, exacerbated by disputes between English-­and French-­speaking colonists that have given the revolt the somewhat-­inaccurate reputation of an ethnic dispute. The revolt in Upper Canada, motivated by abuse of patronage, especially regarding land grants, was a more limited affair and would probably never have resulted in violence had it not been for the example of Lower Canada. In any case, neither revolt enjoyed the level of popular support necessary for success. Each was suppressed by the authorities relatively quickly. Rebellions, however, often depend on outside intervention for success. Just as Washington was worried that Great Britain would intervene in the American Civil War, there were concerns in Westminster that the United States would involve itself on behalf of the Canadian rebels. Although President Martin Van Buren issued a proclamation of neutrality on January 5, 1838, U.S. public sympathies were clearly on the side of the rebels. Seeing the unfolding events as the inevitable consequence of the example of the United States, Americans believed the revolts were copies of their own struggle for independence. This perspective was apparently confirmed when, after being driven from Canada, the leaders of the two rebellions, William Lyon Mackenzie and Robert Nelson respectively, issued declarations of independence for Upper Canada on December 13, 1837, and for Lower Canada on February 28, 1838. These, however, were effectively the final nails in each rebellion’s respective coffin. The colonial authorities, playing on Canadian annexationist fears, were able to portray the rebels and their leaders as Yankee pawns, discrediting them and their causes. Anti-­Americanism proved an effective trump card in British North American, and later Canadian, politics for many years to come.29 By 1848, national identities had become increasingly developed and more inclined to challenge authorities viewed as being outside the fledgling nation. Spurred on by a growing belief in nationalism and national identity, separatists in Ireland, Schleswig-­Holstein, Hungary, Sicily, and Pernambuco were among the many regions experiencing discontent. The reasons and demands were similar across many of these uprisings. There is a reluctance among his45

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torians of 1848 to call the revolutionary events in at least the four European regions separatist or secessionist in nature.30 Their focus instead remains on the political and national-­unification impulses rather than on any separatist or secessionist aspects. It is certainly true that nearly all regions of Europe experienced varying degrees of political repression, some of which was aimed at national groups within existing political entities. The upheavals from the seventeenth century on, but especially the French Revolution, increasingly challenged this situation. The infusion of nationalism had caused Germans, Irish, and Magyar to look back at their histories—­or rather interpretations thereof—­for inspiration. The younger generation of nationalists were not necessarily intent on all-­ out separation; many would have accepted accommodation within their existing state system once constitutional guarantees and political protections were acknowledged. Compromise, however, frequently proved elusive if not impossible. Consequently, the reformists increasingly demanded independence. Ireland again is a good example of this phenomenon. The success of Catholic Emancipation stimulated O’Connell and a younger generation of nationalists to demand the abolition of the 1801 Act of Union. The Repeal Association under O’Connell focused on political agitation to bring change. The young patriotic editors of The Nation felt that a broader arsenal was needed to overcome British reluctance.31 Younger nationalists like John Mitchel called for the possible use of force and violence to accomplish autonomy. The growing rift between O’Connell and the Young Ireland grouping appeared when in June 1846 he tried to compel all members of his organization to pledge themselves against violence.32 In response, Thomas Francis Meagher rose and delivered a speech, earning him the nickname “Meagher of the Sword.” He claimed, “National independence does not necessarily lead to national virtue and happiness; but reason and experience demonstrate that public spirit and general happiness are looked for in vain under the withering influence of provincial subjection.” He believed that resolutions against violence would eliminate an important tool for revolutionary change. Meagher demanded: Abhor the sword—­stigmatize the sword? No, my Lord, for, in the passes of Tyrol, it cut to pieces the banner of the Bavarian, and, through those crag46

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ged passes, struck a path to fame for the peasant insurrectionist of Inspruck [Innsbruck]. Abhor the sword—­stigmatize the sword? No, my Lord, for, at its blow, a giant nation started from the waters of the Atlantic, and by its redeeming magic, and it the quivering of its crimson light, the crippled Colony sprang into the attitude of a proud Republic. . . . Abhor the sword—­stigmatize the sword? No, my Lord, for it swept the Dutch marauders out of the fine old towns of Belgium.33

The Irish Confederation, as a competing organization to O’Connell’s, came into existence in early 1847. The growing suffering of the Irish because of the Great Famine accelerated the schism and supported nationalist demands. People had first noticed the potato blight in 1845, when parts of the crop were devastated. For seven years, the country suffered from severe food shortages among the poorer strata of society. The British government’s relief efforts, meantime, were marked by incompetence and reluctance. The Poor Laws provided only limited relief to those suffering and forced some poverty-­stricken individuals to sell off their land to qualify for aid. Despite a myth that persists today, Ireland was not a net exporter of food during the famine—­imports of food more than doubled. Nonetheless, up to a million Irish may have perished due to malnutrition and disease, and almost a million more emigrated to avoid further hardship. While many settled on the British mainland, Australia, or Canada, many others migrated to the United States, which would prove sympathetic to Irish nationalism in years to come.34 The government in London worried about the growing trouble in Ireland. With revolutions across the European continent and Chartist agitation in Britain, the government decided to push through Parliament the Treason Felony Act, which reduced some treasonable crimes to transportation rather than death, to bring about more convictions, especially in Ireland.35 The government followed up the Treason Felony Act with a suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. In response, the leadership of the Irish Confederation launched a rebellion.36 Between July 23 and 29, 1848, William Smith O’Brien, Meagher, and others led such efforts in Wexford, Kilkenny, and Tipperary.37 But the uprising failed to win support from the local population and lacked effective preparation. Their failure ended any aspirations this spontaneous uprising 47

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had. Within days its leaders were arrested and faced trial and transportation. Another unsuccessful secessionist movement took place in Switzerland, a civil war that in some respects, as Carl Degler has correctly demonstrated, resembled the one that took place in the United States, each in a decentralized republic. As in Ireland, however, religion was the underlying cause of the event. Switzerland has a claim to being the oldest republic on the planet, arguably dating back to the fourteenth century. Nonetheless, it was conquered by the French Revolutionary armies in 1798, its independence and neutrality only being restored with the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Operating under a confederal system based on small states called cantons (which themselves could be traced back to the republic’s origins), Switzerland, like Ireland, experienced a Protestant-­Catholic divide. The Protestant cantons were the more recently organized and, increasingly, the more secular and less tolerant. In 1841 the Protestant canton of Aargau suppressed all religious orders, offending the Catholic cantons. Although this was in violation of the Federal Pact of 1815, none of the other Protestant cantons joined the Catholic ones in protest. In response, the Catholic canton of Lucerne invited the Jesuit Order to run its schools. This successfully offended both Lucerne’s Protestant minority and the Protestant cantons. Acts of violence soon erupted, and in December 1845 seven Catholic cantons formed the Sonderbund. Although more reminiscent of the Hartford Convention rather than southern secession in that it did not actually declare independence but rather addressed genuine grievances, that it also raised an army strongly suggested to the rest of Switzerland that secession was on the table. The diet of the confederation demanded the Sonderbund dissolve itself, and when the delegates of the Sonderbund cantons walked out in response, the vote to use force against the Catholic cantons was passed. The Sonderbundskrieg was brief, lasting only three weeks, in large part because, as with the American Civil War, no foreign intervention occurred. The Sonderbund was defeated and the new Swiss constitution, modeled in part on the antebellum U.S. Constitution, established a clearly confederal republic. Yet that was not the only resemblance to the United States. In a manner similar to the events that would later take place in America, the Sonderbund cantons were “reconstructed”: they had to agree to ban the Jesuit Order before being readmitted back into the confederation; almost a century would pass before the Jesuits were readmitted into the Swiss Republic.38 48

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By contrast, the Hungarian independence movement was older and proved harder to suppress. Hungary, enjoyed limited autonomy within the Austrian Empire, having its own parliament (the diet). A new group of younger nationalists used the opportunity afforded by the Hungarian parliament being in relatively regular session to voice their desire to obtain political freedoms and full autonomy. Building on the ancient ties between Austria and Hungary, the reformers desired a say in their own affairs and to economically, socially, and culturally advance their country.39 István Széchenyi, Lajos Batthyány, and Lajos (Louis) Kossuth used the opportunity of the general political upheaval to voice their demands in the streets of Buda-­Pest.40 Their protests were successful, and the imperial government permitted the formation of a Hungarian government under the moderate Batthyány.41 In contrast to the relatively straightforward rebellions in Ireland or Switzerland, the Hungarian uprising was more difficult since the Hungarian kingdom rebelled against the Austrian Empire and its rulers. Unfortunately, the king of Hungary and the emperor of Austria were the same person. Making matters more complex was the multiethnic composition of the resulting Austro-­Hungarian Empire. This multiethnic composition of its armies meant Hungarians in the Austrian army had to decide whether to remain loyal to their oath and fight against the Hungarian revolutionaries or abandon the army and support the uprising. Hungary itself also consisted of various ethnicities, including Croats, Germans, Magyars, Romanians, Slovaks, and Serbians. Thus, when the Austrians gave extensive powers to the Croatian Ban Josip Jelačić to suppress the Hungarian uprising, these ethnic divisions were exacerbated.42 Hungarian separatists did not accept Croatian separation but expected Austria to accept Hungarian separatism. Faced with the increased levels of violence and Croatian and Serbian armies prepared to attack and defeat the Hungarians, Batthyány resigned in early October 1848. With the radical Kossuth replacing him, immediately the tone of the uprising changed. On April 19, 1849, Kossuth finally convinced Hungarian politicians to issue a declaration of independence.43 Suddenly, accommodation or autonomy were no longer options; the struggle was now for independence and the creation of a Hungarian nation-­state. The “Declaration Relative to the Separation of Hungary from Austria” bore a strong resemblance of the American Declaration of Independence.44 49

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Similar to the American text, the Hungarian document started with the relatively familiar phrases, although slightly altered to fit the European context: “We, the legally constituted representatives of the Hungarian nation, assembled in Diet, do by these presents solemnly proclaim, in the maintenance of the inalienable natural rights of Hungary, with all its dependencies, to occupy the position of an independent European state.” Like other separatist declarations with their long lists of grievances, the Hungarians charged that the Austrians had violated their political and constitutional rights for over three hundred years. They now took up arms to defend against “systemized tyranny.” 45 Just as King George III had violated the American colonists’ rights, the Hungarians now claimed, “The House of Lorraine-­Hapsburg is unexampled in the compass of its perjuries, and has committed every one of these crimes against the nation. . . . and its determination to extinguish the independence of Hungary.” 46 Therefore, Hungary and Transylvania should return to their original status as an “independent kingdom.” 47 Just as the Declaration of Independence did not win over all, or even necessarily most, of the American colonists, the Hungarian people were, despite the document’s claims, similarly divided over the cause of independence. The country’s ethnic divisions and a lack of a national identity beyond the elites—­ this, too, bedeviled the Confederacy—­contributed to the lack of support. The suppression of uprisings in other parts of the Austrian Empire allowed Vienna to devote more resources to this fight. Military deficiencies and leadership quarrels, at the center of which was the micromanaging Kossuth, added to the Hungarian problems.48 In June the Austrian government appointed Julius Jakob Freiherr von Haynau, well known for his brutality, to command all Austrian forces in Hungary. He immediately ordered the execution of captured Hungarian officers and politicians. Once more the equation had changed.49 As the Hungarian army was defeated on the battlefield, Kossuth resigned from all positions of authority on August 11, 1849. His rival, Artúr Görgey, took over as commander in chief and political leader of the Hungarian revolution. Within two days Hungary surrendered.50 Despite leaving Hungary behind, Kossuth could not accept Görgey’s treason. In his farewell declaration, Kossuth wrote: “How many streams of blood have run, as proofs, how the Hungarian loves his father-­land, and how he can 50

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die for it! And yet hast thou, beloved father-­land, become a slave! Thy beloved sons are chained and dragged away like slaves, destined to fetter again every thing that is holy.” Kossuth more importantly concluded with an attack on Görgey: “Curse him, people of the Magyars! Curse the heart, which did not dry up, when it attempted to nourish him with the moisture of life! . . . The God of liberty will never blot you out from His memory. . . . You may still be proud, for the lion of Europe had to be aroused to conquer the rebels!” 51 Just like the Irish, the Hungarian separatist movement had failed. By the end of 1849, most of the rebellions in Europe had suffered defeat. Two small duchies, however, continued their struggle for independence. Like Hungary, the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein were a complicated lot. Technically, there were three duchies, Holstein and Lauenburg in the south and Schleswig to the north. The southern two states and the southern half of Schleswig were populated by Germans; residents of the northern parts of Schleswig were overwhelmingly Danish. Adding to the ethnic confusion was the 1460 Treaty of Ribe, which called for a perpetual union between Schleswig and Holstein. The Up Ewig Ungedeelt clause of the treaty became a rallying cry for German nationalists. The fact that Holstein but not Schleswig was part of the German Bund complicated matters even further. Traditionally, the region had placed ducal authority over the duchies in the hands of the king of Denmark. Unfortunately, the House of Oldenburg, governing Denmark, was facing extinction, adding to the problems in the differing succession laws of the duchies and the kingdom. Since the duchies were technically independent, they had long demanded an autonomous administration and constitutions. Many Germans in the 1830s and 1840s had looked to the struggle in Schleswig-­Holstein as a national cause to free German people from foreign rule and bring them into a nation-­state.52 In some respects they resembled the American settlers in Mexico’s province of Tejas. The death of Denmark’s king, Christian VIII, on January 20, 1848, unleashed demands for a new constitution for the country and the duchies, precipitating a national conflict in which Danes demanded the incorporation of Schleswig into Denmark and German nationalists resisted any change in the ties between Schleswig and Holstein.53 With the Danish government in turmoil and German nationalists preparing to defend their national and constitutional interests, the two sides believed they needed to act quickly. On March 51

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18, lacking information from Copenhagen, the German nationalists started a rebellion against Danish rule. The duchies asserted the legitimacy of their cause, claiming they acted on behalf of their duke to defend the ducal rights against Danish nationalists.54 The revolution to protect the autonomy, unity, and constitutional rights of the duchies quickly escalated from a civil war between Danish and German interests at the base of the Jutland peninsular into a greater European crisis. With Danish troops advancing into Schleswig to suppress the rebellion, German nationalists called on the revolutionary German parliament and Prussia for support. Until February 1851, the conflict between Denmark and the German states had gone through three stages of war and two periods of prolonged peace. Each new stage of war had reduced the support among the German allies. With the German revolution now dying a violent death, nationalists were at the mercy of their Prussian supporters, who in turn were under growing European pressure to leave the balance of power in Scandinavia alone.55 As in Hungary, radical elements challenged the conduct of the war by the moderate provisional government, which forced revisions to the cabinet without giving the radicals an opening to assume power. Dependent on military leadership from the outside, Schleswig-­Holstein could not conduct the war alone against overwhelming odds, despite the radicals’ demand to continue fighting to the bitter end. With a victorious Danish army to the north and advancing Austrian and Prussian armies to the south, the secessionist movement was suppressed. European separatists had failed to bring about independence, and with this failure, many departed their homelands and in some cases Europe altogether. Still, the hope for a renewal of the struggle to bring about independence remained alive. Therefore, they anticipated that exile would be short and kept a close eye on European events. The separatist revolutions and their proponents provided a set of ideas and language other revolutionary bodies could use. Separatism, secession, and other aspects of national aspirations were not restricted to Europe. While the Atlantic World saw independence and secessionist movements in places like Texas, Yucatan, Greece, Belgium, Poland, Canada, Hungary, Sicily, Schleswig-­Holstein, and Ireland, Africa and Asia did not see separatist movements in part because modern national identities had 52

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not yet developed and lacked an educated population self-­aware of their national distinction. Yet the history of Vietnam, which fended off several Chinese incursions, suggests that ideas of independence were hardly unknown outside the Western world. There was also one major non-­Atlantic exception in the modern era: the Indian subcontinent. The ethnic diversity of India was even greater than Hungary or Schleswig-­ Holstein. Through a process starting in the seventeenth century, the British East India Company effectively took control of India by the mid-­eighteenth century.56 Its rule, however, was decidedly indirect throughout much of the subcontinent: most states retained their independence of administration. The company’s administration was primarily interested in the economic wealth to be gained and to protect this profitable territory. As a result, its armies, using Indian soldiers, had engaged in campaigns in Afghanistan, Burma, and China. The events leading to the Indian Mutiny or, according to some historians, India’s first war of independence, were a case of both power tending to corrupt and familiarity breeding contempt. Initially, the company and its agents were careful to at least appear to respect Indian traditions. True, the British put an end to suttee (widow burning), but at the same time they also stamped out the Thugee network. More to the point, earlier agents and officers of the East Indian Company had learned Indian languages, and some intermarried (a number even converted to Islam). But by 1857, the situation had changed considerably. Increasingly, the British began to interfere in Indian life and aggressively promoted Christianity. Whereas they had previously been reluctant to challenge Hinduism and Islam (and had even shown something akin to respect toward both religions, especially the latter), this was no longer the case. From the British perspective, it was about “modernizing” or “civilizing” the Indians; from the Indian perspective, it was about an alien creed and culture being aggressively imposed upon them. Providing the final trigger was the introduction of the new Enfield rifle with internally greased paper cartridges (to facilitate loading). Rumors soon appeared concerning both the tallow and the lard being used for greasing, that it was a mixture of cow (sacred to the Hindus) and pork (forbidden by Islam). Soldiers biting such a cartridge to prepare it for firing, whether Muslim or Hindu, would thus be seriously violating their faith. This seemed to them to be as aggressively offensive an act as possible. While East India Company officers recognized the danger of such a situation, 53

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recommending the animal fat be changed to beeswax, it was too little, too late. Outraged Muslim and Hindu soldiers in the Bengal Army rebelled.57 That was the mutiny part. The independence aspect came from the movement to restore the Mughal dynasty to a position of glory and to use Bahadur Shah II as a symbol for a unified Indian state. The Mughal Empire had fallen far since the days of Humayun, Akbar, and Aurangzeb, and the Bahadur Shah only ruled over a small patch of land in northern India. The Indian Mutiny was fought over the whole of the Ganges River valley and into Gujarat and the headwaters of the Indus River. The mutineers’ demands varied, from respect for their culture to restoration of territorial rights to Indian rulers, punctuated by the senseless killing of civilians of the European garrisons. Reinforcements of regular British soldiers, who were supposed to go to China to conduct the Arrow War, provided the East India Company with the necessary firepower to subdue the rebellion. By the summer of 1858, the uprising was over, and those found guilty of having provoked or perpetuated the rebellion were executed in the most brutal possible ways, as the British committed atrocities of their own. Indian independence had failed, but many in the Atlantic region looked at the mutiny as simply a barbaric rebellion against civilization featuring unspeakable atrocities. Nonetheless, this view was not universal. Although the events of 1857 continue to be referred to as the Indian Mutiny, based on the rebellion among the Sepoy soldiers of the Bengal Army, Indian historians have argued that this was the first attempt by the Indian people to bring about their independence from British rule.58 In London politicians agreed that the rebellion was no mere mutiny. In the House of Commons, Benjamin Disraeli asked whether the events in India represented a simple military mutiny or a “national revolt.” Disraeli raised the question, he noted, because only an accurate understanding of the events would allow Britain to adopt the right policy in the future.59 Others held similar views. In his 1858 history of the uprising, Charles Ball writes: It had become less a cause of surprise than of apprehension when, day after day, intelligence spread over the country of unexpected outbreaks in this or that quarter of the Bengal presidency, sometimes accompanied by rumours of the most dire import—­at others, appearing only as an effect of some popular and systematic design to shake off the yoke of foreign domination, with54

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out unnecessarily provoking the wanton effusion of blood that too frequently already had characterized the progress of the insurrection, and had degraded a struggle for liberty and independence, as a people, into a war of senseless cruelty and unmanly vengeance.60

Thus, there was a perception, even among European contemporaries, that some in India did not just fight over greased cartridges but sought independence. While scholars are correct that this was fundamentally a religious war, given the significance of religion here compared to other wars of secession, this hardly disqualifies the Indian Mutiny as an example of a nineteenth-­century struggle for nationhood. Returning to the Atlantic World of the mid-­nineteenth century, secessionist, separatist, autonomy, and independence movements flourished everywhere, in both Europe and the Americas. Although separatist-­minded individuals had traditionally accused the authorities they wished to leave as oppressive and tyrannical, utilizing the language of national difference became increasingly common as well. Social and political elites emphasized national identities based on shared culture, history, language, and tradition, using their new identity to differentiate them from an allegedly oppressive overlord. A frequently manufactured historical identity increasingly provided the basis for constitutional and national separatist demands. Further, the spread of these ideas, often carried by European separatists migrating to the United States, infused a new language into the American political discourse. The proximate cause of southern secession lay in the aftermath of the successful war with Mexico and the California gold rush. American leaders had to quickly find a solution to the growing sectional dilemma regarding slavery and the new territories acquired from Mexico. The admission of new territories into the Union threatened to upset the balance between slave-­owning and free states in the U.S. Senate. There were also growing demands from southerners for a stronger fugitive-­slave law. Their demands in Congress were accompanied by growing concerns in the southern states about their future in the Union. In June 1850, delegations from several southern states came together in Nashville for a convention, building on a meeting the previous year in Mississippi. Convened by the so-­called fire-­eaters, among them Calhoun, both 55

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conventions voiced southern interests regarding slavery in the West and opposition to any attempt barring the practice from those lands. Some states indicated their willingness to protect their interests by force if necessary. The fire-­eaters’ demand for secession if slavery was restricted was overruled by moderate-­minded delegates who did not feel their mandate included disunion. Nevertheless, there were some who were once more willing to embrace separatism to advance their agenda.61 As with the changing face of secessionist campaigns elsewhere, this new southern separatist movement was based on a southern identity, as elites felt their region was increasingly oppressed by a northern majority intent on destroying slavery and the southern way of life. This perception had grown since the emergence of abolitionists groups in the 1830s with the first publication of Garrison’s Liberator. Southerners started to look back to the heritage of the American War of Independence and leaders from the South like Washington, Jefferson, and Madison for inspiration. The recent secessionist and independence movements in Europe offered fresh inspiration and arguments. Even before the American Civil War, southerners had developed a notion of their region being an exceptional place within the Union. Jefferson, for example, had written up his own list, noting the cultural differences between the North and the South. Thus, the wider national identity of the United States as a beacon for democracy and republicanism, which the country would export to other parts of the world, nonetheless contained an element of southern exceptionalism.62 Kentuckian Leander Cox was glad to see the European rebellions of 1848 and made justifications for their existence and legitimacy, which eventually would serve the southern states well. He stressed that “every nation has a right to govern itself.” Cox, however, qualified his point, calling for both national and individual independence. Since Hungary had stood for the former and not the latter, its cause was not pure enough for the United States.63 The far-­higher levels of immigration into the northern states increasingly made that part of the nation a multiethnic entity. To integrate the newcomers, the North moved toward a more civic nationalism, although the existence of the nativists demonstrates the limitations of this approach. The founding mythology, with its heroic leaders, important documents, and shared suffering, provided a civic foundation that increasingly was also religiously infused 56

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as a result of the Second Great Awakening, especially in the 1820s and 1830s. Competing with civic nationalism was a growing perception of cultural distinctiveness that provided a basis for an ethnic nationalism even in the United States.64 The ethnic component relied on the idea of “whiteness,” with African Americans and Native Americans still considered beyond the pale; the Founding Fathers had, after all, restricted citizenship to “free white men.” By contrast, the white southern identity was less civic based, given the relative lack of immigrants to the South, and the racial component, thanks to the defense of slavery, in time became central. Southerners thus developed an increasingly local, rather than national, allegiance that placed higher value on patriotism to their individual states than to the United States. For a time, the federal nature of the country made this kind of allegiance possible.65 South Carolinian separatists could look to the independence of the United States from Great Britain for inspiration of their own autonomous aspirations.66 Since Bacon’s rebellion in Virginia in 1676, southern slaveholders had developed an identity in which republicanism, liberty, and slavery worked hand in hand, needing one to appreciate the other.67 To them, slavery created “a unique society that was more conservative, more fair, and more stable than its free labor counterpart.” 68 Paternal planters allegedly watched out for their enslaved, whereas northern industrialists only exploited their workers. Slavery thus created a society, culture, and economy distinct from the northern states and provided a basis for a southern national identity. Since slavery was such an integral part of the nationalism-­creating elite of the southern states, any attack on the institution became a personal insult.69 The perception of being in a political-­minority status did not help either and made southerners increasingly defensive. The addition of more territory closed to slavery perpetuated this minority status and feeling of besiegement.70 The fears present in southern society provided a powerful basis for a distinct sectional national identity constructed around a status of oppression and subjugation. Just like their forefathers, southerners eventually would have to act against this tyranny and rebel. With respect to the wider Western world, however, the South’s position on slavery was retrograde. Southern insistence on it as the basis for a national identity wooed calamity. As a result, they looked to recent European examples to cloth their cause in more appealing terms, such as independence and self-­ 57

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determination. Various national leaders abounded, from Kossuth to Mitchel (both of whom visited the United States). Even such revolutionary and national-­unification espousing individuals like the Italian Giuseppe Garibaldi could be used. Garibaldi had fought first for Italian independence and then for unification—­surely the southern states could do the same. The fire-­eater Robert Barnwell Rhett was convinced that nations had a right to independence and their own state. Compared to “the people of England and Ireland, Russia and Poland, Austria and Italy,” he wondered whether they were any “more distinct and antagonistic in their characters, pursuits, and institutions, their sympathies and views, than the people of our Northern and Southern States.” 71 Rhett and his ilk found enough examples from the last thirty years to justify the southern cause for self-­determination and separation. “Stretching back to nullification, southern [fire-­eaters] had pressed their case using pamphlets, newspapers, and political associations old and new,” comparable to their European counterparts.72 The perception that southerners, just like various European ethnicities or cultures, were an oppressed people was widespread in the region by the late 1850s. Southerners mimicked the European arguments that the South was suffering under northern tyranny and that governments and nations were distinct entities. Therefore, they could identify with separatists as distinct as the Irish, the Poles, and the Hungarians. Even more, southerners used the established claim that nations and governments were frequently at odds and that the highest level of development was to create a state in which nation and government were in harmony.73 To ensure that the cultural distinction of their region existed and was showcased, southern intellectuals, writers, and educators worked to provide it with a literary tradition. Some of these efforts culminated with the creation of the University of the South, which Leonidas Polk hoped would instill an overarching national identity.74 By the late 1850s, southerners looked with growing concern to the future. Earlier that decade, all attempts to expand the country into the Caribbean basin by means of filibuster expeditions or diplomatic purchases had failed.75 This left only one direction for slavery to expand—­westward. By the late 1850s, even after some initial success, Kansas, too, had slipped through the fingers of slavery expansionists. Added to the geographic limitations now in place was the emergence in the northern states of a new party whose ideology centered 58

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around “free labor, free soil, free men, [and] free speech.” 76 It was not simply the Republican opposition to the expansion of slavery that directly attacked the South but also the promotion of tariffs, a direct assault on the South’s free-­ trade ideology upon which the exportation of its slave-­grown cotton crop depended. When the 1860 election campaign started, southerners had the painful memory of the northern reaction to the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, the outrage over the Sumner-­Brooks Affair in the U.S. Senate chamber, and John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia, on their minds. As a result, the South’s delegations to the Democratic convention in Charleston, South Carolina, insisted on support for a constitutional amendment protecting slave property nationally. The convention quickly disintegrated when the party’s northern delegates refused to support such a proposal. With southern delegations then leaving in protest, the party could not elect a presidential candidate. Southern paranoia about northern intentions to destroy slavery and thus the southern way of life had shattered the last remaining joint still holding the country together politically. Not until October, however, did southerners start to voice their intention to secede in case of a Republican election victory.77 Lincoln’s winning the presidential election set off fire-­eater debates and calls for secession conventions to determine the future of the South. Having a long history of separatist tendencies, South Carolina carried the torch once more and held a secession convention on December 17 in Columbia. Despite immediately agreeing on secession, the official announcement had to wait until the convention had left the smallpox-­plagued state capital and reconvened in Charleston. On December 20 South Carolina followed in the footsteps of its revolutionary ancestors and the example set by many European uprisings, declaring its independence.78 South Carolina announced that a people had the right to self-­government and an obligation to rebel against oppressive governments, just like the American colonies had done against the British Crown in the 1770s. That was how far the historical comparison went. From there, just like the previous separatist movements, the South Carolina delegates focused on a legal argument to explain the legality of their move. Focused on the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation, they pointed out that the United States had come about as a set of “FREE, SOVEREIGN AND INDEPENDENT STATES.” 59

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Even more important, they constructed a history where the Constitution was sent by the convention in 1787 to the states, not the people, for ratification. Based on this argument, South Carolina could claim a “compact between the States, a Government with definite objects and powers, limited to the express words of the grant.” All powers not granted remained with the states.79 Finally, South Carolina declared that the northern states had violated their own obligations to the Union; the sluggish enforcement of the fugitive-­ slave clause especially irritated the delegates. Even worse, northern states had actively undermined the enforcement of the most-­recent federal act and made efforts to nullify slavery-­related laws. Therefore, the states were no longer equals, as some of them had denied others the rights to property. Worse still, northerners had encouraged the insurrection and running away of the enslaved over the last quarter century. With Lincoln’s election, South Carolina feared a man “hostile to slavery” was about to take office and eliminate the institution. Its secession ordinance stated: “The guaranties of the Constitution will then no longer exist; the equal rights of the States will be lost. The slaveholding States will no longer have the power of self-­government, or self-­ protection, and the Federal Government will have become their enemy.” Therefore, independence was the only option left to South Carolina. Other southern states soon followed its example. The process of secession—­one of many such movements that took place in the nineteenth century—­was underway. The imagining of various communities either locally or regionally not only created the desire for unified nation-­states but also created a growing awareness of national oppression, leading to the desire of people to seek independence by separating from larger state entities. When some southerners in 1861 determined their future no longer lay with the United States but in secession and a newly formed nation-­state built around their peculiar interpretation of the Constitution and the history of the country as well as the enslavement of their labor force, these separatist rebels could look to a long history of earlier secessionist movements, especially in Europe. Irish, Polish, Hungarian, and Greek separatist rebellions in the first half of the nineteenth century had signaled the fragility of the state system and the willingness of communities that perceived themselves as oppressed to rise and seek independence. While secession could have a variety of underpinnings, many looked to the earlier successful separatist victories, such as the American War of Independence. 60

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Therefore, the secession movement in the southern states was the next chapter in a long line of separatist nationalist movements that inspired each other and sought justification. The southern rebellion, however, faced a difficult task, as standalone independence movements rarely fared well if they lacked outside support.

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3 TRANSFORMING LIBERALISM A N D R E P R ES E N TAT I V E GOVERNMENT But a man may here object, that the Condition of Subjects is very miserable; as being obnoxious to the lusts, and other irregular passions of him, or them that have so unlimited a Power in their hands. And commonly they that live under a Monarch, think it the fault of Monarchy; and they that live under the government of Democracy, or other Soveraign Assembly, attribute all the inconvenience to that forme of Common-­wealth; whereas the Power in all formes, if they be perfect enough to protect them, is the same; not considering that the estate of Man can never be without some incommodity or other; and that the greatest, that in any forme of Government can possibly happen to the people in generall, is scarce sensible, in respect of the miseries, and horrible calamities, that accompany a Civill Warre. —­T H O M A S H O B B E S ,

Leviathan, 1651

The state of nature is governed by a law that creates obligations for everyone. And reason, which is that law, teaches anyone who takes the trouble to consult it, that because we are all equal and independent, no-­one ought to harm anyone else in his life, health, liberty, or possessions. —­J O H N LO C K E ,

S

Second Treatise of Civil Government, 1689

ome have claimed that, at least in the English-­speaking world, all political philosophy is a continuation of the debate between Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, especially through their respective works Leviathan (1651) and the Second Treatise of Civil Government (1689).1 Simplified greatly, Hobbes saw men as naturally immoral and brutal, thus requiring an absolute 62

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authority over them to ensure a stable and functioning society. Such a phenomenon was in direct contrast to man’s natural state, under which life, as Hobbes famously put it, is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Locke’s view of human nature was more optimistic. Believing in the “tabula rasa,” man—­and Locke was talking about men—­was not naturally immoral or brutal at all, though he could become such, and while authority was required, it needed to be responsive to those it governed. Very crudely put, for Hobbes authority had to be imposed upon man for his own good; for Locke, man had to impose it upon himself for his own good—­a battle between the common good and the authority upholding it on the one hand, and the individual’s inclinations and the legitimacy of authority itself on the other. One can see this divide in Lincoln’s arguments that the individual states could not unilaterally terminate the federal government’s authority over them, for that would lead to anarchy (Hobbes’s great bugbear), and in his opposition to slavery as an institution and his belief (echoing Locke) that the Union ensured “a government of the people, by the people, for the people.” Both works were responses to serious political upheaval: Hobbes to the English Civil War; Locke to England’s Glorious Revolution. Hobbes was responding to the arguments of, among other people, unreconciled republicans such as John Milton; Locke was defending, among other things, the right of a people to overthrow a monarch. Both men ultimately found themselves on the winning side—­the Restoration in the case of Hobbes and the Glorious Revolution in the case of Locke. The “ultimately” is important. Both Hobbes and Locke had to flee England for the Continent—­France for Hobbes, Holland for Locke—­Hobbes for supporting the Stuart monarchy under Charles I, and Locke for opposing it under James II. Despite their ending up on the winning side, both men’s books were incendiary. Locke famously published his anonymously and denied authorship throughout his life. Hobbes’s work, meantime, was condemned by a convocation of the University of Oxford as “Heretical and Blasphemous” and destructive of both church and state. Thus, both works—­ credited with having initiated a debate that is still ongoing—­were born out of crises of political legitimacy and accountability. Hobbes and Locke were reacting to genuine political changes in England that did lead to a liberalization of the state, if not a liberal state. After all, despite Cromwell’s dictatorship, both the Instrument of Government (1653) and 63

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the Humble Petition and Advice (1657) were effectively constitutions. Both use the word “liberty” and are concerned with it (although not for Roman Catholics), none of which impressed Hobbes. Historian Steven Pincus has made a compelling case that the Glorious Revolution, with its Bill of Rights and other features, marked the origins of the liberal state, with Locke certainly being an able propagandist of the latter.2 Nonetheless, that both men would have been surprised by their place in intellectual and political history is an understatement. The notion of an “English-­speaking world” would have been quite beyond them. Indeed, a French-­speaking world would have made more sense, given that language’s widespread use in Europe among the educated. Both worked within a wider European intellectual tradition to which they saw themselves as contributing, as their own writings make clear. Among others, Hobbes was influenced by Niccolò Machiavelli, knew Galileo Galilei personally, and debated René Descartes both in print and possibly in person. Locke, meanwhile, was influenced by, among others, Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, and Hugo Grotius. Their being decoupled from the European milieu in which they worked and being moved to a separate Anglo-­American political tradition would have made no sense to them whatsoever. Locke especially would be surprised to learn that he is often credited as the father of the political ideology liberalism—­for reasons discussed below. Yet to a large extent, this has been their fate. Liberalism is traditionally seen as a venerable Anglo-­American tradition, most attributing the founding role to Locke. Following him, liberalism slowly gained acceptance during the Enlightenment until it was brought to North America, where the Founding Fathers enshrined its principles in the Declaration of Independence—­a Lockean lawyer’s brief to some—­and the U.S. Constitution. Liberalism continued its steady advance in the nineteenth century until it became the dominant ideology of the Western world. This Anglocentric account of the emergence of liberalism also relegates key non-­English Enlightenment thinkers—­along with those listed earlier, Baron de Montesquieu, Voltaire, Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, and Denis Diderot, just to name a few—­to the role of supporting players, even if the Scot David Hume is occasionally acknowledged. Fortunately, more recent scholarship has questioned this Anglocentric version. Helena Rosenblatt, for 64

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example, argues that it was the French Revolution that gave birth to liberalism and the Germans who transformed it. According to her, the historical interpretation crediting Locke as the father of liberalism and the English-­speaking world as its pathfinders is “a myth.” Rosenblatt instead believes that “liberalism, as a word and a cluster of ideas, emerged in France in the wake of the Revolution.” Its first theorists were Benjamin Constant and Madame de Staël. Rosenblatt correctly points to the fact that Locke never called himself or his ideas “liberal” and continues: “Originally invented as a term of abuse, liberalism referred to the principles of the French Revolution, the ‘ideas of ’89.’ For most of the 19th century, liberalism was seen as a French doctrine, tied to that country’s successive revolutions (1789, 1830, 1848 and 1871). Its association with France and revolution led many Britons and Americans to distrust and even fear it.” 3 The German contribution arrived in the nineteenth century. Whereas the early French liberals focused on establishing the rule of law, political equality, and constitutional representative government, the Germans were increasingly concerned about the socioeconomic changes wrought by industrialization. While industrialization undoubtedly created vast wealth, it also created massive economic inequality and teeming slums, riddled with disease and overcrowding. German political economists—­Wilhelm Roscher, Bruno Hildebrand, and Karl Knies, in particular—­attacked the doctrine of laissez-­faire. Arguing that free-­market ideas were too abstract and theoretical while insisting that data demonstrated that economic growth was leaving large segments of the population marooned in poverty, they advocated for a results-­oriented political economy, including government intervention to help the poor. Although the German theorists may be forgotten in the English-­ speaking world now, they were recognized in their day by Britons such as John Stuart Mill and Americans like John Dewey, who then built upon their ideas.4 In short, liberalism’s antecedents lie in Continental Europe, not in the English-­speaking world. While Rosenblatt’s arguments are not entirely original—­the idea that modernity, including contemporary political ideologies, was born with the French Revolution is hardly unheard of—­they are a necessary correction to lazy assumptions about the origins of contemporary political thought and indeed the development of liberalism and the liberal state. That said, they will not be the last word either, especially with respect to the genesis of the terms 65

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“liberal” and “liberalism.” While it is true that Locke never used the word “liberalism,” even before Rosenblatt’s work was published, Daniel B. Klein, through a search for the word, concluded that “liberal” in the political sense (as opposed to meaning merely generous) was coined in 1769 by the Scottish historian William Robertson, who attached it to “liberties and rights” and “liberal ideas concerning justice and order.” Klein also notes that an examination of works published in Europe during this period reveals that the term “liberal,” in a political sense, first appears in Britain before moving abroad.5 He does note, “On the Continent, ‘liberal’ was used, as compared to in Britain, more to denote constitutional reform and political participation, as opposed to natural liberty.” Yet natural liberty was understood by Robertson—­and indeed by Locke—­to require a liberal political structure to maintain and defend it: in other words, a liberal state. More to the point, even if Locke did not use the terms “liberal” or “liberalism,” his argument that government requires the consent of the governed is, in the end, the foundation stone of liberal ideology. After all, if a liberal state is not about government by consent, then “liberal” has no meaning whatsoever. More to the point, representative government of some kind or another long predates the eighteenth century—­or, for that matter, the seventeenth century. At the time of the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, for example, the Republic of Venice had operated under a constitutional and representative system almost nine hundred years old, ending only in 1797. The republic was ruled by the doge, who was elected by members of the city-­state’s parliament, the Great Council. Yet given that this body was derived from merchants and aristocrats, Venice was essentially an oligarchy. Nor could it be described as a liberal state, given its treatment of political dissidents, although this was frequently determined by whether the city was at peace or at war. That said, scholars believe that most Venetian citizens supported this political system, meaning it cannot be simply dismissed as autocratic. Further, although Venice’s power was clearly in decline by the eighteenth century, several Enlightenment thinkers took its model of governance seriously. It was a republican system of remarkable longevity.6 A better example is Switzerland, which has been a republic since around 1300, the chief interruption being 1798–­1803, when under French military occupation. In the nineteenth century Switzerland continued its contribution to representative government by being the 66

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first nation to introduce universal male suffrage for citizens in 1848 under the new constitution following the Sonderbundskrieg. In the United States all white men did not have the right to vote throughout the nation until 1856.7 As with the debate about the birth of the nation-­state, the argument concerning the precise origin date and place of liberalism and the liberal state, as well as the insistence upon a “Year Zero,” seems almost certain to end in semantics. Again, it must be acknowledged that the ideology of liberalism is protean and has transformed over the years. Yet the terms “liberal” and “liberalism” themselves throw up another issue that Rosenblatt acknowledges: “The term ‘liberal democracy’ is often used in an unproblematic way, as if liberalism and democracy were natural allies. But early liberals were highly suspicious of democracy. None of them would have been surprised by the term ‘illiberal democracy’ or would have found it confusing.” 8 One thing the French Revolution did establish with the Terror was that democracy did not necessarily guarantee personal liberties, let alone a liberal order to uphold them. There is a reason the term “Hobbesian” exists. The Terror also provided a negative example for opponents of democracy—­and, at times, liberalism or liberal reforms—­throughout the nineteenth century.9 This is why great care needs to be taken with respect to the term “democracy,” which in nineteenth-­century political discourse did not necessarily mean what it does in the twenty-­first century (usually, a liberal democratic state guaranteeing individual rights). And contrary to what is sometimes asserted, Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835–­40) did not provide a widely agreed-­upon definition of the term. In the first place, Tocqueville was not semantically clear in his use of the term démocratié, which was interpreted to mean either a bourgeois, capitalist society or an egalitarian society at large. In the second, the reception and understanding of Tocqueville’s work was further undermined by the various translations of it, such as Henry Reeve’s in English, which were not entirely faithful. Indeed, as late as 1880, irrespective of Tocqueville’s work, Edward Dicey complained that the term “democracy” in Britain remained synonymous with the French Revolution (and the Terror)— ­he could easily have meant any European state.10 This explains the great reluctance and even refusal by British liberals and radicals to be associated with the term “democracy,” even in the case of movements for universal male suffrage such as Chartism (the People’s Charter, for example, never uses the word).11 67

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The situation was similar in the United States. Although the term “democracy” enjoyed a better reputation, even here there were reservations. The framers of the Constitution took a dim view of democracy—­the word appears in neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution—­which they also associated with mob rule and instead put in place the checks and balances precisely to curtail it. Further, while “democracy” was undeniably used in the public discourse by the 1830s, and the Democratic Party (which only jettisoned the word “Republican” from its name in 1844) existed, U.S. politicians remained circumspect when it came to the term. Although historians use the term “Jacksonian Democracy,” Jackson himself avoided the word in his public addresses. Lincoln, meanwhile, did likewise and instead preferred the expression “popular government.” In fact, the first president to refer to the United States as a democracy in a public address was apparently Woodrow Wilson during the First World War.12 Largely because of the ambiguous and frankly contradictory uses of it, the term “democracy” is generally avoided here in favor of “representative government” or the “liberal state.” 13 Besides, genuine democracy did not really exist in the nineteenth century—­it would take the twentieth century to achieve that. Nonetheless, the nineteenth century was a democratizing and liberalizing century for the most part. Yet there were drawbacks to match the advances. While we often consider the political reforms during the Age of Jefferson and Jackson as expanding the electoral franchise in the United States, there were groups, such as African Americans in the northern states, whose right to vote was eliminated from state constitutions.14 Similarly, it is difficult to argue, for example, that much or any advantages accrued to the inhabitants of the Congo under the rule of Belgium’s King Leopold II. Much the same statement can be made regarding any other example of European imperialism in the nineteenth century. Similarly, what exactly the Native Americans or Mexicans gained in terms of political rights by U.S. expansionism is an equally difficult case to make. Although these issues are discussed in chapter 9, a reminder of this is necessary when discussing the advance of liberalism and liberal ideas in the nineteenth century. One critical struggle in the creation of the liberal state was women’s suffrage. It is unfortunate that this cause seems to have been almost hermetically sealed off unto itself as “women’s rights” or “women’s history” as opposed to 68

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being placed, where it belongs, at the center of the wider liberal-­democratic struggle. Most people are women, so women’s suffrage was meant to enfranchise the majority. It was thus not some sort of optional addition to the liberal state but the actual fulfilment of it. So, although the subject of women’s rights extends far beyond simply acquiring the franchise, this will be the lens through which we explore the development of the liberal state with respect to the majority. Although some historians date the beginnings of the move to enfranchise women from the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848—­the same year as revolutions took place in Europe—­the cause was much older than that. Lack of space prevents a comprehensive discussion of the history of the struggle for women’s political rights, but the cause could already be seen as early as the seventeenth century if not before, with a considerable number of publications demanding them.15 Abigail Adams’s famous request that her husband “remember the ladies” when he was involved in drafting the U.S. Constitution is another example. Although the word “feminism” only dates from 1837, being coined by Charles Fourier (“féminisme”) and spreading through the rest of Europe during the nineteenth century—­its use in Britain and then the rest of the English-­speaking world began only in the 1890s—­the ideology in its modern form more or less begins in France with Olympe de Gouges’s Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen in 1791. Gouges, a playwright and abolitionist—­women’s rights and antislavery activism seemed to be joined at the hip—­writing during the French Revolution, demanded women enjoy the rights of citizenship just as men did. She was not the only woman writing or speaking about women’s rights, but hers was the most lucid, comprehensive, and influential argument.16 Gouges, who was murdered during the Terror, was followed in 1792 with Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a work written in response to Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791), which itself was a response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). All of this lends credence to the argument that modern women’s rights were born out of the French Revolution. Certainly, the French took Wollstonecraft’s work far more seriously than did her fellow countrymen, in part because Gouges and others had prepared the intellectual ground.17 In some ways this may explain the relative failure of American Judith Sargent Murray’s 1790 essay “On the Equality of the Sexes,” which, while 69

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preceding both Gouges and Wollstonecraft, never received as widespread an audience. Murray, however, may have been doomed by her belief in the legitimacy of social classes, making her in this respect too conservative.18 Her overshadowing by Gouges and Wollstonecraft notwithstanding, unlike in earlier eras, this genie could not now be put back in the bottle, as the nineteenth century was an era in which patriarchal authority contended with women’s political and social liberation. The upheavals caused by the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars on both sides of the Atlantic put the arguments for women’s rights on hold. The issue, however, reared its head again when Jeremy Bentham published his plan for parliamentary reform in 1817. Bentham broached the idea of enfranchising women, asking, “why has it never been imagined that the right of election should be extended to women?” 19 Questions beg answers, and when James Mill claimed in 1823 that women, being effectively wards of their fathers or husbands, had no claim on the suffrage, Anna Doyle Wheeler and William Thompson replied with their 1825 Appeal of One Half the Human Race, Women: Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, to Retain Them in Political, and Thence in Civil and Domestic, Slavery: In Reply to a Paragraph of Mr. Mill’s Celebrated “Article on Government.” As one scholar notes, “The essay as a whole is an unequivocal appeal for votes for women, the first to be cogently argued (Wollstonecraft had only hinted at it).” 20 A counterreaction came with the 1832 Reform Act, which specified that “male persons” were being enfranchised, the first time that English law explicitly prohibited women from voting. In Britain the battle lines had been drawn. These then would be exported to the United States when Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott met at the first World Anti-­Slavery Convention in London in 1840. Outraged that women were neither allowed to speak nor vote at the convention, the two Americans would go on to organize the Seneca Falls Convention eight years later, arguably the first convention for women’s rights in history.21 A demonstration of nineteenth-­century women’s growing politicization versus men’s refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of the same can be seen in Jessie Frémont’s visit to Lincoln in the White House on September 10, 1861. Her husband, Major General John Frémont, had issued a proclamation freeing the enslaved owned by rebels in Missouri, where he was serving. Lincoln 70

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had countermanded the order. Frémont, a longstanding opponent of slavery, requested an audience with the president to deliver a letter from her husband justifying his actions, but she was also determined to express her own views. Pointing out, among other things, that not making the war one of emancipation was damaging the Union’s cause abroad, especially in Britain, Frémont defended her husband’s course of action. With respect to abroad, she was largely correct—­Lincoln’s countermanding the general’s actions did in fact damage the Union’s reputation in Britain.22 Nonetheless, as Frémont recalled: “The President said, ‘You are quite a female politician.’ I felt the sneering tone and saw there was a foregone decision against all listening.” Indeed, Lincoln condemned her husband’s actions: “The General should never have dragged the negro into the war. It is a war for a great national object and the negro has nothing to do with it.” 23 As Frémont’s biographer observes: “No doubt Jessie was tired and overwrought when she saw the president, and she neglected to use her considerable charm, but she was also a clear and forceful speaker who expressed herself easily and well. Abraham Lincoln, like most men of his time, was unaccustomed to taking women seriously on political matters.” 24 Indeed, it just so happened that on this occasion the woman was correct. To what extent the Civil War helped or hindered women’s rights is still debated. Probably, given the Confederacy’s more patriarchal views, it helped on balance.25 Women certainly were given purpose by the war and greater responsibilities as their husbands or fathers were away fighting it. They also advanced the professionalism of nursing (discussed in chapter 5). Nonetheless, despite generally offering women better rights with respect to their property and relative ease of divorce in comparison to Europe, the United States was hardly a pathfinder when it came to finally enfranchising them. After all, the Fourteenth Amendment for the first time introduced gender into the Constitution, allowing states to discriminate against women’s demands for the right to vote. Although women were given the vote in Wyoming Territory in 1869 (possibly a consequence of the Civil War), this was reversed upon its achieving statehood. Nonetheless, women’s voting rights ultimately would not be prevented. New Zealand became the first nation to give women the vote in 1893, followed by several Australian states and then Finland in 1906 and Norway in 1913. The First World War, however, was the watershed, with Canada, Russia, Germany, and Poland all extending the franchise to women. Britain, which 71

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did so with limitations in 1918, and the United States in 1920 were among the laggards, but France was one of the last, only finally enfranchising women following the liberation in 1944. Thus, the nation that was arguably the birthplace of modern women’s rights was one of the last to grant them the vote. From the perspective of most white men in the United States, Europe, and settler societies generally, the liberal ideology and the liberal state appeared to advance. This certainly appeared to be true with respect to the extension of the franchise, the terms and conditions of which depended upon local circumstances and varied widely, yet even this was far less linear than is commonly assumed. It is, for example, widely understood that Britain’s 1832 Reform Act (also known as the “Great Reform Bill”) finally enfranchised the upper middle class, as prior to that, voting was limited to freeholders worth forty shillings a year, with women, common laborers, and the poor having no voting rights at all. The forty-­shilling qualification for the franchise, however, only applied in forty English counties, whose voters made up a minority of the electorate. The larger number of parliamentary seats were in the boroughs, the number of which exceeded two hundred, many of which had a smaller number of voters than any county. An obvious example of this is the infamous “rotten” or “pocket” boroughs, where the number of voters was so small, they were effectively little fiefdoms. The fictional rotten borough of Onevote in Thomas Love Peacock’s 1817 novel Melincourt, wherein an ape, Sir Oran Haut-­Ton, is put forward as a member of Parliament, should remind us that people of the day recognized these were an affront to a liberal society. Other boroughs, however, were the exact opposite. In these the electorate was far larger, owing to a remarkably varied mixture of qualifications. In such places the electorate extended much lower down the social scale, and in some cases, women were voting, too. This was the other side of the Reform Act. While it undoubtedly expanded the British electorate, it also disenfranchised a significant number of voters.26 Further, while the act undeniably widened the franchise, even most men did not have the right to vote—­only one in seven. Liberal Britain’s extension of the franchise was a sporadic and prolonged effort. Further reform bills in 1867 and 1884 expanded the electorate, ultimately including most men, but even universal male suffrage remained elusive. The 1867 Reform Act roughly doubled the electorate, meaning two in seven men could vote. Only in 1884 did most men in Britain secure the vote.27 Yet even 72

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by the time of the 1884 Representation of the People Act, Britain’s franchise was more restricted than many other European nations. In fact, it was not until 1918 that all men (and women above the age of thirty) secured the vote.28 Britain’s settler societies were relatively more liberal with respect to the franchise. Prior to Confederation, in 1867 British North America’s constituent territories had individual standards for the franchise, from the more liberal Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia, which had universal male suffrage by 1853 and 1854 respectively, to the more conservative Upper and Lower Canada, which paradoxically both expanded and contracted the electorate at various times. Upper Canada especially attempted to disenfranchise U.S. settlers, whom they regarded as an advance guard of annexation akin to that experienced by Mexico in Texas. Nonetheless, most men—­U.S. settlers included—­ had the vote before Confederation.29 Australia, like Canada, began as a collection of colonies with various franchise requirements, but all men had the vote by the 1860s, South Australia starting the trend by granting universal male suffrage in 1856.30 New Zealand, a beacon of progressive experimentation in the nineteenth century, enfranchised all men, including the indigenous Māori people, by 1879 and women in 1893.31 The “Anglosphere” was not exceptional. Aside from Switzerland, Continental Europe saw various countries either expand their electorates or introduce universal male suffrage during the nineteenth century. Denmark was one of the earliest in 1849, followed by a surge toward the end of the century, as Belgium in 1893, Austria in 1896, and Norway in 1898, among others, all granted adult males the vote.32 Further, one could argue that the European nations, being far less racially diverse, were more expansive in their extension of the suffrage than the United States or Australia and Canada, which continued to limit the right to vote based on race or recent immigration status, although a different standard, of course, existed with respect to their colonial possessions—­where voting rights even existed. Getting the vote was one thing, being allowed to freely exercise it was an entirely different proposition. One of the underexamined aspects of nineteenth-­ century political representation is the extent to which fraud and intimidation influenced elections, even in allegedly liberal states. Being required to publicly cast one’s vote, whether by a show of hands or a written statement, frequently left one open to reprisals. In Britain, for example, landlords were known to 73

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watch their tenants closely to make sure they voted correctly, with eviction as the consequence for the delinquents. This continued in some cases even after the 1867 Reform Act. Nineteenth-­century U.S. elections were also notorious for both fraud and strong-­arm tactics to ensure that certain measures were won at the ballot. New York’s Tammany Hall, effectively the controlling interest of the city’s elections from the 1830s until the end of the century, was legendary on both sides of the Atlantic. Violence, intimidation, and political corruption were hallmarks of Tammany Hall’s activities—­and, as such, made a mockery of the ideals of representative government.33 Yet as a recent defender of Tammany Hall has pointed out, it was hardly unique. In 1852 the Whig Party printed up an incredible eighty thousand fraudulent ballots in attempt to steal local elections.34 Indeed, as one scholar notes, the situation became enough of a problem in the United States that “by the middle of the nineteenth century it was obvious to many Americans that manipulation of the ballot box had made voting a meaningless procedure.” 35 In many respects voting did not become a secure right until the introduction of the secret ballot. Several nations experimented with this on both sides of the Atlantic, but it was not until the mid-­nineteenth century, when Britain’s Australian colonies began implementing it on a regular basis, beginning with Tasmania in February 1856 and in the following month, Victoria (which subsequently claimed the credit), that the secret ballot became an official addition to the liberal state. By 1870, its use had spread to New Zealand, then to Britain in 1872. The first U.S. president to be elected to office by the secret ballot was Grover Cleveland in 1892. The secret ballot’s origins were noted in the United States, where it was called “the Australian ballot.” 36 The right to vote, however, is only part of the story. After all, all white men enjoyed the vote in the Confederate States of America, making it, based solely on that criterion, one of the most “democratic” states in the world during its brief existence.37 The liberal state has always been based on fundamental rights—­ indeed, the English 1689 Bill of Rights, the French Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen in 1789, and the U.S. Bill of Rights in 1791 demonstrate that the question of individual constitutional rights considerably preceded the expansion of the suffrage. This question of suffrage and its relation to the liberal state was of extreme importance to the political careers of two men,

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neither of whom were—­or are—­generally regarded as liberal: Louis Napoleon and Otto von Bismarck. Napoleon III has been subject to a fair amount of scorn by historians, especially American ones. Certainly, his quixotic attempt to establish a French protectorate in Mexico, his dubious diplomacy during the American Civil War, and finally his humiliating defeat at the hands of the Prussian-­led German Bund marked him out as one of history’s tragic-­comedic failures. This view, however, owes rather a lot to hindsight and American-­centered antimonarchical blinders. And contrary to what is sometimes claimed, liberals were not always opposed to Louis Napoleon.38 Historians quoting Victor Hugo disparaging him often forget that he was originally an admirer and staunch supporter of Napoleon’s election to the French presidency in 1848 as well as a critic of the French revolutionary government. Hugo was not alone. British liberals Richard Cobden and John Bright were also staunch admirers for most of Napoleon III’s career. With respect to the former, the feeling was mutual—­Louis Napoleon was the leading financial contributor to the statue erected to Cobden in Manchester following his death in 1865.39 Plenty of other nineteenth-­century liberals at one time or another held similar views. It was only toward the very end of his reign that Napoleon III became one of nineteenth-­century liberalism’s bête noires. For much of his reign, the situation was very different. There were reasons for this. In public at least, Napoleon was a champion of popular sovereignty and nationalism. He played a key role in the unification of Italy, one of the great liberal causes of the nineteenth century, by defeating Austria in the Franco-­Austrian War, or the Second War of Italian Independence (1859). His alliance with Britain helped contain tsarist Russia, one of the least popular regimes in the European liberal imagination, during the Crimean War, thus checking Russian expansionism. Given European liberal hostility to both Austria and Russia, his contribution to thwarting both helped his reputation. He also successfully established the French Empire in Indochina, thus extending civilization in many nineteenth-­century European liberal eyes. Further, in many key respects Napoleon modernized France, pushing it into the industrial age. Railways were rapidly expanded; in less than twenty years, France’s 3,500 kilometers of track became 20,000 kilometers.

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New banks were created to make credit available for businesses. Napoleon III turned the country into an important export power in part through his free-­ trade agreement with Britain in 1860, then with other neighboring states, promoting the liberal idea of free trade. France’s merchant marine became second only to the United Kingdom’s. French workers, meanwhile, received the right to legally go on strike in 1864, more than twenty years before Britain and long before the United States recognized such rights. Public education, particularly for women, was massively expanded. He was, without a doubt, a modernizer. Then there was the little matter of Napoleon being elected, first by almost three-­quarters of an electorate based on universal male suffrage in 1848 as president of the Second French Republic, then by a plebiscite in 1851 as emperor of France. His majority in both cases was far greater than Lincoln’s in either 1860 or 1864. It was at this point, however, that some liberals such as Hugo and other republicans began to turn against him. More would do so in following years as Napoleon censored the press and imprisoned political rivals, while others, particularly those outside of France such as Cobden and Bright, stood by him. Although opponents complained that his electoral victory as emperor was illegitimate, there remains no reason to believe that, at any time before 1866 and his failures in Mexico, Napoleon would have lost any national election had he held one—­even by secret ballot.40 He undeniably enjoyed genuine popular support for most of his reign, including from many liberals. Napoleon thus represented a challenge to nineteenth-­century liberalism and divided liberal opinion—­that is, until the Germans overthrew him. He was a popularly elected emperor who modernized his nation and introduced, at least to some extent, genuine liberal policies. But there was another aspect as well: Napoleon III undeniably struck fear into British hearts by constructing an ironclad fleet—­the first in the world—­to challenge the Royal Navy. He also irrefutably frightened the United States both with respect to potential interference in the American Civil War on the side of the Confederacy (which would almost certainly have tipped the balance of the conflict) and by his actions in Mexico. Not everyone, however, shared British and U.S. nationalist hostility toward him. Disregarding hindsight, then, for much of his reign, Napoleon was taken very seriously indeed by his contemporaries on both sides of the Atlantic. Insofar as France supporting the Confederacy, realpoli76

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tik seems to have been a key motive in his decision (a concept discussed in a later chapter)—­he wanted an independent South to recognize his regime in Mexico. Yet it also appears that he supported the South for the same reason he did the Italians—­the principle of self-­determination. In an interview with radical MPs John Arthur Roebuck and William Schaw Lindsay, Napoleon III claimed he wanted Britain to join France in recognizing the Confederacy because the southerners had proved able to “maintain their independence and govern themselves.” 41 It was not the forces of liberalism that brought an end to Napoleon’s popularly elected empire, but rather Otto von Bismarck. Yet Bismarck and the Germany of which he was a key architect represented a very different proposition to nineteenth-­century liberalism. As with Napoleon III, Bismarck was not without foreign—­or, indeed, German—­liberal supporters. His Kulturkampf against the Roman Catholic Church, an institution seen by many liberals as a bastion of political reaction—­the declaration of Papal infallibility in 1870 only reinforced this—­did have its liberal supporters on both sides of the Atlantic, including William Gladstone and Ulysses S. Grant.42 Further, while his constitution promulgated in 1871 was not especially liberal, it did include a national representative body, the Reichstag, elected by universal manhood suffrage, something that still remained elusive in Britain and other liberal European states. The Reichstag’s power, however, was circumscribed; in many respects the real power lay with the kaiser and the chancellor. Nonetheless, as with Napoleon III, Bismarck instituted social reforms in the 1880s that liberals on both sides of the Atlantic sought to emulate, including national healthcare (1883), accident insurance (1884) and old-­age pensions (1889). There is a legitimate claim to be made that Germany was the world’s first modern welfare state, decades before President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal (1933–­ 39) or Britain’s “New Jerusalem” (1945–­51).43 That Bismarck was outflanking the socialists with these maneuvers simply served as a precedent for others. It was not only liberals in opposition to socialism, especially after the Paris Commune in 1871, who had sympathy for Bismarck’s approach.44 This was the other side of Bismarck. To many late-­nineteenth-­century liberals, Germany was an ultramodern state. American progressives, among others, paid close attention to German educational reforms, especially with respect to higher education, as the Germans professionalized several disci77

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plines, particularly history. Johns Hopkins University, founded in 1876 as the first U.S. research university, was constructed almost entirely along German lines. This belief in German intellectual dominance in higher education was so widely held that by 1915, an estimated 25 percent of all high school students in the United States studied German. In Britain, meanwhile, liberals such as Joseph Chamberlain, Charles Dilke, James Bryce, and A. V. Dicey were all, at one time or another, staunchly pro-­German. That the last three were pro–­United States as well underlines a further point. Late-­nineteenth-­century ideas of Anglo-­Saxon racial supremacy—­Anglo-­American liberals particularly believed these—­included Germany, which was after all the original home of the Angles and the Saxons. The origins of representative government were said to lie in the Anglo-­Saxon meeting of freemen, the gemôt, which originated with the ancient Germanic tribes and could be seen replicated in the New England hall meeting.45 Yet this Anglo-­American liberal admiration for Germany was effectively erased from popular memory and history following the events of 1914–­18 and especially 1933–­45.46 Only after the First World War was Germany equated with militarism and authoritarianism, a judgment apparently confirmed when the Nazis overthrew the Weimar Republic. When Germany’s stunning and unexpected victory over France in 1871 became known in the United States, Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women, exulted: “I side with the Prussians. . . . Hooray for old Pruss!” 47 Was the liberal Alcott an admirer of Bismarck’s approach to nation building? Possibly, but possibly not, for the intervening text in the quote reads, “for they sympathized with us in our war.” By “our war,” Alcott means the American Civil War: Prussia had supported the Union and France had not. This anecdote is crucial to understanding the various international responses to the American conflict. Although the myth persists that liberals and radicals abroad, but in Europe especially, identified the Union cause as theirs and Lincoln became a hero of international liberalism, the evidence for this, to be charitable, is underwhelming.48 While it is true the Union was supported by liberals such as Garibaldi, it was also staunchly supported by antiliberals and opponents of the liberal state—­to say nothing of democracy—­including, crucially, Tsar Alexander II, Bismarck, and Austrian emperor Franz Josef, not to mention Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, neither of whom was a democrat or a respecter of the liberal state. European divisions over the Civil War did not divide neatly 78

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between liberals and conservatives. The Union had plenty of illiberal supporters; the Confederacy had significant liberal ones. The assumption that liberals abroad saw the American Civil War the way Lincoln and American nationalists did—­this applies both then and now—­ founders especially with respect to one liberal European state, Great Britain. Contrary to a myth still being promulgated by Civil War historians, British views on the conflict did not split along political lines.49 Nor did they divide along lines of class, Marx’s and others’ claims notwithstanding.50 British perspectives of the United States, liberal or otherwise, were shaped by relations prior to the war, rather like Alcott’s opinion of Prussia. Mid-­nineteenth-­ century Britons remembered America’s de facto alliance with Napoleon Bonaparte in the War of 1812. Given their belief that the Napoleonic Wars were a struggle against military despotism, from their perspective, the British liberal state—­and by extension, European liberalism—­existed despite the United States, not because of it. Repeated threats to annex Canada made by American politicians, the U.S. opposition to Britain’s campaign against the international slave trade (a liberal cause if there ever was one), and apparent widespread American public sympathy for autocratic Russia in the Crimean War seriously damaged the country’s reputation in Britain prior to the Civil War.51 Following southern secession, the Union’s Morrill tariff, Lincoln’s declarations that he would not interfere with slavery, and Secretary of State William Henry Seward’s maladroit and Anglophobic diplomacy, culminating in the 1861–­62 Trent Affair—­the Union navy unlawfully seized two Confederate commissioners from a British mail ship in international waters—­destroyed what little goodwill remained. Fortunately for the Union, the Confederacy’s threat to force Britain to intervene in the war by withholding its cotton crop—­ the so-­called King Cotton strategy—­and its status as an unapologetic slave-­ owning society meant that very few could support the South either.52 Again, contrary to mythology, most British liberals and radicals were never particularly enamored of the United States or its claims to be a rival political model to Britain.53 Exceptions to this such as Cobden and Bright—­so pro-­ American they became the most outspoken opponents to Britain’s attempts to stamp out the international slave trade, then largely carried out by the U.S. merchant marine—­have too often been treated as representative of British liberalism by American Civil War historians. Further, the widespread American 79

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belief in the congenital inferiority of Black people ran up against the equally dominant British belief that racial differences were essentially environmental. Notions such as T. B. Macaulay’s “Brown Englishmen”—­other racial and ethnic groups could adopt Britain’s perceived superior culture—­remained the norm in the United Kingdom until the Jamaican, or Morant Bay, Rebellion of 1865.54 For this reason, slavery placed the Confederate States beyond the pale for most Britons, whatever their political inclinations or social status. Abolition of slavery was the liberal cause for the British, not America’s or Lincoln’s pretensions to be defending a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. A tendency has persisted to wildly exaggerate the scale of British sympathy for either side. Besides the fact the American conflict was replaced as a focus of public attention by the Polish Rebellion in 1863 and the Dano-German War in 1864, the combined membership of southern and northern groups in Britain and Ireland amounted to fewer than 2,500 individuals in a population exceeding 29 million.55 Similarly unimpressive were the numbers at the meetings held for one side or the other during the conflict. Only six meetings held on the American Civil War broke the 5,000-­attendee mark, with none apparently exceeding 10,000 persons. By contrast, in 1863 around 50,000 people attended a speech in Glasgow by Lord Palmerston. While that speech admittedly was on domestic matters, possibly as many as 100,000 people had turned out to see Kossuth when he visited London in 1851.56 Thus, by nineteenth-­century British political standards, the numbers in attendance at meetings on the Civil War were relatively low, undermining the claim of mass support for the North or the South. Even among the small minority who favored one party or the other, Britons were less inclined to support a side in the American Civil War than to oppose one—­opposing one side did not necessarily mean supporting the other. Opponents of the Union tended to be such because they believed that the South had the right of political self-­determination, regularly comparing the Confederate cause to the Italian or Hungarian struggles. Opponents of the Confederacy, meanwhile, tended to be such because of slavery, regularly comparing southern secession to Irish rebellion. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation undeniably improved British opinion of the Union’s cause—­the United States had finally fallen into line with Britain’s view of slavery—­but beyond a few 80

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individuals, arguments that the Civil War’s outcome had consequences for the liberal state were rare in the British political discourse.57 This skepticism, at best, of the United States was broadly shard by Britain’s settler societies. Canada, whose founding population consisted of French Canadians who refused to participate in the War of Independence and United Empire Loyalists who rejected the U.S. cause outright, created liberal societies based on as explicit a political rejection of the United States as Americans did of Britain. This idea of Canada as an “anti-­America” continued after the American Civil War in 1867 among the nation’s fathers of Confederation. The liberal Sir George-­Étienne Cartier declared, “In our Federation the monarchical principle would form the leading feature, while on the other side of the line, judging by past history and present conditions of the country, the ruling power was the will of the mob.” 58 Australia’s and New Zealand’s political liberalization, meanwhile, developed independently of the United States, taking cues more from the United Kingdom than anywhere else. Australia’s secret ballot, for example, almost certainly derives from British Chartists. Lincoln’s reputation among liberals—­and that of his cause—­rather like Louis Napoleon’s, was broadly determined by his end, except in reverse, with Lincoln assassinated at the height of his triumph. At that point the creation of a liberal myth began. J. S. Mill in Britain, for example, who had opposed the South solely because of slavery and concurred with fellow liberal J. E. Cairnes’s statement that he did not expect or desire the Union to be preserved during the conflict, changed his tune after the president’s murder. Only then did Mill declare that the Civil War was a test of liberal institutions and proceeded to accuse conservatives of supporting the slaveholding South. He and others were joined by later generations who, keen to create a usable past for “the English-­speaking peoples,” recast the turbulent and often-­antagonistic history of nineteenth-­century Anglo-­American relations as two communities united by a shared commitment to liberal and democratic institutions. As with Bismarck’s Germany, the First and Second World Wars were crucial to that narrative’s development. This myth remains active to this day.59 Thus, those who claim that Britain or its settler societies—­Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—­owed their extension of the franchise and further liberal reforms largely to the United States or to the American Civil War are simply demonstrating a lack of familiarity with these nations’ histories. With 81

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respect to Europe, both Switzerland and Denmark had universal male suffrage before the Civil War. As for France, insofar as foreign influence resulted in the downfall of Napoleon III and the establishment of the Third Republic, the cause was not Lincoln and Grant but rather Bismarck and von Moltke—­even Louisa May Alcott recognized that. This idea of the American Civil War somehow propelling liberalism across the globe also overlooks another inconvenient fact: following the conflict, the United States retreated from both liberalization and universal male suffrage. While initially the Civil War advanced the liberal state in America with both the abolition of slavery and the enfranchisement of African Americans, what came after was a reversal. Following the contest, and with President Andrew Johnson determined to stop them, the Radical Republicans passed the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, giving Black men (but not women of any race, with the term “male persons” used for the first time in the Constitution) the vote.60 Although the Radicals’ actions only meant enfranchising 8 percent of the U.S. population (roughly half of the African American population), given that Black people were heavily concentrated in the South (90 percent), it meant that whole areas of the region now allowed most males to vote for the first time. In 1868 large numbers of freedmen indeed voted—­turnout was 90 percent in some areas—­and elected the South’s first Black officials and public servants. This led to significant legislative changes in the former Confederate states, including their first public schools for African Americans and the removal of laws restricting Black peoples’ rights and liberties. In this respect, U.S. Reconstruction was very much part of the extension of the franchise and liberal reforms taking place across the Western world. With the end of Reconstruction, however, came the reversal, as African American voting rights were steadily reduced beginning around 1878 onward as the South was, in white southerners’ perspective, “Redeemed.” Property qualifications, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses (by which one could only vote if one’s forefathers could, obviously barring the formerly enslaved and their offspring) were introduced. And there were cruder methods, such as fraud, intimidation, and, in the final analysis, terrorism through lynching. The gains that African Americans had made during Reconstruction were swept away as the so-­called Jim Crow South, featuring segregation, was constructed. 82

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For African Americans, the United States became anything but a liberal state.61 Historians have pointed to the Great Migration from the increasingly hostile South to the hopefully more tolerant Northeast, Midwest and West as an example of Black people being political refugees—­in this case, within their own nation.62 It would not be until the latter half of the twentieth century that Jim Crow would be dismantled and African Americans regained the freedom to exercise their legal and constitutional rights. Some have argued that because of this, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 represents when the United States finally became a liberal democracy with universal adult franchise. In this sense, then, the Redeemed South had actually moved the United States in the opposite direction of other nations in extending the franchise and the rights of the individual. G. K. Chesterton once observed that, unlike their ancestors in the ancient world, humankind’s current state is one of discord and disunion: “Then a city was like one man. Now one man is like a city in civil war.” 63 This, the liberal would surely respond, is the inevitable price of political and social freedom. Factionalism is a consequence of liberty, as Madison noted in the Federalist Papers. Current works on liberalism tend to begin by claiming that the ideology and its creation, the liberal state—­and by extension, democracy—­is in crisis. Yet the fact that the American Civil War was a crisis of the liberal state should alert us that we are hardly in uncharted seas. The ship of liberal democracy sailing serenely in placid waters is, in fact, an unusual situation. Genuine liberal democracies are more likely than not to be in a divisive state, as questions of citizenship, individual rights, civic duties, the judicial interpretation of legislation, and so on are inherently divisive issues. The more common state of liberal democracy is crisis in one form or another. The liberal order is disorder. Winston Churchill, after all, said that democracy is “the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried.” 64 Certainly, it has so far proven preferable to Hobbes’s state of nature—­to say nothing of the cure he recommended.

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4 E M A N C I PAT I O N A S A T R A N S N AT I O N A L PHENOMENON That it is due to justice to restore to man his freedom: that one of the chief objects of the revolution of 1854 was to recognize and guarantee the rights of humanity, oppressed, denied, and scorned by the tribute of the Indian and Slavery of the negro. —­R A M Ó N C A S T I L L A ,

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“Emancipation Declared in Peru,” 1855

n September 22, 1862, President Lincoln issued his preliminary emancipation proclamation, setting one of the largest slave societies in the Americas on the path of freedom.1 Following the Union victory at Antietam five days earlier, having already considered making emancipation a war aim since the summer, Lincoln acted.2 In contrast to the Peruvian emancipation decree (quoted above), Lincoln’s preliminary proclamation was a war measure to restore the Union by holding the stick of emancipation over the rebellious southern states. Yet Castilla’s emancipation edict, although similarly limited by Peru’s civil war, was certainly farther reaching than Lincoln’s proclamation. In addition, emancipation, was very much a trend found throughout the Americas. Slavery and emancipation have attracted a significant number of comparative studies looking at U.S. and Brazilian slavery or how emancipation in the United States and the end of serfdom in Russia illustrate a desire to end bound labor.3 But while taking inspiration from some of these works, there are a few new comparisons that have not yet been made that help better illustrate the different trajectories taken by societies in the Americas when emancipating their enslaved populations during civil conflicts. The 84

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American Civil War was not unique in bringing freedom to thousands while thousands more died over political disputes. The demise of slavery came to prominence in the Caribbean in the Age of Revolutions (c.1772–­c.1825). The challenge to slavery in the West was twofold: opposition from liberal and evangelical thinkers who regarded the institution with abhorrence, and resistance on the part of the enslaved themselves. So, for example, while both England’s 1772 Somerset decision (more accurately, Somerset v. Stewart), which outlawed slavery in England and Wales but not the empire, and the abolitionists’ campaigns to abolish slavery were vital, so also were events such as the Haitian Revolution of 1791 and the earlier resistance of the Jamaican Maroons.4 It is important to remember that these emancipation struggles took place during times of grave crisis within the British and French Empires. The same was true in the United States. In the United States, when the Civil War began, Lincoln had embraced the issue of Union, declaring, in his inaugural address that the southern states had no reason to be concerned about the fate of their peculiar institution. As he stated: “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” 5 After all, the Republican Party since its inception between 1854 and 1856 had emphasized the goal of preventing the expansion of slavery into the western territories, not the destruction of slavery where it existed.6 That said, some of the abolitionists and radical elements in the party had longstanding records of questioning its right to exist. Seward, the future secretary of state, had challenged slavery on the principle of “higher law” and in an 1858 speech claimed the settlement of the question would involve an “irrepressible conflict.” 7 Although he later backed away from that statement, some historians argue that his “irrepressible conflict” speech, severely damaged Seward’s opportunity to be the Republican nominee for president. To the chagrin of some Republicans and most abolitionists, Lincoln did not embrace emancipation in 1861, mindful of the problem he faced with the border slave states, including Maryland and Kentucky. Indeed, while Lincoln was undeniably opposed to the extension of slavery, what he finally intended to do about the enslaved was another question. Certainly, he was a strong supporter of colonization. Lincoln believed that African Americans did not belong in the United States and should be encour85

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aged to move elsewhere (thus “colonize”), such as the U.S.-­sponsored African state of Liberia; Great Britain’s African colony for freed slaves, Sierra Leone; or the British Caribbean and Central America. Precisely when or if he abandoned notions of colonization remains in dispute, but as one of his leading biographers has noted, Lincoln “persisted in his colonization fantasy until well into his presidency.” 8 Colonization was one issue. Gradual and compensated emancipation (for the enslavers, not the enslaved)—­this had taken place in the British Empire—­was another. It was one thing to decide to end the institution of slavery, but it was quite another determining how to achieve it, given the vested interests involved. By the time of the American Civil War, opposition to slavery, both by officialdom and ordinary people, had a long history. The Roman Catholic Church formally condemned the slave trade—­albeit to little effect—­in the late seventeenth century. In Britain and its American colonies, meanwhile, Quakers and other religious dissenters broadly opposed slaveholding at least a generation before the 1772 Somerset decision. By 1776, Adam Smith, who was not a political radical, made the case against slavery in his An Inquiry into the Wealth of Nations. The British Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade was established in 1787. Revolutionary France abolished slavery within that country and its empire in 1794, although Napoleon Bonaparte reinstated it in 1802. Both Britain and the United States abolished the slave trade in 1807, with the former initiating a campaign, backed by the Royal Navy, to abolish it globally. In 1833 the British abolished enslavement within their empire; the French following suit by 1848. Abolitionism was always an international and transnational movement. It was never the preserve of any one people or religious group, all of whom, as is the case in human affairs, could be relied upon to behave both honorably and hypocritically with respect to the issue. Even before his Inquiry into the Wealth of Nations, Smith, in his Lectures on Jurisprudence (1763), argued that slavery was highly inefficient and that it would be better for the enslavers and enslaved both if the institution was abolished. Yet he admitted to a problem: if this was so, why was it only ending in Western Europe, a small “corner” of the world? Smith saw humankind’s “love of domination” and the problems inherent in compensation to the owners as the chief culprits. He made another observation:

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In a democraticall government it is hardly possible that it ever should [be abolished], as the legislators are here persons who are each masters of slaves; they therefore will never incline to part with so valuable a part of their property. . . . [T]he monarch here being the sole judge and ruler, and not being affected by the easing [of] the condition of the slaves, may probably be inclined to mitigate their condition. . . . The condition of the slaves under the absolute government of the emperors was much more tollerable than under the free one of the Republick.

Smith published this well before the Declaration of Independence and the establishment of the United States of America, so he was clearly not referencing it. Yet once again the Scottish sage recognized an underlying issue that many did not. His observations would prove pertinent with respect to the future United States.9 By the time Smith penned An Inquiry into the Wealth of Nations, the Somerset decision was already settled law. The facts of the case were straightforward: Charles Somerset, a slave, had been purchased by James Stewart (or Steuart), a customs official in Boston, Massachusetts. In 1769 Stewart brought Somerset to England with him, only to have the man escape two years later. Soon recaptured, Somerset found himself bound for a Jamaican plantation. At this point British abolitionists petitioned the Court of the King’s Bench for a writ of habeas corpus. Because of this, the court now had to determine whether Somerset’s imprisonment—­enslavement, in plain English—­was legal. Richard Hofstadter famously described Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation as having “all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading.” 10 One wonders how he would have described the Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, the Earl of Mansfield’s ruling in Somerset v. Stewart: “The state of slavery is of such a nature, that it is incapable of being introduced on any reasons, moral or political; but only positive law, which preserves its force long after the reasons, occasion, and time itself from whence it was created, is erased from memory: it’s so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law. Whatever inconveniences, therefore, may follow from a decision, I cannot say this case is allowed or approved by the law of England; and therefore the black [man] must be discharged.” 11 It does seem, with respect to the English-­speaking world’s

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two great abolitionist acts, the Somerset decision and the Emancipation Proclamation, that rather than morality, each was the product of cautious legal parsing driven by political expediency. Mansfield was aware of the case’s significance in moral, political, and even economic terms, not simply in England but the empire as a whole, and he wished to avoid opening them—­hence his adherence to a very close reading of English Common Law. While he was arguably initially successful, the cautious jurist had set in motion a chain of events that would reverberate for years to come, not the least in the territories, where the entire saga of Somerset and Stewart had begun—­the American colonies. Some historians have recently argued that the case was one of the causes of the War of Independence, with one going so far as to describe the war as the counterrevolution of 1776.12 There were certainly contemporaries who believed a defense of slavery was involved in American independence. As Samuel Johnson famously asked in 1775, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” 13 Whether this argument is correct—­the Declaration of Independence itself does castigate King George III for exciting “domestic insurrections amongst us”—­the fact remains that slavery was embedded in the American colonies, carrying over to the United States of America, in a way that it was not in Great Britain. Remembering Smith’s remarks regarding “democraticall government” having “legislators . . . who are each masters of slaves,” the dilemma was acute. Now there was a nation, many of whose founders were themselves slaveowners and for which a significant number of its politicians would be slaveholders, too. This would be represented in the Constitution by, among other things, the three-­fifths compromise. Slavery was central to the U.S. political foundation and experience in a way that it was not to imperial metropoles such as London or Paris. The situation was much the same in Latin America. Thus, to a certain extent, this is what makes the story of American abolitionism more akin to the history of its fellow republics in Latin America than to the nations of Europe, whether republican like Switzerland, liberal like Great Britain, absolutist like Russia, or at various times all the above like France. Whatever slavery contributed to the causes of the War of Independence, the conflict itself undeniably challenged the institution. A political union ostensibly founded on a document declaring that all men have the right to lib-

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erty must, at the very least, explain why some within its borders are denied said liberty. From the beginning, slavery was less important to the northern states, not being central to their economies. Hence, in 1777, even before becoming a state, Vermont abolished the institution. Other northern states followed, and a process of gradual emancipation took place. This, however, could take a long time. Historian James Gigantino has shown how the gradual end of slavery in 1804 meant that it persisted into the Civil War era in some northern states, only fully ending with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, when slavery ended in the entire country.14 But even this did not end discrimination and second-­class citizenship status for African Americans, a pattern to be repeated globally. With slavery ending in the North, however, retrenchment of the institution began in the southern states, where manumission of the enslaved became increasingly more difficult. Free Black people had no place in the slave society of the southern states. Having overwhelmingly adopted the Virginia race system, the South created a racial-­legal dichotomy of skin color, with white freedom counterbalanced by Black enslavement.15 The integration of Louisiana caused issues since New Orleans had a substantial population of free people of color. By the end of the first decade of the nineteenth century, southerners had found a powerful set of arguments against abolition or even debating emancipation. These peaceful transitions from slavery to freedom were slow and increasingly challenged by more violent means to bring the slave-­labor system to its end. In 1791 the unthinkable happened. Inspired by the events of the French Revolution and the infighting among the free elites on the island, the slave population in the northern parts of the French colony of Saint Domingue rose in rebellion.16 Initially, the white population and free people of color (gens de couleur) had fought over political rights and influence in the colony inspired by the revolutionary events at home. The free population had tried to keep the news of the revolution secret. The enslaved, however, many of them recent arrivals from Africa, were able to communicate with each other during traditional religious meetings, such as Vodun (Voodoo), to plan rebellion. Some were under the impression that slavery had ended, and the white planters had withheld the news from them. For thirteen years, Saint Domingue was

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engulfed by social, political, and economic unrest. The events of the French Revolution and Saint Domingue are early examples of emancipation coming about because of conflict, whether civil or international. When Napoleon Bonaparte assumed power in France, he intended to restore French imperial power and regain control of Saint Domingue’s wealth, particularly the sugar-­producing plantations. His government determined to reestablish slavery in Saint Domingue and eradicate the free people of color’s status. Despite a brutal conflict, the French proved unable to recapture the colony. In 1804 the new Republic of Haiti came into existence. Unlike the infant United States, Haiti was beset by domestic and international setbacks that threatened its independence. The United States and Europe refused to welcome Haiti into the family of nations. Born from a slave rebellion, slaveholders and their sympathizers around the Atlantic region pointed to Haiti and the fall of its wealthy plantation economy into poverty and misery as a—­ if not the—­cautionary tale as to how loose talk about abolition could cause slave rebellions and societal collapse. For the next twenty years, the Haitian Revolution served as an argument for opponents of abolition.17 In very much the same way, supporters of the ancien régime used the Terror of the French Revolution as a cautionary tale against political radicals. Haiti thus not only acted as a threat to abolitionism but also served as a spur. As French rule collapsed, the Spanish Empire’s dissolution resulted in massive violence and conflict in Latin America, opening the door to further emancipation attempts. During the wars for independence, both Spain and the new countries promised freedom to slaves joining their side. Some quickly adopted gradual or full emancipation, especially if their enslaved populations were small. In Mexico and Central America, slavery ended in the 1820s. For the other new countries in Latin America, Brazil excepted, slavery remained a small part of the labor force well into the nineteenth century.18 Except for the associated conflict, this was replicated in the United States, where states with small enslaved populations moved toward abolitionism, while those with large populations adhered to the institution even more closely. Yet the divide between the free and slave states took time to develop. In the first place, there was a strong perception in the United States that republican and democratic institutions were suited solely for white people, and therefore, people of African descent could never be full citizens. As one his90

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torian has observed, Jefferson’s statement regarding slavery, that “nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free,” must be accompanied by his concluding clause: “Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government.” 19 It was this mindset that resulted in many influential individuals in the United States, including southerners, to found the American Colonization Society. The society encouraged emancipated slaves to move to Africa and was able to successfully lobby Congress to purchase a stretch of land there for this resettlement. The colony established in 1822, Liberia—­its capital, Monrovia, was named after former president James Monroe, a member of the society—­never gained much popularity among African Americans. Ultimately, general American neglect caused Liberia to declare its independence in 1847; British diplomatic recognition followed almost immediately, while that of the United States came rather later, in 1862.20 The intellectual environment did not change until 1831, when two events altered the entire direction of emancipation. First, on January 1, 1831, the Liberator, edited by William Lloyd Garrison in Boston, began publication and radicalized the language of abolitionists. Pointing to the Declaration of Independence and its claim “that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights,” Garrison and his followers called for immediate and uncompensated emancipation; for the most part, they were hostile to colonization, too. During his campaign, Garrison would contemplate the secession of northern states from the Union to free them from slavery and promoted an extension of civil rights and voting to not just African Americans but also women. His radicalism was too much for many, and the American Anti-­Slavery Society broke apart because of it. Nonetheless, Garrison represented a new breed of abolitionism opposed to any compromise.21 Second, following on the heels of the Liberator’s appearance, was Nat Turner’s revolt—­the most significant slave uprising in U.S. history. In Southampton County, Virginia, during the night of August 21–­22, 1831, Turner and several coconspirators killed their enslavers and over fifty white residents in the area. Hysteria gripped the South, and over two hundred African Americans paid with their lives for the paranoia that gripped slaveholders. To the enslavers, the publication of the Liberator, abolitionist agitation, and Turner’s rebellion only confirmed the lessons taught by Haiti’s example.22 Southerners were in91

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creasingly defensive about their peculiar institution, which only increased after the 1830s as pressures from abolitionist mailing and petition campaigns grew. Yet this threat was not simply from within the United States. As with defenders of the institution everywhere, southern enslavers were increasingly isolated on the global stage, too. There, the shift from violent emancipation to peaceful transition was starkly highlighted by events in the British Empire. Following the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the British had taken an increasingly hard look at the institution of slavery itself. Abolitionist forces, gathering support since the Somerset decision, were well placed to attack the institution. Slavery, it was argued, was an affront to British notions of liberty, inferior to wage labor, and socioeconomically impractical. Despite the best efforts of West Indian planters, Parliament moved to abolish the institution in all British territories. On August 1, 1834, slavery ended in the British Empire for those less than six years of age, then six years later for the rest of the enslaved population. But there was opposition to the six-­year delay, and protests forced the government to end slavery earlier in 1838, culminating a peaceful transition to freedom.23 Thousands gained their freedom as a result of these legislative actions. Yet even as the enslaved gained their liberty, there was little else for them. Their enslavers, by contrast, received compensation for their losses, for which the British government allocated £20 million, a significant sum of money for the time. Furthermore, with planters retaining their lands and thus both their economic and political power, freedpeople on the tiny islands of the British Caribbean faced an uncertain future. Ultimately, they had to work for a wage on the plantation, competing with newly arriving Indian and Chinese coolies. Without economic freedom, freedpeople were unable to reach the electoral property requirements, thus leaving them without political power.24 Nevertheless, the British Empire’s transition from slavery to freedom by peaceful means was a major boost for the abolitionist movement. While the shadow of Haiti undeniably served as a push factor against British-­style abolitionism, the latter also provided a clear counterexample. Slavery could be abolished peacefully through ordinary legislative means.25 It was not, however, an example the American South wished to emulate. Initially, British influence looked as if it could be resisted. Although there very definitely was some cooperation between British and U.S. abolitionists—­the 92

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first World Anti-­Slavery Convention at Exeter Hall in London on June 12–­23, 1840, for example—­their organizations and practices diverged (and not only over the question of whether women should be speakers at the convention). By the 1840s, antislavery sentiment in Britain was the establishment position. The president of the British Foreign and Anti-­Slavery Society, for example, was none other than Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s consort. While there were radicals and outsiders in British abolitionist circles, they were not the only or even the primary participants in that movement. By contrast, U.S. abolitionists were radical outsiders, a despised minority seen by many, both North and South, as a threat to the nation. The oft-­difficult diplomatic relationship between the United States and Great Britain did little to help the American abolitionists either.26 An example of this was the serious divide between the United Kingdom and the United States with respect to the international slave trade. The nation that, after 1805, controlled the high seas, Britain behaved in an increasingly aggressive fashion against slavery, spending almost 2 percent of its gross national income per year in the endeavor. Having abolished such trade in 1808, the Royal Navy proceeded to place a naval squadron on the West African coast to stamp out the shipment of slaves across the Atlantic. Britain then initiated a serious diplomatic campaign to persuade other states to support the suppression of the Atlantic slave trade. Initially, the agreements were made with other European powers, but then strong-­arm tactics were increasingly applied to the republics in the Americas, such as Brazil, which found themselves encouraged to cease and desist the trade. With the 1845 Aberdeen Act, Britain essentially forced Brazil to abandon the slave trade by seizing that fledgling nation’s ships. The cause may have been humanitarian, but it amounted to gunboat diplomacy.27 Although Britain was able to negotiate treaties for mutual right of search with virtually every major power, the strongest opponent of this policy was the United States, which led a serious diplomatic countercampaign against it. Feeling strongly about maritime rights dating back to the French Revolutionary Wars and the War of 1812, the Americans contended that they would police their own merchant marine; for a time, the U.S. Navy maintained a squadron off the African coast to do just that. By 1842, however, all serious attempts by the United States had stopped at a time when American ships were among the most frequent carriers of slaves in the world, despite the 93

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illegality of the trade. Although involvement in the trade theoretically carried the death penalty in the United States, very few slave traders were successfully prosecuted and none executed until 1862.28 While most of these enslaved people were destined for Cuba and Brazil rather than the United States—­as many as a third may have ended up in the South—­the problem for the British was that they had largely stopped all the holes in the net except those made under cover of the Stars and Stripes. The United States also rejected a British compromise policy: only a right of visit, not a right of search, to verify that a ship flying an U.S. flag had authority to do so. Consequently, the British took matters into their own hands and began stopping American ships. This continued until 1858, when a hostile response from the United States caused the Royal Navy to suspend this policy. All of this allowed abolitionism in the United States to be tarred with an Anglophobic brush.29 This would at least partially explain the proposal of Irish nationalist exile John Mitchel, made in his Knoxville newspaper, to reopen the international slave trade.30 Earlier in New York, Mitchel had suggested that because most people in Africa were “ignorant and brutal negroes,” they should be brought to the United States to improve their situation.31 He firmly believed that “the cause of negro slavery is the cause of true philanthropy, so far as that race is concerned.” 32 As it happened, however, the Upper South, which profited from increasing slave prices as its soil depleted by selling surplus laborers, and the Lower South, with its insatiable need for enslaved labor, disagreed over the reopening of the international trade. In any case, if slaves arrived illegally in the United States, law enforcement could rarely find a jury willing to convict southern traders.33 Nonetheless, for the United States to revoke its own position against the international slave trade and openly participate in it was likely to cause a military confrontation with Great Britain; Anglophobia only went so far. While most of Latin America had embraced some form of gradual abolition during the wars for independence, enslaved populations still existed on the southern continent by the 1840s. A representative example similar to what eventually happened in the United States is the case of Peruvian emancipation. When Peru fought for its independence in the 1820s, there was some talk about universal emancipation, but that never materialized. Instead, independence did not change anything for the slave population. By the time of independence, 94

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Peru still had about 50,400 enslaved people, constituting about 3.8 percent of the population. By the mid-­1850, the country still had 25,505 enslaved people, which then represented less than 1 percent of the population. Despite its small size, this enslaved population continued to exist and thrive, largely because “the government and the dominant elite continued to view it as an institution that was of vital importance to themselves and to the nation as a whole.” 34 Enslaved people continued to work on large estates, producing essential crops and commodities for export. Where an estate used enslaved laborers, they were a significant investment and enhanced the value of the plantation or business. They also served as domestic servants, providing various services in the enslaver’s household. Furthermore, they worked on the guano islands, alongside convicts and army deserters. Eventually, Chinese coolies replaced the enslaved population. Despite this, slaves remained an “irreplaceable component of the labor force.” In contrast to the Atlantic World, Peru faced significant political turmoil in the first decades after independence, with frequent government changes and violence. As a result, there was no political pressure from abolitionist organizations. Especially since “Peru was a Lima-­dominated state with a local elite of large and small landholders, urban financiers and retailers, wealthier artisans, and heroes of the Independence Wars,” local caudillos, even if they gained national power, had to work with these groups in Lima to make meaningful political changes. This self-­interested elite had no desire to end enslavement and made incorrect claims that “Peruvian slavery was comparatively benevolent.” Southern enslavers had, of course, provided the same assurances. When faced with emancipation talk in the years after achieving independence, slaveholders consolidated themselves to ensure that their right to own human property found acceptance in Peru.35 The enslavers’ class even discussed reopening the slave trade with Africa or other Latin American countries. This proposal collapsed, however, in the face of British naval power and economic clout. A more realistic option was the plan to prevent the emancipation of slaves in Colombia by shipping them illegally into Peru. Some Peruvian merchants in the 1840s reached out to Havana to inquire if the importation of slaves from Cuba was possible. With similar talk occurring in Brazil and the United States, Peru’s debate about reopening the Atlantic slave trade to supplement its already existing enslaved population was hardly unique at the time.36 95

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Peruvian proponents of slavery, like their southern counterparts, continued to defend the institution by claiming that the conditions under which the enslaved labored were not harsh. In 1846 José Gregorio Paz Soldán, a Peruvian politician and journalist, claimed that the enslaved, like their lower-­class counterparts, wasted their money on clothes and liquor instead of saving their income to purchase their freedom. Furthermore, slaves there, “with their fiestas and good food . . . , were better off than England’s factory workers.” Paz Soldán was not alone in this assumption. Regardless of where a slave resided, the reality was that enslavement, even in Peru, was harsh and involved the lack of freedom. Yet they did have rights within the Peruvian slave system and retained the right to sue their enslavers, which often involved mistreatment that reduced the enslaved’s value, making it easier to purchase freedom.37 Those in urban environments especially had the opportunity to earn extra money and accumulate enough to purchase their freedom, something that had by and large come to an end in the United States.38 As with the racist outlook common to many around the Atlantic World, people of color in Peru faced discrimination even if they had never been enslaved. Sometimes they faced arrest for suspicion of being runaways. The legal system, while allowing people of color to sue, was slow and often rigged against free people thanks to the interpretation of judges. A common and widespread perception held that those in the lower strata of society, regardless of skin color, were “ignorant, incompetent, [and] unproductive.” As in other societies with slavery, including those in the U.S. South, enslaved Peruvians did challenge the institution. They maintained their traditional customs to avoid indoctrination by the slaveholder’s Roman Catholicism, even embracing practices specifically designed to offend Christian morality. Furthermore, the enslaved could engage in disruptive behavior, break machinery, simply act ignorant, or work slowly. Even criminal activities were possible, as some of the enslaved stole livestock in the countryside or household items in the city. Finally, the most permanent and damaging resistance was escape, which concerned Peruvian authorities most since it allowed not only a disruption of labor supplies but also the potential for increased violence.39 In 1851 the Chicama Valley faced a brief and geographically limited rebellion by the enslaved. The uprising was allegedly the work of two tailors who had assisted local slaves in crafting a petition demanding emancipation. 96

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In this sugar-­producing region of Peru, the enslaved complained about their treatment and a lack of food. By late January 1851, the petition campaign appeared to have stalled, and events took a turn toward violence. On February 1, one hundred armed enslaved persons marched on Trujillo, the departmental capital. Facing no resistance from the twelve soldiers stationed in the city, the rebels acquired weapons. Thus armed, they demanded their freedom as well as money to ensure their newfound independence could be put into practical effect. When officials promised them their freedom, many departed, convinced that they had achieved their aims. But as soon as this happened, the military officer in charge of the city, José María Lizarzaburu, prepared defenses against their return. When the rebels came back the following day to receive the securities establishing their freedom, troops fired upon and dispersed them. Over one hundred individuals were arrested and promptly returned to enslavement.40 The Chicama Valley uprising illustrates how widespread resistance was, even without the ability to directly communicate with each other—­the enslaved, from Virginia to Peru to Haiti, understood the unnatural state of their existence and desired to gain their freedom. Despite the clear desire among the enslaved to gain their freedom, there was no powerful abolitionist movement in Peru. Even liberals who supported constitutional government there had a stronger commitment to the “sanctity of property rights than to human rights.” 41 Most criticism in Peru focused on the slave trade rather than the institution itself. Those who challenged slavery faced arguments about the possibilities of social disorder like in Haiti, the lack of “effective workers,” and the consequences of emancipation on the enslaver elite.42 Abolitionists were at best able to use what power they had to reduce the influence of slavery to narrowly interpret laws supporting the institution. Antislavery judges frequently interpreted protective laws as narrowly as possible but embraced a much broader interpretation when it came to law opposed to slavery.43 Slavery’s existence may well have been prolonged by the political instability plaguing Peru since its independence. Nonetheless, the situation changed in the 1850s. Assuming the country’s presidency in April 1851, José Rufino Echenique was a conservative but sympathetic to antislavery ideas. He also, however, was accused of corruption and abuse of the law. In August 1853 his government was challenged by Domingo Elías, who upon being exiled, sup97

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ported Echenique’s removal through violent means. After failed military expeditions in October and December of that year, opposition against Echenique increased. In January 1854 the southwestern coastal province of Arequipa rebelled. Joining the growing upheaval was Echenique’s predecessor, Ramón Castilla, who accused the current president of “tyranny, theft, and immorality.” Castilla quickly gained supporters and by April had acquired the title “The Liberator.” With both leaders needing supporters, Castilla proposed to abolish the Indian head tax; Echenique followed suit immediately. As would be the case with Lincoln, both men were initially reluctant to embrace the abolition of slavery, despite the occasional raids on plantations that had freed numerous enslaved. On November 18, 1854, Enchenique, his effective authority now restricted to the coastal region, made a last effort to rally the citizens behind him. He offered an amnesty to deserters, provided additional financial incentives to the soldiers, and declared that “every domestic or hacienda slave who enlists in the army will receive his freedom . . . , and the reward will be extended to his legitimate wife.” Thus, as with Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, Enchenique’s proclamation was provisional, yet unlike the American president’s, it provided compensation to the freedpersons’ owners. In response, on December 3 Castilla raised the stakes by making an unqualified declaration of universal emancipation. He promised freedom to all enslaved and compensation for enslavers who thus lost their property. Although Castilla later claimed that the end of Native tributes had required the end of slavery for humanitarian motives, both military and political reasons played an important role in his decision. After the Battle at La Palma on January 5, 1855, when Castilla won his final victory over Enchenique, slavery ended permanently in Peru.44 Most importantly, just like in the United States, it had come during a civil conflict as a means to win the war and assume the moral high ground. Despite concerns about the social consequences of emancipation, Castilla reiterated his commitment to abolition in another decree on January 23, which also established some of the rights and obligations of the formerly enslaved in Peru.45 Claims for compensation soon started arriving. “By 1860 the government had committed 7,651,500 pesos for compensating owners,” according to historian Peter Blanchard.46 While the end of slavery placed extreme financial strains on the country, “in the broad sweep of Peruvian history Castilla’s abolition decree was almost inconsequential. The basic underpinnings of Peruvian 98

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society remained virtually intact,” not unlike what would happen eventually in the United States.47 Like in so many previous cases, abolition on its own did not bring about the anticipated wholesale change in the social, political, and economic situation of the formerly enslaved. Peru’s experience was repeated in many emancipations in the Americas during the 1850s and 1860s. On the other side of the world and before Lincoln ever freed a single slave, Tsar Alexander II freed 22 million serfs on February 19, 1861.48 Of these, 10.5 million were in private hands, and 10.4 million either under state or tsarist control. The decision ended almost four hundred years of serfdom in Russia. Dating back into the fourteenth century, peasants there were tied to large, landed estates. They faced significant legal restrictions and, like the enslaved, were bound to remain on an estate until their death or their sale to another landlord—­the practice underpins the plot of Nikolai Gogol’s masterpiece Dead Souls (1842). Although not actually called slavery, a large part of Russia’s agricultural population was bound to a master and thus very much akin to the institution for all practical purposes. While serfdom lacked efficiency, challenging the status quo was not in the interest of landlords, including the tsar himself, who also did not want a potential serf rebellion.49 The remnants of serfdom in western Europe were swept away by the French Revolution, putting an end to the bondage of people to land or landlord. Eastern Europe, however, was different. In Hungary, East Prussia, and farther east, serfdom stubbornly remained. By 1848, however, it had disappeared everywhere in Europe outside of Russia’s territory, leaving that country alone with the last vestiges of the medieval institution. Although respected as a European power, Russia was regarded as autocratic and regressive. Its pretensions to being a major power, however, were undermined by its defeat in the Crimean War, which illustrated the backwardness of the nation and its institutions. Clearly, Russia needed to modernize, and in the aftermath of the defeat, Alexander II tried to convince the nobility to end serfdom.50 The tsar emulated the earlier abolition of serfdom in Estland, Courland, and Livonia, where the institution had ended before 1820. As with the abolition of slavery in many areas, the abolition of Russian serfdom was a gradual process to ensure that a new agricultural system could develop. There was an initial two-­year transition period, during which the serfs remained obligated to their lord. The proclamation promised land ownership to the peasants but 99

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only after a forty-­nine-­year period of allotment payments.51 While the owners retained their land, most serfs turned into landless laborers and sharecroppers, leaving them without freedom to seek work elsewhere without permission.52 In this respect, the Russian peasant found himself in a position not entirely unlike African Americans under the sharecropping system following emancipation. Once again, the desired social, political, and economic changes proved elusive to the former victims of forced and uncompensated labor. Importantly, Russia made this change without the pressure of a domestic rebellion or civil war, even though the recognition of the need for modernization came about because of its failures during the Crimean War. By the end of 1865, after hundreds of thousands of casualties, the United States, formerly one of the last three major slave societies, had abolished the institution with ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment. The end of slavery in the United States left Spanish America and Brazil as the last holdouts. The age of plantation slavery was coming to an end. Emancipation in the United States increased the pressure on Spain and Brazil to act.53 Historians, however, have not yet fully explained why it took another thirty years for these two slave societies to abolish the institution. By the time of the American Civil War, the United States supplied over 70 percent of the world’s cotton while Cuba supplied 40 percent of the world’s sugar. Production of sugar had dramatically increased from the modest 42,000 tons in 1815 to over 700,000 tons by the second half of the 1860s.54 This expansion required manpower, and even after states around the Atlantic started to outlaw slavery, Cuba kept importing large numbers of people from Africa despite the British naval presence. After its enslaved population reached 430,000 in 1841, the island had a difficult time sustaining such a large number of people, and by 1862, the number of enslaved had fallen to 368,000 in Cuba.55 Concerned with property and wealth, Cuban planters showed no interest in independence in the first quarter of the nineteenth century and focused on maintaining slavery and the plantation complex. Close relations with Spain promised more benefits—­ economically, politically, and militarily—­ than 56 independence. During the last months of the American Civil War, on December 7, 1864, Puerto Rican Julio Vizcarrondo, faced with the failing Leopoldo O’Donnell government, called for the first meeting of the Sociedad Abolicionista Es100

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pañola. By April 2, 1865, the organization had fully formed and had many powerful liberal political supporters.57 In the Revolution of 1868, liberals in Spain overthrew the government of Isabella II and forced her into exile, initiating a long period of political instability. This coincided in Cuba with a rebellion for independence. The leader of the uprising, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, had freed his own slaves, encouraged others to do likewise, and then urged the enslaved on plantations of owners loyal to Spain to revolt.58 Thus, akin to the Civil War in the United States, there was a chance that Cuban slaves might gain their freedom during an independence struggle, but only if Céspedes and his followers were successful. In May 1870 Segismundo Moret introduced a new law in the Spanish Cortes (parliament). As minister for colonial affairs and an abolitionist, Moret was determined to end slavery. The Moret Law, or a free-­womb law, established gradual abolition by requiring new-­born children to work for their mother’s enslaver until eighteen and then for half-­wages until twenty-­one, when they would obtain their complete freedom. In addition, all enslaved over sixty­five received their freedom immediately. Spain’s moves toward abolitionism thus took place against the backdrop of a rebellion and was in part directed against the rebels, just like in the United States and in Peru.59 The Guerra de los Diez Años—­Cuba’s war for independence—­concluded in 1878 with a Spanish victory. The war had devastated slavery on the eastern half of the island, while the western part remained dominated by large sugar plantations. Thousands of enslaved persons had gained their freedom during the war, dramatically undermining the feasibility of the institution. The enslaved population dropped from 360,000 before the conflict to 230,000 by its conclusion.60 The institution was dying, and this failed independence movement had greatly contributed to its decline. To ease the transition from slavery to freedom, the government replaced enslavement with an apprentice (patronato) system in which people continued to work for their enslavers for another eight years. Enslavers abused the eight years given them to work their slaves as compensation for emancipation, and few prepared their enslaved peoples for the new responsibilities of freedom. On October 7, 1886, with the Spanish monarchy reestablished, slavery was ended by royal decree for the remaining estimated 25,000 enslaved in Cuba. It was the lack of abolitionist pressures and economic viability that 101

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maintained slavery on the island for as long as it did. New white workers and Chinese coolies replaced the enslaved on the plantations, allowing the production of sugar to continue unabated.61 Even as differences between the formerly enslaved and the rest of society remained starkly drawn in Cuba, people of color enjoyed many political opportunities and career paths in government.62 In some respects, the freedpeople did better there than their counterparts elsewhere. Brazil, by contrast, had established itself as the major producer of coffee. From the 1850s to the end of the century, the country contributed 50–­60 percent of the world’s supply, representing 5 million sacks of coffee by 1889. The enslaved constituted the backbone of the coffee plantations’ work force. Over 1.6 million slaves entered Brazil in the first half of the nineteenth century, helping establish an enslaved population of about 1.5 million by the 1870s. Slavery had undergone many changes in Brazil. In the northeastern parts of the country, when sugar planting declined, the enslaved people were sold into the southern parts of the country to jumpstart the coffee boom.63 Thus, in Brazil coffee played a role analogous to cotton in the U.S. South. It was not the crop that created the demand for enslaved labor, but it became the one central to slavery. The end of slavery in the United States, however, sent a clear message to Brazil as the largest enslaving society in the Americas: the institution was perishing.64 Even as abolitionism became fashionable in the political circles of the court of Dom Pedro II in Rio de Janeiro, conflict overshadowed those debates. From 1865 to 1870, Brazil participated in the Guerra del Paraguay (Paraguayan War), which included slaves fighting in the Brazilian army. Liberal elements, who opposed the increasingly bloody war against Paraguay that ultimately cost nearly half a million lives, also voiced their growing concern with slavery. Abolitionists purchased the freedom of individual enslaved persons with donations. In addition, a growing literature emerged questioning the institution.65 While resembling the United States with respect to the emergence of reform-­minded persons and abolitionists, Brazil never had the stark geographic sectionalism of its northern counterpart. Initially proposed by the liberals in the Brazilian senate in 1868, a free-­ womb law designed to bring about gradual abolition passed with the support of the conservative government in 1871. As in other countries, it was largely 102

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designed to silence domestic and international abolitionist criticism of Brazil. As with all gradual-­emancipation laws, slaves born after it took effect remained enslaved until twenty-­one years old, but they could provide money to buy their freedom at age eight. In their transition the future freedpeople were called ingenuos or riobrancos, named after José Maria da Silva Paranhos, Visconde do Rio Branco. Abolitionists questioned the fairness of the law for individuals born the day before it took effect, who could conceivably remain slaves until the second half of the twentieth century. The law was a small step and faced opposition both from abolitionists for not doing enough and from coffee planters for doing too much.66 Nevertheless, seeing the end of slavery approaching, planters started to prepare for it by recruiting European agricultural workers for their coffee plantations. From a modest five thousand immigrants a year in the early 1850s, Brazilian immigration grew to over thirty thousand by 1880.67 As the liberals once more assumed power in 1878, the debate about abolition arose again. This time, however, there was growing unrest in the plantation districts. As the two sides retrenched their positions and refused to compromise, in a manner similar to the United States during the 1840s and 1850s, the literature for and against slavery dramatically increased. Brazilian military units like the Fourteenth Army Battalion declared in favor of abolition. As with other parts of the Atlantic World, abolition was decentralized and popular, with local societies taking the lead in organizing protests. Brazilian enslavers did not present a unified front, as some had already prepared for free labor, and their support among the population was limited.68 Realizing their strength, abolitionists became bolder and took the offensive in the 1880s. Focusing on the urban areas of the country such as Belem, they liberated enslaved people city block by city block. Some provinces adopted antislavery laws in the manner of the northern states.69 Networks emerged, resembling the Underground Railroad in the United States, to funnel enslaved persons to freedom in provinces where abolition had already taken place. The abolitionists, however, were not prepared for the influx of large refugee populations, and quilombos (communities, often slums, of the formerly enslaved) emerged on the edges of towns, where runaways resided in poverty. Violence occurred when the authorities raided these shantytowns to return runaways. Scenes akin to those that had played out in the United States, such as when 103

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northern states had resisted the Fugitive Slave Law, took place. Slavery in provinces like São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Minas Gerais faced collapse, with many running away.70 The institution had all but collapsed by the first months of 1888, when the Brazilian government passed the Lei Aurea (Golden Law), which on May 13 permanently ended all slavery in Brazil.71 By the end of the nineteenth century, the very old institution of racial enslavement ceased to exist when Brazilian slaves gained their freedom. Emancipation in the United States during the second half of the century was part of this protracted struggle. Ever since Saint Domingue, emancipation had often involved civil war, but these were frequently not conflicts fought to bring about the end of slavery. Often they were brought about by disagreements over constitutional interpretations, political differences, or geographic rivalries. The contending sides decided to emancipate the enslaved to gain a moral high ground and additional supporters for their cause. In that, Lincoln’s actions were not unlike those of Spain and independence-­seeking authorities in the Spanish Empire, the rebels and authorities in Peru, and the two sides in Cuba during its war for independence. What made the American Civil War different was that it was the deadliest of these emancipation struggles. Sadly, one thing all enslaving societies shared was that the granting of freedom did not mean inclusion into the political process or the guarantee of civil rights and liberties for the formerly enslaved.

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5 THREE MODERNIZING WARS It seems now we will hold no interior point between Chattanooga and the Gulf, as all railways, foundries, and other public works will be destroyed before this campaign shall end, and much of the country effectually eaten up and desolated. —­U N I O N S U R G E O N ,

1864

H

istorians have long debated whether the American Civil War was the first modern war. Although military theorists such as J. F. C. Fuller argued that the way the Union smashed the Confederacy foreshadowed the methods of twentieth-­century warfare and John Bennet Walters identified William T. Sherman as the founder of modern war, more recent scholarship has challenged these claims. While the Civil War birthed what appeared to be startling innovations, many of these were simply further development of technologies and methodologies from earlier conflicts. Troops transported by rail; battlefield photography; up-­to-­the-­minute news bulletins (courtesy of the telegraph); improvements in medical care, including the professionalization of nursing; trench warfare; ironclad ships; and other new military technologies, to say nothing of aerial observation (via hot-­air balloons), were all present in the earlier Crimean War (1853–­56). The later Franco-­German War (1870–­7 1) furthered some of the above developments and innovations and, like the Civil War, introduced new ones, too. In some respects, speaking strictly in terms of military technology and innovation, the conflict in America was more of a link between these two wars than a serious deviation from nineteenth-­century norms. As Gervase Phillips notes, “we now have a more nuanced understanding of the conflict’s place in history: an essentially

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conventional 19th-­century war, yet one which harboured some dark portents for the future.” 1 As with its contemporaries, the American Civil War served as a transitional conflict from those of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to the first half of the twentieth century. But warfare had not been in stasis before these mid-­nineteenth-­century conflicts. The earlier French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars had already ushered in massive changes in the military sphere. As Peter Paret reminds us, military thinking “had to come to terms intellectually and institutionally with the new French way of warfare. Within one decade the resources France mobilised for war had risen to unprecedented levels. The numbers of soldiers now available to her generals made possible campaigns that accepted greater risks, brought about battle more frequently, spread over more territory, and pursued political goals of greater magnitude than had been feasible for the armies of the ancient régime. This new technique was used by Napoleon with a brilliance that shocked as much as did his ruthlessness.” 2 This had given rise to a new generation of military theorists, including Carl von Clausewitz and Heinrich von Bülow. While neither of these two were known to Americans, another such theorist, the Swiss-­French general Antoine-­Henri, Baron de Jomini, certainly was, and his works were required reading at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Many of the officers in the American Civil War at least began the conflict following Jomini’s principles, even if to what extent is debated.3 Thus, at least on the battlefield, Civil War military leaders were students of the new theories of war created in response to the changes wrought by the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. In addition, contrary to what is so often claimed, the casualty rates of the American Civil War were neither unprecedented nor extraordinarily high by nineteenth-­century standards.4 While the Crimean War’s casualty totals remain in dispute due to inadequate recordkeeping by Russia and the Ottoman Empire, both of which took by far the most casualties, some recent scholars have estimated that the conflict may have cost around 1 million men their lives.5 This is well in excess of even the recent recalculated total of 750,000 soldiers killed during the American Civil War.6 True, the Crimean War was fought by several nations, while the Civil War took place in one—­albeit between two distinct societies, both of which claimed to be nations—­but at just under two and a half years, the European conflict was also shorter than the 106

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American one. Indeed, in terms of numbers killed relative to the duration of the fighting, the Franco-­German War was deadlier than both, with some 180,000 men perishing in a mere six months.7 Further, these comparisons are restricted to the Western world. China’s contemporaneous Taiping Rebellion (1850–­64) cost at least an estimated 20 million dead, and while these were mostly civilian deaths, it remained by far the bloodiest conflict of the nineteenth century and among the deadliest in world history. The point being that major nineteenth-­century wars resulted in high body counts. Not only that, but this also had been true at least since the days of the Napoleonic Wars. The casualties (dead, wounded, captured, and missing) from the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, for example, were 65,000 men versus the 51,000 at Gettysburg almost fifty years later.8 Even in terms of casualties, then, the Civil War was not the only nineteenth-­century conflict that foreshadowed the terrible slaughter of the First and Second World Wars. In the twentieth century, however, casualties were more often a consequence of enemy action rather than disease. By contrast, in the nineteenth century disease proved far deadlier than enemy combatants. Most soldiers who died in the Napoleonic Wars, the Crimean War, and the American Civil War perished of disease. This had long been a problem for armies, especially those operating in tropical climates. Indeed, there were examples of whole campaigns being abandoned almost solely because of disease, such as the British invasion of Haiti in 1793–­98, when over 60 percent of the invading troops died of yellow fever.9 Medical knowledge had not much advanced half a century later, nor indeed had care for the sick and wounded. It was this last that made Florence Nightingale’s reputation in the Crimean War. By exposing the atrocious conditions under which the wounded suffered, Nightingale forced the British government to establish the Renkioi Hospital. The facility, which was prefabricated in England and then shipped to the Dardanelles, had a mortality rate of a mere 10 percent of its predecessors. Nightingale herself sharply reduced mortality rates by imposing basic hygiene. She was also a pioneer in the use of statistics in medical care. So, in this sense, Crimea marked the beginning of a change in treatment of the wounded in war.10 Comparisons have been made between Nightingale and the American Civil War’s Dorothea Dix, Mary Ann Bickerdyke, and especially Clara Bar107

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ton (founder of the American Red Cross). This is unsurprising, as the Nightingale legend of the “Lady with the Lamp” made it across the Atlantic and inspired American women. Indeed, Nightingale would train the American Linda Richards, who would establish the first professional nursing schools in the United States. Yet the exchange was two way: Dix, superintendent of army nurses during the Civil War, traveled to Britain several times, and her research into Scotland’s insane asylums encouraged the foundation of the Scottish Lunacy Commission to bring about reform. All four of these women had several things in common: they were unmarried and childless (Bickerdyke excepted); they were inclined toward evangelicalism (even if like Nightingale they remained part of an establishment church); they were social reformers; and each challenged and, to a degree, overcame obstruction by male colleagues who believed they were transgressing established social and gender norms. The wars of the nineteenth century thus offered women—­wherever they were—­an opportunity to challenge the status quo and to contribute significantly to advances in medical treatment. But this did not apply only to white women. Nightingale’s rival in the Crimea was a Jamaican Briton, Mary Seacole. Rebuffed by Nightingale when applying to serve as a nurse in the Crimea (the two women did not get on, but Seacole complained of prejudice on the part of the British Army as well), Seacole established her own institution. Similarly, during the American Civil War, Susie King Taylor and Ann Stokes, both former slaves, served as nurses to the Union armies.11 If medical science was slow to change in nineteenth-­century warfare, the efforts of women notwithstanding, industrialization was another issue, being one of the most important drivers of change in nineteenth-­century warfare. With respect to the United States, while the Union had a more advanced industrial base, the Confederacy had begun efforts to catch up in the decade prior to the conflict. Although the older interpretation of the Civil War as being a struggle between an agrarian South and an industrialized North overstated the difference between the sides—­the Union was the fifth-­most, while the Confederacy was the sixth-­most industrialized nation in the world—­the North’s industrial output did outstrip the South’s.12 In the northern parts of the country, coal, iron, and textiles had emerged as the United States slowly worked on catching up with industrialized British. At the same time, despite being behind the Union in this respect, the Confederacy was able to procure 108

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technology from Europe, despite the U.S. Navy’s blockade, for much of the war.13 Like the earlier Crimean War, the American Civil War would be fought with new, modern industrial technology, only on a larger scale and indicative of the new age of warfare that fully materialized with the destruction of the First World War. At the time of the 1851 Great Exhibition of Works of Industry at the Crystal Palace, the United States presented the achievements of mechanized firearm production. The U.S. Model 1841 Rifle received careful attention. The manufacturer took six rifles completely apart, placed the pieces in one box, mixed them together, and fully reassembled six rifles. The demonstration illustrated the superiority of interchangeability in weapons production and industrial precision. The British purchased U.S.-­produced machinery in 1854 and 1855 to achieve similar results. The dawn of a new industrial age in weapons production had arrived, making future war more deadly.14 The emergence of modern technology, especially rifling for both artillery and small arms, had undermined the uses of cavalry and even artillery. The distance at which muskets were effective dramatically increased, even if not always used to their full potential. A rifled musket could fire a projectile effectively for 300 yards. The deadliest kill zone remained the 75-­to 100-­yard area in front of a firing line. With rifling, new bullets were needed. As early as 1823 conoidal bullets emerged, which C. E. Minié developed into a new effective bullet. By 1851, the British Army issued these new bullets to all its units. The result was a dramatic reduction of misfires and a doubling of range and accuracy. Estimates from the time indicated that 150 soldiers with rifled weapons could replace 525 troops with old-­fashioned muskets. Technological advances continued, and eventually feeding powder and projectile into the barrel of the weapon from the muzzle seemed too slow and cumbersome.15 Still in the experimental stages during the Civil War, breech-­loading small arms and multi-­fire machine guns were tried. Where the United States experimented with various types of repeater and breech-­loaded rifles, the Prussian army had adopted the breech-­loading Zündnadelgewehr, which had a range of 400–­600 yards, by 1841. Slowness in production meant that most Prussian soldiers still relied on muskets until the new rifle’s efficiency was demonstrated during the German Revolutions of 1848 and the war against Denmark (1863–­64). Production was stepped up thereafter, and by 1866, the 109

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entire Prussian army was equipped with them. The French army, meanwhile, had adopted the Chassepot (officially known as Fusil modèle 1866), with an effective range of 1,000 yards and ability to hit as far as 1,500 yards. In comparison to the muzzle-­loaded rifles of the Civil War, which at best fired three shots per minute, the Prussian rifle with its “clunky bolt action” fired four to five rounds a minute and the French rifle between eight and fifteen. Even the conservative British Army was testing breech-­loading rifles by 1849. These new weapons required soldiers to carry more ammunition, however, as much as one hundred rounds, putting increasing demands on logistics. The French mitrailleuse, which consisted of thirty-­seven gun barrels fixed together and shot in succession, could fire up to two hundred rounds per minute, leading to its nickname “hell machine.” The rifling of small arms and cannons dramatically changed the face of war.16 On the losing side of these changes was cavalry, which was no longer able to charge an enemy line relying on the speed of horses. As Sherman observed in his 1875 memoirs, “The danger of cavalry attempting to charge infantry armed with breech-­loading rifles was fully illustrated at [the Battle of] Sedan, and with us very frequently.” 17 Cavalry, however, could still be used on retreating troops—­certainly that was the British use for them during the Second Anglo-­Boer War (1899–­1902). They would also be useful for reconnaissance well into the twentieth century. Horses, meantime, continued to play a role in warfare, but increasingly it would be in the form of transportation of people and wagons, something they continued to do as late as the Second World War. Indeed, during that conflict, around 80 percent of German transport came in the form of horses—­the largest use of military equestrian transport in history.18 The iron horse and telegraph, however, made the movement of information, troops, and material much easier and quicker. Logistics, transportation, and the quartering and supporting of armies was permanently changed by the railroad, which also transformed tactics as a whole: armies could now be moved long distances in a few days. Contrary to the claim that until the American Civil War. armies moved no faster than they did in ancient Rome, as early as 1839 the British used railroads to swiftly move troops around the country to deal with a potential Chartist rebellion.19 In the Crimean War, meanwhile, allied troops and supplies were brought to the battlefield by the 110

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Grand Crimean Central Railway, a military railroad specially constructed by British forces in 1855.20 The use of rail for military purposes spread. The Prussian army, particularly, developed a sophisticated coordination of railroad and telegraph communications to maneuver large bodies of troops. As Brian Holden Reid notes, “In 1864 the Prussians moved a corps of 12,000 men with attendant horses and guns to Cracow” entirely by rail.21 Even before the Civil War, during the War of Italian Unification of 1859, France was able to transport by rail some 130,000 soldiers and a similar number of horses relatively rapidly to the warzone.22 Railroads proved an excellent means to bring large bodies of troops to the battlefield. At the time of the American Civil War, the northern railroad network was far more extensive than its southern counterpart. Making transport more complicated in the South was the different gauges of rails used, and often river transportation proved more convenient for short distances. Still, both sides used railroads extensively for troop movements. Arguably, the arrival of Confederate troops by rail at the First Battle of Bull Run (July 21, 1861) was the first time in history that soldiers anywhere had been taken directly to a battlefield. These reinforcements by railroad almost certainly turned the tide of the battle in favor of the South. The Confederacy would also move large bodies of troops by rail prior to the Battle of Shiloh (April 6–­7, 1862), the Battle of Perryville (October 8, 1862), and the Battle of Chickamauga (September 19–­20, 1863). The Union, too, used railroad to its advantage. In 1862 the Lincoln administration created the United States Military Railroad to streamline transportation along private railroads. At Chattanooga the Union moved some 20,000 troops from Virginia to Tennessee to fight the successful Chattanooga Campaign (October–­November 1863). In 1864, meanwhile, Major General Andrew J. Smith used railroads and river steamers to transport his corps from crisis region to crisis region, including the Red River, Missouri, and Nashville.23 Finally, following his assassination, Lincoln’s body traveled in state by rail from Washington, DC, to Springfield, Illinois, following in reverse the same route he had taken to the capital for his inauguration. Thousands lined the tracks to watch the train pass. By the time Lincoln was laid to rest, an estimated seven million people had seen his casket.24 As much as railroads offered a quicker means to transport large bodies of troops, the length of the tracks prohibited adequate protection of the lines. 111

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Disruption of railroads was easy since pulling up a few pieces of iron could cause significant damage and delays, preventing trains from moving. The vulnerability was always on the mind of Union commanders as they advanced into the South and faced an ever-­longer supply line relying on vulnerable railroads. General Grant learned his lesson when his 1862 overland campaign to capture Vicksburg failed after Confederates destroyed his supply depot in northern Mississippi. Other commanders suffered similar fates. During his Atlanta Campaign in 1864, General Sherman sent at least two Union forces into northern Mississippi to keep Major General Nathan B. Forrest’s cavalry occupied and away from his army group’s supply lines in Middle Tennessee.25 As a major conflict, the Crimean War offered observers many opportunities to learn about modern weaponry. The U.S. Army and Secretary of War Jefferson Davis sent Richard Delafield, among others, to inspect European military production facilities. Delafield reported on new weapons technology, fortifications, bunkers, and many other innovations. One of the prominent aspects in the report was an elaboration and blueprint of the new Vienna arsenal. Delafield spoke highly of the modern facility, which he called “perfect in all respects.” The design and report did not have an immediate effect, but Davis did not forget it, revisiting the subject when he became president of the Confederate States.26 Confederate chief of ordnance Josiah Gorgas ordered the creation of a new arsenal at Augusta, Georgia, built on an already existing set of structures, for the manufacture of both weapons and ammunition. With powder works and material in place, the facility produced large amounts of material for the Confederate war effort between 1863 and 1865. Construction of the newly designed building started in September 1861, and it was ready for operations in early 1862, looking like the arsenal in Vienna. The Confederate Powder Works became a major producer of ammunition for southern forces.27 Augusta was only one small piece in the emerging Confederate military-­ industrial complex in Georgia. Along the Savannah River and the Augusta Canal, the Richmond government produced 6,000 tons of gunpowder per day. The Atlanta Arsenal, in operation since March 1862, produced 46 million percussion caps and 9 million rounds of ammunition in its over two years of operation. Other production facilities in the city produced rifling for muskets. The Columbus Arsenal did better, with 10,000 rounds of small-­arms ammu112

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nition prepared per day. At the Naval Iron Works, the Confederacy produced cannons and boilers. The Macon Arsenal produced Parrott rifled guns, which eventually made up a large amount of the artillery of the Army of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Dalton, Rome, Griswoldville, and Athens were all involved in the production of military goods.28 According to contemporary claims, Georgia’s agriculture and investment in the creation of thirty-­eight cotton and woolen factories meant the state did much better investing in industry than Ohio. The South had made strides in food production, railroad construction, and canal building prior to the war. With more and more cotton mills, the South not only produced the raw material but also turned it into fabric. The 250 cotton mills in the South at that time operated half a million spindles. These were new and thus cheap to operate and more technologically advanced, allowing southern industry to clothe some of its own population. Railroads and cotton mills required iron. The Virginia Iron Works at Wheeling and the Canton Iron Works in Baltimore provided some of that needed material. There were 115 mills of various sizes in the Lower South that could produce nails, wires, and even steam engines and locomotives. Among these were the Montgomery Iron Works, King’s Mountain, East Tennessee Manufacturing, Tredegar Iron Works, and the Etowah Manufacturing and Mining Company. Furthermore, 1,246 leather shops and tanneries could produce four million pairs of shoes annually. Many of these operated without the high industrial capabilities of their northern equivalents. On balance, the southern industrial class was doing well by the 1860s. Yet there were some things the South could not produce on a large scale, chief among them, ships.29 The European powers had emerged from the era of the Napoleonic Wars with a large armada of wooden warships, ranging from small 4-­gun schooners to single-­gun-­deck frigates to the mighty ship-­of-­the-­line, with up to 124 cannons. Hundreds of ships patrolled the world’s oceans after 1815, maintaining the colonial empires and trade interests of the European powers. The age of industry brought vast advances in iron making, however, allowing for larger and more powerful artillery pieces and the use of iron plates to protect a ship’s hull. Added to this was the ability to use a steam engine for a more reliable propulsion system than wind and sails. Paddlewheel-­and-­steam technology had existed since the late 1700s, 113

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when steam engines were first placed on ships. These early steam-­powered vessels remained limited to river transportation. Oceangoing steam transportation was slow to develop because of the massive coal bunkers required to fuel long journeys. As naval technology advanced, military planners started to think about the uses of steam and iron in the design of oceangoing warships. Early experiments were cautious and involved retrofitting already existing ships. One of the first significant advances was the Birkenhead Iron Works construction of the Nemesis for the East India Company. A paddle steamer with a length of 184 feet and a beam of 29 feet, the ship had only 6 feet of draft. Knowing the difficulty of sufficient coal storage, the ship was equipped with two masts as auxiliary propulsion. The ship’s armament included “two pivot-­ mounted thirty-­two-­pounders, several six-­pounder and swivels, and a rocket launcher. The ship impressed most because it was the first ever vessel entirely made of iron, except for deck, spars, and sundries.” The Nemesis altered naval warfare, even though the vessel was built for a private corporation.30 Upon its arrival in China to support the expeditionary forces during the Opium Wars, the Nemesis made an immediate difference. In January 1841 it participated in the Second Battle of Chuenpi. The ship performed beyond expectations and annihilated several enemy junks, as iron and steam demonstrated their worth against an inferior enemy of wood and sail. By the time the Nemesis scored its successes, the British government realized the need to update its naval arsenal in the face of French naval renovation.31 Naval planners in Great Britain and France during the 1840s were still reluctant to use paddle steamers since such vessels had little room for canons and therefore seemed unsuitable for military purposes. While the British continued to adhere to traditional methods, however, the French embraced a bold new strategy. The Crimean War was an important moment for the demise of sailing vessels. By 1855, all naval taskforces deployed by the British were entirely composed of steam warships. The conflict also encouraged innovations in weapons, as both major allies experimented with rifled artillery. Yet it was not only steam vessels that proved their worth in the war, so, too, did ironclad warships. At the Battle of Kinburn on October 17, 1855, French armored floating batteries destroyed Russian coastal fortifications. Although extremely crude—­essentially armored barges carrying artillery rather than 114

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ships proper—­the three French ironclads Lave, Dévastation, and Tonnante, performed far beyond expectations, their hulls barely dented despite numerous hits from the Russian guns. Recognizing the superiority of ironclads over wooden vessels, the French swiftly moved to manufacture new warships combining both armor and steam engines.32 In March 1858 the French constructed the first modern warship, Le Gloire, with ambitious plans for more ships to follow. The British, by contrast, took over a year to respond, with HMS Warrior entering service in May 1859. The vessels would reflect the two nations’ different approaches: whereas France favored iron plating on wooden hulls, Britain quickly went with all-­iron construction. The British program continued apace from there on, with an additional ship being laid down every five months. Much of the initial construction happened in private yards rather than naval yards. There was an additional difference between the pioneering warships as well: Le Gloire was a short-­range vessel, whereas the Warrior was able to exert British power anywhere in world. This Anglo-­French arms race was important, as it propelled the development of ironclad ships, both nation-­states seeking naval advantage over the other, with the British concerned they might lose the control of the high seas they had enjoyed since Trafalgar in 1805. It remains too often claimed in American Civil War scholarship that the Virginia and the Monitor were the world’s first ironclads. They were not. Nor, as the Battle of Kinburn demonstrates, were they the first example of ironclad ships in combat. Further, both Britain and France had a head start on the United States with respect to ironclad warships, and both nations’ vessels were technologically more advanced than the Americans’ (including, for example, being equipped to handle the high seas).33 Nonetheless, there remained a theoretical aspect: how would ironclads perform in combat against each other? It was in this respect that the American Civil War offered the first example. Both the Union and the Confederacy, alert to the previous wars and naval developments in Europe, recognized the importance of the seas, with the Union proclaiming a blockade of all the ports of those states in rebellion and the Confederacy issuing letters of marque and reprisal to destroy northern shipping. The Union needed large numbers of ships to blockade the southern ports. Confederate leaders, meanwhile, realized that breaking the blockade required either a fast or a heavily armored warship. 115

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The Union needed a similar warship to protect the blockade. And as Howard Fuller points out, its navy also was concerned about foreign interference and wanted some form of defense against the innovative European warships.34 The Confederacy largely salvaged captured vessels and used the limited technology available to create ironclad wooden-­hulled ships. When Virginia seceded from the Union, militia units captured the Norfolk Naval Yards, which had not been destroyed during the evacuation. They also took the hull of the partially burned USS Merrimack and, under the leadership of Lieutenant John M. Brooke, naval constructor John L. Porter, and chief engineer William P. Williamson, developed a plan to cover the area above the waterline of the ship with two layers of two-­inch iron plates produced by Tredegar Iron Works. The 170 foot-­long casemate was angled at 36 degrees to deflect cannon balls. Equipped with ten guns, the reimagined warship was small and underpowered, but the 7-­foot ram provided it with another advantage in attacking enemy vessels. Thus, the CSS Virginia was born.35 The Union experimented with iron warships, too, and had several plans available. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles created the Ironclad Board to look at these proposals. Swedish-­born John Ericsson successfully offered a screw-­propeller design after Welles had asked him for an expert opinion about another design’s buoyancy. Despite lingering mistrust toward him because of the 1844 USS Princeton explosion, Ericson got the deal for the USS Monitor. The only part of this newly designed warship significantly above the waterline was a massive rotating turret with eight inches of iron plating for protection and two 11-­inch Dahlgren cannons for armament. Monitor was looked down upon by naval planners, some of which later seemed justified considering the ship eventually sank in high seas off Cape Hatteras. This emphasizes the point that neither Union nor Confederate ironclads were oceangoing ships and could only operate in coastal waters—­they thus did little to alter the international balance of naval forces.36 On March 8, 1862, Captain Franklin Buchanan took the Virginia out to do battle with the blockade squadron, consisting of USS Cumberland, USS Congress, USS Minnesota, USS St. Lawrence, and USS Roanoke, among others. The Cumberland and Congress were among the first targets of the Confederate ironclad. With Cumberland sinking and Congress ablaze, the Virginia had to retreat before taking on Minnesota because of the receding tide. Not since the 116

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Royal Navy’s capture of the U.S. flagship President on January 15, 1815, during the War of 1812 had the U.S. Navy seemed so impotent in battle. But that night the Monitor arrived and took station next to Minnesota. The next day the Monitor and Virginia fought for three hours, shots falling or glancing off the heavy plating on both vessels. While neither side was able to claim victory, ironclad warships had proven their superiority to wooden ones.37 In London the Times reported on the battle: “Six months ago the Secretary of the Admiralty described our active force afloat as 19 line-­of-­battle ships, two iron-­cased frigates, 38 frigates and corvettes, and 90 sloops. Of all this force there are but two vessels that could be relied upon to meet such a ship as the Monitor.” What the Times—­although not the Admiralty—­missed was that the U.S. warship had significant shortcomings, such as being “underpowered, slow, unseaworthy, and insufferably hot and humid in warm weather.” Experimentation continued with larger oceangoing ships and armored river vessels.38 The Confederacy recognized their lack of shipyards capable of manufacturing modern warships. As a result, the government quickly determined to contract for ships in Great Britain, the nation on the forefront of ironclad manufacture. Georgian James Dunwoody Bulloch had served the U.S. Navy before the Civil War but had left to become the captain of a private ship. At the start of the war, Bulloch offered his service to the Confederacy and was tasked with creating a fleet of foreign-­built ships. At least one historian has argued, “It is doubtful whether anyone in the entire Western Hemisphere was as well fitted for his special task as Bulloch was.” 39 Upon arriving in Britain, the Georgian immediately set to work. In Liverpool Bulloch sat down with the engineers of the Laird Shipyard at Birkenhead on the Mersey to develop a powerful new warship capable of chasing off the blockade squadron. Without allowing a significant draft, the vessel’s firepower and armor would suffer. They overcame the problem by using turret batteries and, six feet below the waterline, an iron ram to maintain maneuverability and achieve a better weight distribution. Measuring 230 feet in length and 40 feet at the beam, carrying a 350-­horsepower engine for ten knots of speed, and a draft of 15 feet, the Laird rams were relatively small. After the Union’s diplomatic efforts and British fears about what sort of precedent would be established prevented the Confederacy from obtaining the ships, they served brief careers in the Royal Navy, which found little use for 117

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the rams. When the British government shut down his operations, Bulloch moved his shipbuilding program to France and contracted with Lucien Arman. But the agent’s new operations were also quickly discovered, and Arman had to find new purchasers for the four frigates and two ironclads intended for the Confederacy.40 Arman quickly found interested parties—­everyone was now aware of the advantages of ironclads. He sold two frigates and one ironclad to Prussia, which was then fighting Denmark, using Goll and Company in Amsterdam to broker the sale. As a result, the United States was suspicious about the true identity of the purchaser. News soon arrived of the appearance of one of the ships in Bremerhaven, at which point the French government pointed out to Arman that the sale was still illegal since Prussia was a belligerent in an active conflict. As a compromise, Prussia and Denmark received one Arman ironclad each. The Danish navy, however, found the vessel insufficient.41 Besides the naval needs of the belligerents during the period of German unification, South American countries also realized the need for better weapons. Following the American Civil War, the mothballed warships of the U.S. Navy offered cheap and quickly attainable military vessels. Further, there were large numbers of experienced sailors with the technical knowledge of operating ironclads who now required employment elsewhere. As it happened, many countries desired access to these new technological advances. In 1864 war broke out between Peru and Spain, a conflict Chile eventually joined. The two former colonies relied primarily on naval power to deal with the Spanish navy. Lacking a location to resupply their warships and having taken over the guano-­rich Chincha Islands, Spain’s imperial ambitions faced a dilemma; the war ended in 1866 with Spain’s defeat.42 Toward the tail end of the Guerra Hispano-­Sudamericana, U.S. artist James Abbott Whistler went to Valparaiso, the Chilean port city where, according to a recent biographer, he offered new military technology to the South American belligerent. In addition to torpedo technology, the Peruvian navy had the Huáscar and Independencia, European-­built ironclads. By 1868, the country had purchased from the United States the USS Catawba (renamed Atahualpa) and USS Oneota (Manco Cápac) as well as two Canonicus class monitors. Peru had also obtained the CSS Georgia (ironically renamed Union) and CSS Texas (America), both of which had originally been Arman vessels.43 118

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One development in naval warfare the American Civil War can claim to have initiated is the age of the submarine—­Americans had been involved from the start in the age of submarine warfare. Although the submarine itself had a long history, one being credibly dated as existing in 1620 and Nathaniel Symons patenting the first known example of using a ballast tank for submersion in 1747, its first military application took place during the American War of Independence, when the Turtle was first used—­albeit unsuccessfully—­ against British ships. Further, Napoleon considered a model designed by American Robert Fulton for use against the Royal Navy in 1802 but finally rejected the idea. Undeterred, Fulton turned around and offered his idea to the British instead, but they were as disinclined to accept it as the French.44 The arrival of New Orleans entrepreneur Horace L. Hunley’s submarine, the CSS Hunley, marked the true beginning of submarine warfare. Although the ship proved equally dangerous to its crew and had killed its inventor, on February 17, 1864, the Hunley sank the USS Housatonic outside of Charleston harbor—­the first time in history a warship was sunk by submarine. It must still be remembered that this development, as startling as it was, was nonetheless part of a global competition in the matter of military submarines.45 The year before Hunley’s namesake entered military annals, the French had launched the first submarine not to depend upon human power for propulsion, Le Plongeur. The very next year the first air-­independent and combustion-­powered submarine, the Ictineo II, was launched by Spain. In 1866 the Sub Marine Explorer became the first submersible to successfully dive, cruise under the sea, and then resurface entirely under the control of the onboard crew. That same year the British Whitehead torpedo, the first self-­propelled weapon, came into existence. In other words, the Hunley came into being very much in the middle of a period of rapid developments in submarine warfare.46 Furthermore, the Confederacy used any means necessary to protect its ports and rivers against Union attacks. One of the most effective ways to sink Union warships turned out to be the torpedo, a stationary, underwater contact mine. Despite their primitive electrical or contact detonation systems, Union captains feared torpedoes lurking in southern rivers and harbor entrances. These, too, foreshadowed future developments in war.47 As military developments took place on land and sea (as well as underwater) during the American Civil War, the air was no exception. The French 119

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had pioneered the use of hot-­air balloons, with the Montgolfier brothers flying the first ones in 1782 and 1783. Military applications followed swiftly, with the French first using balloons for observation purposes at the Battle of Fleurus on June 26, 1794, during the French Revolutionary War. They were sufficiently impressed by the results to set up a military aeronautical school. The next obvious development—­using balloons to drop bombs—­followed in 1849. As Austrian troops besieged rebellious Venice, they managed to drop at least one bomb on the city from a balloon. Given that the Austrian balloons were pilot­ less, one could argue that it was not simply the first aerial bombing raid but the first example of drone warfare as well. This first balloon bombing raid failed due to the winds blowing in the wrong direction, but the second, featuring 200 balloons carrying thirty-­three pounds of explosives, managed the successful hit. Despite the poor targeting—­some bombs landed on the Austrians themselves—­at least one scholar argues that the balloons damaged Venetian morale enough to lead to their surrender two days later.48 Despite the bombing of Venice being witnessed by the American Edmund Flagg, who later served as U.S. consul to the city, neither the Union nor the Confederacy attempted to repeat Austria’s innovation. Instead, the American Civil War marked a return to the use of balloons for strictly observational purposes. But even in this there were innovations. Although individuals on both sides advocated using balloons in an Austrian fashion, with two patents awarded to persons for their proposed “bombers” in the North and a Confederate veteran’s appeal in a Richmond newspaper for money to buy a balloon for the purpose of bombing Grant’s army, neither side followed through on their respective entrepreneurial schemes. That noted, balloons were used far more extensively and effectively in the Civil War than they had been during the Crimean War, where the use of balloons for observation purposes was viewed as a failure.49 For the Confederates, the lack of material and skilled manpower meant that their observational balloons were inferior to the Union’s and were frequently lost. Following the French, the North established a formal aerial unit, commanded by Professor Thaddeus S. C. Lowe, who became chief aeronaut of the U.S. Army Balloon Corps. Under Lowe’s command, the Balloon Corps achieved several firsts, including the widespread use of hydrogen gas, the first use of telegraph communication between a balloon and the ground, and di120

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recting artillery via flag signals to fire on enemy positions they could not see. Further, by taking off from a barge on the Potomac and then flying inland to observe a battle on one occasion, the Balloon Corps has a claim to be the first example of the use of an aircraft carrier. These successes, however, did not save the Balloon Corps from being dissolved in August 1863. If the Union military never granted Lowe the respect he was due, others certainly did. One foreign observer of the Civil War, a young German, Ferdinand von Zeppelin, learned of Lowe’s exploits. The latter would go on to make even further developments to the airship in both civilian and military spheres.50 In military terms the American Civil War, rather than being the first modern war, was along with the Crimean War and Franco-­German War one of three major mid-­nineteenth-­century conflicts that introduced new technology into the military sphere, thus pointing to future developments of industrialized warfare. Even if it was not the pioneer in every area, it nonetheless contributed to the development of medical care for the wounded, the general use of breech-­loading rifle, the railroad for transportation, the submarine, the ironclad ship, the aerial balloon, and the telegraph. The war in North America was part of a transitional period during which new technology like rifling and conical projectiles increased the range and accuracy of small arms and artillery. Modern warfare increasingly depended upon industrially produced goods and easier means of transportation (the railroad) and communication (the telegraph). While conflict on land changed, so did the nature of war at sea. Ironclad wooden warships and then vessels built entirely of iron changed the dynamics of naval warfare. Longer-­range artillery made coastal fortifications and wooden warships obsolete. The Civil War was a testing ground for many new technologies, some of which was outdated as soon as Union and Confederate soldiers took the field. Most infantrymen still carried muzzle-­ loaded muskets in North America, whereas in Europe armies already extensively used breech-­loaded weapons and experimented with early types of machine guns. The Civil War was at a mid-­nineteenth-­century crossroads of military developments.

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6 M E D I AT I O N A N D I N T E RV E N T I O N IN THEORY AND PRACTICE I should be inclined to think that we might begin by a general recommendation to the two parties [the United States and the Confederate States] to enter into communication with each other in order to see whether some arrangement of their difficulties might not be made by which this afflicting and destructive war might be ended. —­LO R D PA L M E R S TO N ,

T

British prime minister, 1862

his quote comes from an exchange between Foreign Secretary Lord John Russell and Prime Minister Henry Temple, Lord Palmerston during the British cabinet’s discussion about offering to mediate in the American Civil War, a conversation which has provided generations of historians something to debate.1 At the start of the conflict, faced with the Lincoln administration’s declaration of a blockade and maritime warfare on the seceded states, Great Britain and France declared their neutrality, which granted the Confederate States belligerent rights. The Confederacy hoped—­and the Union feared—­that acknowledgement of belligerent rights was a precursor to recognition. Secretary of State Seward absolutely believed that was the case, which would have assured Confederate independence.2 Many such fears were misplaced, as the precedents were not in favor of the international community agreeing to offer mediation, far less military intervention, in the case of a rebellion against an established government. By the autumn of 1862, the war’s growing death toll and lack of clear progress created concerns in Europe, where confusion regarding the causes of the conflict prevailed since the belligerents themselves sent mixed signals. The 122

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devastation that year of the battles of the Peninsula Campaign (March–­July), at Shiloh in April, at Second Bull Run in August, and at Antietam in September had caused a significant number of casualties. With the Confederacy victorious in nearly all the battles east of the Appalachian Mountains, the Union war effort seemed to stagnate. As a result, in October France and Great Britain considered whether, on humanitarian grounds, an offer to mediate or to intervene in the conflict might be advisable.3 But neither Britain nor France or any other nation intervened in the war, and despite what is sometimes claimed, no nation formally recognized the South—­including, contrary to myth, the Vatican. Despite extravagant claims made at the time that the Union’s steadfast diplomacy had held the European powers at bay, claims repeated ever since, the reality was more mundane. Regardless of the Union’s or even the Confederacy’s diplomacy, the chances of any European intervention in the American Civil War were remote at best. Indeed, the closest Great Britain came to taking a part in the war was during the Trent Affair, which was the consequence of a series of mistakes by the Lincoln administration.4 France was more inclined to intervene, primarily to protect its interests in Mexico from late 1861, but would not do so without Britain. Given the unwillingness on the part of Palmerston’s ministry to take such a step, French intervention then was equally unlikely. Although the question of European intervention in the Civil War has been discussed by numerous scholars, what has been less frequently discussed—­perhaps it is more relevant to a comparative study—­is what diplomatic precedents, circumstances, and environment the European powers were operating within regarding intervention in foreign conflicts. On matters of intervention and mediation, European powers consulted international law and looked at precedents for guidance. There was no set blueprint for an offer to mediate or to intervene, and in the past such offers were made on a case-­by-­case basis. The Treaty of Westphalia (1648) had insisted that states should be left to handle their own internal affairs, but the French Revolution and its consequences had challenged that line of argument. Among the most important legal scholars, Emer de Vattel had, in the late 1700s, provided some clarity on the conduct of international relations. Vattel defined mediation as a situation in which “a common friend interposes his good offices” to help settle a conflict. The mediating power was to “favour 123

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well-­founded claims,” as “mediation is a mode of conciliation.” There is no indication that Vattel assumed a rejection of such an offer justified military intervention.5 That said, he did argue, “if his [a monarch’s] mediation proves unsuccessful, he remains at liberty to assist the party who appears to have justice on his side.” 6 Thus, Vattel laid the foundation for international legal theories. Adding to Vattel’s arguments was the architect of the nineteenth-­century European state system, Fürst Clement von Metternich. Following the upheavals of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, Metternich wanted to craft a new system that would provide Europe with stability. One of the most destabilizing events being a revolution, particularly one featuring the French Revolution’s excesses, a repeat of which the conservative European leadership was keen to avoid. At the same time, Metternich upheld a principle that was in line with Vattel: intervention in another country’s domestic affairs was only permissible if both sides in the conflict requested mediation from outside. So, for example, Metternich had opposed the British intervention in Greece as a violation of the principles of the post-­1815 Europe.7 Metternich’s principles, however, were not always followed. During the Congress of Troppau, which reacted to the 1820 revolution in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, a much more belligerent and pro-­interventionist approach was used. The Austrian representative at the congress, Friedrich von Gentz, authored the three reasons justifying intervention. The congress asserted that all revolutions were illegal and criminal, which permitted the intervention on just principles by third parties. If the state authorities were the instrument of revolution, intervention was only permissible if the changes in the state threatened the neighboring states or the international community. If both circumstances took place, then intervention was most justifiable. Ironically, given their past willingness to interfere in other states’ affairs, the British government opposed this extension of the grounds for intervention.8 The first decade after 1815 was filled with legal and diplomatic arguments about this issue. By the 1840s, however, the international community largely avoided intervention, especially military, in the internal affairs of other states. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, following the conflict between Spain and the United States, Sir Sherston Baker provided an updated interpretation for international law. His book was a general overview that covered a wide range of pertinent topics. In his opinion, arbitration in a civil war de124

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pended upon invitation so that the arbitrator knows the issues at stake.9 More importantly, he provided a lengthy elaboration about mediation. Like Vattel, Baker argues, “mediation is where a common friend interposes his good offices to bring the contending parties to a mutual understanding.” The Treaty of Paris (1856), which ended the Crimean War, had provided an opening for arbitration and for the avoidance of further war.10 The only reasons why one power could become involved in the internal affairs of another was self-­ defense, treaty obligation, humanitarian reasons, or upon invitation of the belligerents.11 The offer of a “pacific mediation” was completely lawful.12 There were other precedents for mediation by the time of the American Civil War that pertained directly to the United States. Russia, during the War of 1812, had offered to mediate between Great Britain and the United States to end their conflict, the tsar believing it distracted the former from the fight against Napoleon. While the Madison administration was receptive, the British were not, and thus the offer was rejected. More pertinent, however, was the U.S. offer to mediate between the belligerents in the Crimean War in 1854. President Franklin Pierce and Secretary of State William L. Marcy attempted to interest the concerned powers in talks and further proposed an international agreement on the rights of neutrals. The Pierce administration, ironically, was upset by the Franco-­British blockade of Russia, believing, in Marcy’s words, “free ships, free goods”—­the United States reversed itself seven years later when the Lincoln administration imposed a blockade upon the Confederacy. As it happened, while the Russian government was receptive, Paris and London viewed it—­not unreasonably—­as being too favorable to Moscow and rejected the American proposal.13 Thus, an offer of mediation from another nation in the American Civil War would have had precedence and could not credibly be classified as an aggressive or hostile act. Mediation, moreover, was not the same as military intervention. Baker is clear on this: armed intervention is illegal unless “for the preservation of the balance of power; that is, to prevent the dangerous aggrandizement of any one State by external acquisitions, so as to put in jeopardy the safety of others, or the general peace of nations.” 14 This still required a set of prerequisites. Baker explains that “if both parties unite in the invitation, it will afford just ground for the pacific interference of the mediating Power.” This does not mean, however, that armed intervention is yet justified.15 Great Britain had 125

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long supported the principle of intervention to preserve the balance of power in Europe.16 At the same time, there was a tradition of favoring intervention requests by established governments over those in rebellion.17 International law distinguished between mediation and intervention, especially in civil wars that did not challenge the balance of power. Mediation by a third power required the invitation of both belligerents and remained nonbinding, in contrast to arbitration. Again, there remained very few legal reasons why any power could intervene in the internal affairs of another state or in a civil war: self-­defense, treaty obligations, humanitarian reasons, or by invitation of the belligerents. The Congress of Vienna altered the perceptions among the European powers about interventions in the domestic affairs of other countries. In the eighteenth century, European powers had done everything to increase their relative positions of power, including intervening in the affairs of and even destroying smaller states. The intervention of the French government in the struggle between Great Britain and its American colonies was facilitated by the invitation of the rebellious colonies and the desire of the Bourbon monarchy to seek revenge for the loss of Canada and other territories.18 This was in direct contrast to the nineteenth century, when the aftermath of the French Revolution and the subsequent Congress of Vienna overshadowed everything. So, for example, when the Spanish colonies rebelled against their imperial overlords, there was no European aid or support. By the 1830s, interventions for any reason were rare.19 After the upheavals of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, the Congress of Vienna constructed a new European order built around the legitimacy of royal privilege, the maintenance of the balance of power, and territorial changes based on the support or opposition of a country to Revolutionary and Napoleonic France. Armed intervention for the protection of the balance of power remained permissible under international law, if not universally accepted.20 This divergence soon became apparent in Sicily. In July 1820 the people of the Two Sicilies revolted against their Bourbon overlord and his attempt to abolish the constitution. Royal troops quickly suppressed the uprising in Sicily proper, but the king still faced revolution in the capital, Naples. After the 1821 Congress of Laibach, Austrian troops intervened and defeated the mili126

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tary revolt. Similarly, a mutiny by Spanish troops against their king was suppressed by a French intervention in 1822. In the direct aftermath of twenty-­five years of revolutionary warfare, the reactionary powers of Continental Europe were not prepared to tolerate any revolutionary changes, which they viewed as criminal in nature. During these two interventions, the United Kingdom abstained from involvement in the internal affairs of those countries.21 The British government did offer mediation in Belgium to end the conflict between the Dutch and their southern provinces and forestall a French expansion toward the Rhine. But London remained reluctant to use military force to support mediation or intervene militarily. There were, however, exceptions.22 The British willingness to intervene in certain territorial questions became manifest when the Greek people rebelled against their Ottoman overlords.23 The revolution was twofold, with émigré military officers in the Russian army and Greeks on the Peloponnese demanding independence. Their struggle was difficult, and when the Ottoman rulers brought in Egyptian troops to subdue their rebellious subjects, European governments became concerned. Greek desires for independence were much larger than an internal conflict between the Ottoman rulers and their people. The decline of the Ottoman Empire went hand in hand with the territorial aggrandizement of Russia. Since Great Britain had a substantial interest in the Levant trade, Egypt, and the Mediterranean in general, the entrance of a new power could upset the balance of power in the region and cause conflict between Russian and British ambitions. The intervention of the Egyptian forces brought joint opposition from France, Great Britain, and Russia. British neutrality shifted toward favoring Greece. There was, however, concern about a growing influence of Russia upon an independent Greece. When the Ottomans did not accept offers to mediate the conflict but the Greek rebels did, the three European powers agreed to an armed intervention. On October 20, 1827, a combined fleet of British, French, and Russian ships destroyed seventy-­five Egyptian vessels while taking no losses themselves at the Battle of Navarino. This action, as well as Russian military successes against the Ottomans on land, helped secure Greek independence in July 1832. British intervention was in part humanitarian and in part geostrategic since the expansion of Russia was not in the interests of the British Empire.24 127

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Similarly, succession difficulties following the death of Ferdinando VII brought about the Primera Guerra Carlista (1833–­39) between Isabella II of Spain and Carlos de Borbon. Ferdinando had died without a male heir, and there was opposition to allowing a daughter to follow her father on the throne of Spain. There was sympathy in Great Britain for Isabella II, and private individuals went to Spain to support the liberal cause.25 At the same time, British officials were more concerned with the conflict in Portugal, where Dom Miguel and Maria II, supported by her father, Dom Pedro, emperor of Brazil, fought for the throne of the kingdom. Secretly, London supported the Pedro-­ Maria cause, which emerged victorious from the Guerra Civil Portuguesa (1828–­34).26 For Great Britain, these two Iberian conflicts were closely connected, but while the British became secretly involved militarily in one, they supported mediation in the other. British overseas interventions became increasingly rare, if not nonexistent, thereafter. When Antonio López de Santa Anna became president of Mexico and attempted to centralize the government, several provinces seceded. Only Texas and Yucatan were ultimately successful. As the Republic of Texas initiated diplomatic relations with France and Great Britain, the British balanced their desire for relations with Mexico with the possibilities Texas offered. When, ten years after the Texas War for Independence, the United States and Mexico went to war over the incorporation of the young republic into the United States, the British government stood aside, neither intervening nor offering mediation between the contending parties.27 This, however, represented the difference between the willingness of European powers to intervene in European affairs or in those of settler societies versus protecting self-­interests abroad. One region of major instability in the world was the Rio de la Plata region in South America. The only recently created country of Uruguay had suffered from a lengthy civil war in the 1830s and 1840s. Meanwhile, in Argentina, Juan Manuel de Rosas had emerged as military dictator in Buenos Aires Province. Rosas and the British had come into conflict in the early 1840s when, despite diplomatic pressure, he refused to accept Uruguayan independence. When Rosas tried to undermine Montevideo’s government with a blockade, Britain and France responded with a blockade of their own to protect their trade interests in Uruguay. The economic loses of closed ports in Argentina, however, did not justify the opening of Uruguayan 128

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ports, and within nine months the blockades ended, as British and French warships withdrew from the region. Economic interests had not only precipitated the intervention but also ended European involvement.28 A similar situation had emerged in China, where the British East India Company and a series of other European and U.S. businesses had developed trade interests. The British had come into conflict with the Chinese government over the importation of opium and the development of more extensive trade relations. When London insisted on compensation for confiscated opium and the Chinese refused, the two sides clashed in the First Opium War (1839–­42).29 With a relatively small force of fewer than 20,000 soldiers and a modern naval squadron, Britain forced the Chinese to open several ports for trade. In the Second Opium War (1859–­60; also called the Arrow War), which was again precipitated by violations of alleged trade rights, British subjects, and British vessels, the United Kingdom and its allies forced a further opening of China. When dealing with a weaker non-­Western power, European interventions were more likely.30 A similar situation existed in the Americas, where interventions came easy when powers dealt with perceived weaker states. France and Spain especially embraced an expansionist policy to restore their empires under the dubious claim of intervention to mediate domestic conflicts.31 French involvement in Mexico, for example, illustrates this European willingness to intervene upon invitation. Mexico had long suffered from political instability, particularly following the Mexican-­American War, with presidents staying in office for short periods before facing a military or political coup d’état. By the late 1850s, the Plan of Ayutla called for a new constitution based on liberal and federal principles. The result was the Constitution of 1857, which provided individual rights, affirmed the end of slavery, improved the judicial and penal system, and restricted the power of the Roman Catholic Church and the army. The military, conservatives, and the Catholic Church opposed the new document, leading to the Guerra de Reforma, which the liberal party eventually won. Conservative guerilla forces, however, continued to operate in Mexico despite Benito Pablo Juárez García’s success and restoration of the government and capital to Mexico City. Among the leading conservatives, Miguel Gregorio de la Luz Atenógenes Miramón y Tarelo departed the country for Cuba and eventually 129

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Europe. While his followers continued the fight at home, Miramón hoped to gain European assistance, particularly from France.32 Miramón found in Napoleon III an adventurous, Catholic-­minded politician who saw an opportunity for aggrandizement. With the United States distracted by the Civil War and Latin America in apparent dire need for stability, Napoleon hoped to provide a force to modernize the region. France thus intervened in Mexico upon request of the Conservative Party and to restore good government, inviting a European prince to serve there as emperor. They found a willing recipient in Ferdinand Maximilian Joseph Maria von Österreich. On June 7, 1863, François Achille Bazaine’s French and Mexican forces marched into Mexico City. A few days later a junta proclaimed a Catholic empire and offered the throne to Maximilian, who became emperor. Legally, the entire affair was carried out under the pretext of the French claim of collecting debts from Mexico. At the same time, the United States did not officially question the French intervention by invoking the Monroe declaration of 1823, which was not part of the recognized body of international law nor usually cited by Americans at this time in history.33 In an age of growing realpolitik, European powers needed few justifications to engage in an intervention, especially if it served their purposes and they dealt with a non-­European/Western opponent. The situation, however, was different among the European powers, who viewed each other as equals. A completely different set of causes underlay interventions, both military and diplomatic, during the mid-­nineteenth century in Europe. During the 1848 rebellions, the powers once more tested the options and limitations of the Congress of Vienna system, which still theoretically governed their interactions. When the Hungarians rebelled against their Austrian overlords and declared the independence of the Kingdom of Hungary, concerns in Vienna and Saint Petersburg started to come together. Where Austria feared the integrity of its empire, Russia had an abundance of reasons to justify intervention, including its role as a policer of the Congress of Vienna system.34 Besides the longstanding cooperation between Austria and Russia to uphold the conservative world order created with the congress, there was the fear of what an independent Hungary could do, including expanding its example into the Russian sphere of interest; for example, independence in Hungary could unleash similar desires in Poland. Saving Austria could be beneficial to Russia 130

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in the future, as a weakened Austria would no longer function as a power in the German Bund. Finally, France had set the example for intervention by following through on Pope Pius IX’s request for help against Italian revolutionaries. Russia’s involvement in Hungary, however, was limited, local, and conditional.35 Its armies helped but did not crush the Hungarian uprising, which Austria had the capability to do. In any case, intervention here was akin to those that followed the Congress of Vienna—­the established government was supported; the revolutionary/secessionist forces defeated. Austria benefited from Russia’s willingness to use its military power to deal with revolutionary elements in the harshest of ways. In dramatic contrast to Russia’s military involvement in Hungary is the diplomatic initiative taken by both Sweden and Great Britain during the prolonged Schleswig-­Holstein uprising of 1848–­52. When German and Danish troops clashed in the summer of 1848, the international community grew concerned. In part, a weakening of Denmark could have dramatic consequences for the balance of power in the Baltic region and question that country’s role as guardian of access to the Baltic Sea.36 Furthermore, much anger centered on the Prussians and their involvement in the conflict, altering international borders without the involvement of a European congress. At several key junctures Britain offered to negotiate a settlement in the conflict, with limited success as British officials were not prepared to engage militarily in the Schleswig-­ Holstein conflict. The only major threat they possessed was to promise a Europe-­ wide conflict by sanctioning Russian and French involvement, but neither of those powers was likely to engage. Only once Austria had asserted its leadership role within the German Bund again did the interested parties convene to negotiate the Protocol of London of 1852, which returned the Danish relationship with Schleswig-­Holstein to its original status quo.37 To the German belligerents in the conflict, British and Swedish involvement undercut their legitimate and justified claims to independence. Again, the established government had been supported and upheld against rebellion. This pattern continued into the next decade, with the Crimean War being the major exception. Yet even this was not a civil war within the context of the Westphalian idea of the sovereign nation but a contest among several states. In the course of 1853, as tensions between Russia and the Ottoman Empire escalated, France and Great Britain insisted on international cooperation. When 131

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relations between the two belligerents failed, Russia moved to occupy the Danubian Principalities (Moldova and Wallachia). Austria, Prussia, France, and Great Britain offered meditation terms, including that the Ottomans would uphold their treaty obligations toward Russia. With the Ottomans unwilling to surrender such a large amount of sovereignty and Russia uncompromising, the Western powers accepted the possibility of their own military involvement. Under international pressure, Russia eventually withdrew from the Danubian Principalities, which Austria immediately occupied in August 1854. While the military defeats inflicted by France and Great Britain upon the Russians were consequential, particularly the capture of Sebastopol in 1855, Austria’s threat to abandon its neutral position and join the allies forced the Russians to negotiate the Congress of Paris peace agreement. Only intervention backed by the threat of force had any chance of success to bring belligerents to the negotiating table.38 Crimea dramatically undermined the desire of the European powers to become involved militarily in international conflicts. Great Britain maintained a close watch of events surrounding Italian unification, worried about the possibility of French intrigue and ambitions. Wanting to prevent the destruction of Austria, London attempted possible mediation in that conflict. Suggesting to Austria that they would be unsupportive if Vienna proved the aggressor and threatening France with possible involvement, the British government hoped to forestall conflict. With their bluff called, British politicians tried to limit the resulting war and avoid its escalation across the continent. Officials discussed the use of force but never seriously considered that option.39 Similarly, when the Polish and Lithuanian peoples revolted against their Russian overlords in early 1863, there was concern France might intervene militarily, enhancing the hope among the Poles that Britain would do likewise. London again remained uninvolved, which meant that Russia was able to deal with its rebellious subjects unmolested.40 Even during the Schleswig-­ Holstein controversy of 1864, Great Britain was at most prepared to hint at an Anglo-­French intervention, something unlikely to materialize because of Napoleon III’s noncooperation.41 Thus, by the mid-­1850s, nonintervention became the mainstay of European diplomacy, with no power willing to intervene and risk entanglement in a conflict of little national interest or unless directly challenged. 132

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What remained ambiguous were the questions of justification for and legitimacy of intervention. There was no agreement on what an intervention entailed and how deeply involved a power could become. Some diplomats and state leaders approved of it as a positive good or necessity. Others condemned the notion of getting involved in another country’s affairs. Alexis Heraclides and Ada Dialla argue that intervention is the “dictatorial interference by a State in the [internal and external] affairs of another State for the purpose of maintaining and altering the actual condition of things.” 42 There was, however, also a humanitarian consideration involved when powers determined whether to intervene. Great Britain tended to pursue a strict nonintervention policy, but once governments realized that such policy was not sustainable long term, intervention debates became closely connected with humanitarianism. As a result, any such actions had to at least appear to serve a humanitarian purpose, at least for British authorities.43 By 1859, Briton John Stuart Mill had outlined some important concerns and issues with any foreign power intervening in the domestic matters of other countries. Written under the backdrop of the Crimean War and the construction of the Suez Canal, Mill wondered about questions of power and freedom. He argued that nonintervention could only succeed if all powers accepted the notion. It might not have been right for England to have taken part with Hungary in its noble struggle against Austria; although the Austrian Government in Hungary was in some sense a foreign yoke. But when, the Hungarians having shown themselves likely to prevail in this struggle, the Russian despot interposed, and joining his force to that of Austria, delivered back the Hungarians, bound hand and foot, to their exasperated oppressors, it would have been an honourable and virtuous act on the part of England to have declared that this should not be, and that if Russia gave assistance to the wrong side, England would aid the right.44

Mill nonetheless worried that premature intervention, even for the noble cause of freeing a people from oppression, could be meaningless because, without having proven themselves, those people may not appreciate or be able to defend their newfound freedom. He asserts, “A civilised government can133

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not help having barbarous neighbours; when it has, it cannot always contend itself with a defensive position, one of mere resistance to aggression.” 45 This was the situation and legal-­diplomatic position in Europe as the United States disintegrated into war in 1861. Most of Europe’s autocracies, from Russia to Austria, on principle opposed any intervention on behalf of a rebellion. Thus, when the American Civil War started, Britain had no desire to get dragged into a conflict of uncertain proportions and even more unclear origin. It was from this vantage that the United Kingdom, by royal proclamation, declared its neutrality—­the Lincoln administration’s declaration of a blockade essentially allowed no other position—­and desire to remain uninvolved. At the same time, both North and South received belligerent status, granting each certain rights—­and responsibilities—­under international law. While the Union government insisted British neutrality was premature and belligerent status supportive of the rebellion, the Confederate government hoped the European powers would follow up their initial proclamation with an eventual recognition of the South as a new nation.46 As it happened, the Lincoln administration was wrong to claim Britain’s declaration of neutrality premature. None other than the U.S. Supreme Court would ultimately rule in 1863 that the declaration of a blockade was conclusive proof of hostilities.47 Nonetheless, the Confederacy was as inordinately optimistic as the Union was unduly pessimistic. Aware of the international situation, Confederate secretary of state Robert M. T. Hunter told James Mason, who was about to leave for London for talks, that Great Britain had a long history of supporting self-­determination movements with interventions, writing: In his letter to Lord Cowley of the 15th November, 1859, after adverting to the action of Great Britain in 1821 in regard to the declaration of the Congresses of Trappan and Laibach, in 1823 in regard to the Congress of Verona, and in 1825, 1827, and 1830 in the cases of the South American Republics, of Greece, and of Belgium, [Lord John Russell] says: “Thus in these five instances the policy of Great Britain appears to have been directed by a consistent principle. She uniformly withheld her consent to acts of intervention by force to alter the internal government of other nations; she uniformly gave her countenance, and if necessary her aid, to consolidate the de facto governments which arose in Europe or America.” 134

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Hunter thus felt encouraged that London would recognize the Confederate States as a de facto government, pointing to many similar examples.48 Recognition, however, was not the same as actual intervention, and this was something the Confederacy—­and many historians since—­should have recognized. The European powers were unprepared to grant an untested government fighting for its survival formal independent status and become involved in a conflict of dubious origin. As the Richmond government hoped for British recognition, followed by intervention, Washington threatened that anything looking like recognition, never mind intervention, would be treated as a hostile act. Secretary of State Seward declared that recognition of the Confederacy was equal to intervention, would cause perpetual war in North America, and would destabilize the entire continent.49 He eventually even threatened that any interaction between British government officials and the Confederate agents (Mason and John Slidell) could be interpreted in the United States as a recognition of the rebel government and a hostile act (but Seward thereby guaranteed a meeting the southerners would otherwise not have received). The secretary concluded that “British recognition would be British intervention, to create within our territory a hostile State by overthrowing this republic itself.” 50 Even if under precedent interactions with rebellious subjects did not mean recognition or that recognition of another country required military involvement, the U.S. government had a clearly defined interpretation that any form of recognition was synonymous to an intervention with or without military force. Such a narrow perception was largely geared toward a blusterous domestic audience that enjoyed hearing politicians talk tough toward Great Britain. Seward had turned Anglophobia into an art form after his first experiences during the McLeod incident.51 In fairness to Seward, however, he did have one precedent with respect to the American Civil War: Britain had treated other European states’ recognition of American independence, while the War of Independence was raging, as a hostile act. The mid-­nineteenth century, however, was not the late eighteenth century, and the reality was that by the late 1850s, European powers were reluctant to intervene in the domestic conflicts of other countries; even those crossing borders and changing the international-­state system were largely left to the belligerents to settle. Nobody desired a repetition of the unsatisfactory results of the Crimean War. 135

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Given that nationalist and secessionist movements existed across Europe, many governments, liberal or otherwise, were not eager to encourage such activities. If the southern states’ secession was championed, then the Poles, Hungarians, Irish, and a host of others’ demands would be legitimated, too. It is no coincidence that British supporters of the Union, for example, consistently compared southern secession to Irish rebellion.52 The so-­called intervention crisis in October 1862 has been considered by some as the most dangerous and most likely moment when the United States faced British intervention in the American Civil War. Supposed humanitarian considerations of a stagnant war, uncertainty over its causation, and a somewhat desperate sounding Emancipation Proclamation all contributed to cabinet debates in London over whether the United Kingdom should intervene with a mediation offer or, if such an offer was rejected, potentially with military force.53 The likelihood of such an action materializing were slim, however, once the “Eastern Question” regarding the vacated Greek throne demanded British attention in the eastern Mediterranean. Lord Palmerston was particularly unmoved by arguments for intervention in America.54 Furthermore, precedent was against any such involvement. Confederate hopes for a European intervention to help bring about independence were built largely on the belief that a repetition of the American War for Independence, when France assisted the colonies to gain their independence, and general international support for self-­determination existed. Another likely precedent for this was the U.S. declaration of war in 1812, when Britain had apparently been losing the struggle with Napoleon Bonaparte (who, fortuitously for the British, invaded Russia on the same day the Madison administration declared war). The world of the 1860s, however, was an entirely different one to that of 1778 or 1812. A serious consideration of British interventions, or lack thereof, during the last few decades could have saved the Confederacy much anguish (and provided great relief to the Union). While there were humanitarian considerations that British officials did consider to justify offering mediation, the Crimean War had fostered a negative view toward intervention—­humanitarian or otherwise. Even leaving the Crimean conflict aside, British statesmen had been unwilling to intervene in international conflicts with military force beyond applying their naval power when it could work. In an age of growing national conflicts and the increasing 136

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danger of a fragmentation of the world map, European powers were reluctant to engage in any action that could promote further disintegration by supporting revolutionary and separatist movements. Europe may not have followed Britain’s lead, but so long as the strongest maritime power was unwilling to involve itself in the American Civil War, none of the others, including France, crucially, was willing to do so either. European intervention in the Civil War would have been decidedly at odds with past precedents and the realities of the geopolitical situation.

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7 THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR AND THE E VA N G E L I C A L C E N T U R Y Those of our people who have grown despondent under the reverses of the times should not think that, because disaster have befallen us, God is unfriendly to our cause. We must remember the terrible character of this war. Our enemy has all the material advantages. We are shut out from the world. . . . [But] we have borne the bloody strife, and remain yet unsubdued. Surely God has been the friend of the South and purposes our ultimate independence. —­Richmond Religious Herald, March 9, 1865

W

illiam Lloyd Garrison famously called the U.S. Constitution “a covenant with death” and an “agreement with hell,” referencing the document’s sanctioning of slavery.1 He was paraphrasing Isaiah 28:18 (King James Version): “And your covenant with death shall be disannulled, and your agreement with hell shall not stand.” Garrison and his followers’ solution to the compact between slave and free states was the dissolution of the Union. The argument was political, the language religious. Garrison was hardly unique. A more mainstream political figure, Henry Ward Beecher, described the American Civil War thusly: “Since we must accept this war with all its undeniable evils, it is a matter for Thanksgiving that the citizens and lawful government of these United States, can appeal to the Judge of the Universe, and to all right minded men to bear witness, that this is not a war waged in the interest of any base passion; but truly and religiously in the defence of the highest interests ever committed to a nation’s keeping.” 2 Then there are the opening stanzas of the abolitionist Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle 138

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Hymn of the Republic”: “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.” The “Hymn” is stuffed with scriptural references, such as “the grapes of wrath” from the Book of Revelations (a perennial favorite with millennialists). Garrison’s, Beecher’s, and Ward’s opponents, the southern slaveowners, however, used Scripture, too, including the Curse of Ham and the frankly neutral tone, at best, the Bible takes toward slavery.3 Yet the role of religion went beyond that of slavery in the South, for as historians have demonstrated, ideas of honor in the region closely interacted with southern evangelicalism.4 Both sides prayed to the same God and used the same Bible to legitimize their actions. As a result, soldiers and civilians both North and South looked to and invoked divine providence not only to explain and justify their actions but also to bring meaning to an increasingly devastating conflict. As their leaders called for days of thanksgiving after major engagements, civilians did wonder to what extent God was indeed on their side. The slaughter and apparent deadlock at times meant that Providence, expected to be on the side of the United States, seemed to have deserted it. Toward the end of the war, as the tide turned in their favor, Union troops used the perception of divine support to their advantage to undermine civilian morale and support for the Confederate government. Lincoln’s first biographer, Josiah Gilbert Holland, immediately after the president’s assassination made a point of insisting that he was “eminently a Christian president.” Yet Lincoln’s two close legal associates, Ward Hill Lamon and William Herndon, both denied he was a believing Christian, something, in turn, that Mary Todd Lincoln took issue with. Whatever the sixteenth president’s religious beliefs—­this question remains controversial—­he took very definite care to insert references from Scripture into his speeches, once issuing a handbill stating that he “never denied the truth of the Scriptures.” 5 In other words, regardless of Lincoln’s personal beliefs, he clearly saw the need to reference Christianity in his public life.6 This is especially apparent in his second inaugural address, which presented the war and its combatants in almost entirely religious terms: Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. . . . The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. . . . If 139

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we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.” 7

Insofar as political speeches go, this one is about as nonsecular as one could find. One is, of course, entitled to think that Lincoln did not believe a single word of what he said, although that seems excessively cynical. Yet Lincoln’s use of such language, even if he had doubts, remains logical enough, for he lived in a nation where people held deeply religious views. Religion and American nationalism went hand in hand. Northern Protestant supporters of the Union viewed the war through the lens of America’s special place in world history, that the northern victory was a prelude to the millennium, and finally—­eventually—­the need to abolish slavery. Churches emphasized the Union had to be preserved because the United States, with its republican institutions, democratic ideals, and Christian values, stood in the vanguard of civilization’s progress. Were the Confederacy to win, the world would deem republican government a failure and no longer the future; humanity’s progress would be slowed, halted, or even reversed. Thus, the Union was not fighting merely for a single nation, but for the future of humanity itself. Further, many Christian ministers utilized millennial terms to describe the war for the Union, arguing that a northern victory might hasten the arrival of the Kingdom of God on earth. It was not that they expected the imminent return of Jesus Christ, but rather that the great day would be advanced. Finally, as with the Lincoln administration, they increasingly blamed slavery for the war and viewed the conflict as punishment for America’s maintaining

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the institution.8 In short, the United States was the “providential nation” undergoing a time of trial. This notion that the Union’s fight was thus the cause of all nations, while understandable in the 1860s, has misled numerous historians about how the rest of the world viewed the conflict. The United States was neither alone nor even the first country to view itself as the providential nation in the vanguard of human progress. The British thought the same about themselves and had viewed many of their own wars, from the seventeenth century up to and including the struggle against Napoleon, in religious and millennial terms.9 Britain undeniably saw itself as a providential nation with respect to its empire; indeed, imperialism often contains a religious impulse, as numerous scholars have demonstrated.10 Similarly, just as Lincoln was accused of lacking in Christian faith, the same charge was laid against Britain’s Lord Palmerston, the Earl of Shaftesbury remarking that the religious sentiments of the country were “as strange to him as the interior of Japan.” 11 From the point of view of the devout, Palmerston’s record was ambiguous. His suggestion in 1834 that compulsory chapel for Cambridge undergraduates be ended because it interfered with young men’s drinking parties marked him as disparaging Christianity in some eyes. Nor did his justification that compelling young men to attend religious services was unlikely to instill genuine devotion do much to dispel that impression. Although unlike Lincoln, Palmerston did belong to a church, the Church of England—­he could hardly be a member of Parliament, let alone a minister of the Crown, otherwise—­accusations of impiety dogged his political career. When Palmerston declined to add his voice to a public prayer regarding a cholera outbreak in Scotland in 1858 and instead suggested that purifying and clearing the affected areas should take priority, he outraged evangelicals who saw in his remarks a profane mockery of the idea of God’s intervention in human affairs. Nor did it help his case that the notorious freethinker George Jacob Holyoake, who coined the term “secular,” praised Palmerston’s actions and remarks. The prime minister’s defenders, such as Charles Kingsley, were compelled to point out that he had in his comments nonetheless respectfully referenced both God and Providence, making it an entirely Christian speech. As with Lincoln, Palmerston was careful to include reverential references in

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his public addresses—­on this occasion, however, divine protection was not forthcoming. Similarly, just as Lincoln detested the anti-­Catholicism of the Know-­ Nothings, Palmerston was of like mind with respect to religious sectarianism, grumbling on one occasion that some Protestants in their zeal forgot “that Roman Catholics are Christians.” 12 He disliked sectarian education, insisting that children should not “be brought up in religious antagonism to each other.” Further, although he would never consider the disestablishment of the Church of England, Palmerston supported both Catholic Emancipation as well as religious liberties for dissenters and Jews. As one historian notes, “Palmerston’s approach to religion as Prime Minister . . . combined a deep-­seated commitment to tolerance as a worthy end unto itself, with a strong dislike of theological controversy, especially when it became divisive and politicised.” 13 With respect to casting political struggles in religious terms, a host of British politicians especially fond of oration, from John Bright to William Gladstone, were practiced hands at this. Bright, for example, dismissed the nearly forty Liberal MPs who opposed Lord Russell’s parliamentary reform program in 1866 as “Adullamites,” referencing the cave of Adullam from 1 Samuel 22. Again, the argument was political, the language religious. Not that such references to Scripture always met approval, as demonstrated by the observation of another MP, Henry Labouchere: “I don’t object to Gladstone always having the ace of trumps up his sleeve, but merely to his belief that the Almighty put it there.” 14 Thus, if the devil can cite Scripture for his purpose, so, too, could nineteenth-­century politicians, believers and infidels alike. During the nineteenth century, throughout the West, Christianity enjoyed what can only be called a renaissance in comparison to the eighteenth century to the extent that some historians have referred to it as the “Evangelical Century.” In fact, it is difficult to really understand nineteenth-­century history on either side of the Atlantic and elsewhere without engaging with this resurrection of the religious impulse. The United States underwent significant changes from 1790 to 1840, during what is sometimes referred to as the Second Great Awakening. The religious growth coming out of New York’s “Burned-­Over District” and the western parts of the country was a search for new meaning as an ever-­changing environment displaced and challenged individuals. These revivals were part of a 142

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series of religious movements simultaneously sweeping across Europe, including in Britain (evangelicalism) and Germany (Pietism). To reach a larger audience, camp meetings appeared, with worshippers coming together for days to listen to preachers. To sceptics such as Frances Trollope, witness to a Methodist meeting in Ohio, the performances bordered on the hysterical.15 Yet to believers, it was a chance for salvation. In addition, there were new schools for religious education, and preachers started to settle down with their congregations rather than circuit ride from town to town offering services, further contributing to the growing sense of religiousness. This growing sense of moral importance also caused the desire to improve society before the coming of the millennium, at least among some.16 Such evangelical fervor prepared the ground for the founding of the Church of Latter-­Day Saints, or the Mormons, in New York in 1830 by Joseph Smith and the creation of the Salvation Army in London in 1865 by William and Catherine Booth, just to cite two very distinct examples of new religious movements on each side of the Atlantic. This revival almost certainly lay behind the appearance of spiritualism, a phenomenon that began in Hydesville, New York, in 1848 when two sisters, Maggie and Katie Fox, allegedly contacted an entity, supposedly the spirit of a peddler who had been murdered and buried in their house—­although no body was ever found—­through tapping on a table. Despite the sisters admitting, then recanting, that their performance was a hoax, spiritualism became a global phenomenon, as mediums supposedly communicated with the dead.17 The American Civil War, with its appalling number of casualties, increased spiritualism’s appeal in the United States as it seemed to allow grieving families to contact their loved ones who died in the conflict—­the First World would provide a similar impetus for a resurgence of the movement in Europe.18 It has long been recognized that Mary Todd Lincoln held séances in the White House, especially following the death of the Lincolns’ son Willie in 1862.19 As for the Lincoln’s views on the subject, the most credible source is probably the president’s German-­born secretary John G. Nicolay, who wrote: “I never knew of his attending a séance of Spiritualists at the White House or elsewhere, and if he ever did so it was out of mere curiosity, and as a matter of pastime, just as you or I would do. That he was in any sense a so-­called ‘Spiritualist’ seems to me almost too absurd to need contradiction.” 20 Nonetheless, one of the movement’s appeals for women was 143

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that it granted them a central role—­many of the best mediums were women—­ that traditional Christianity did not. Thus, spiritualism drew heavily from the ranks of women’s rights activists and abolitionists, although others in those movements were more skeptical.21 In this respect, the United States of the American Civil War was a different place than it had been at the time of the War of Independence. Although even here, as Alan Heimert has established, religion was a driving force—­certainly not the only one—­of independence.22 As to whether the United States was founded as a “Christian nation,” meanwhile, depends upon one’s definition of the term.23 Certainly, at the time of independence, the white population— ­that is, those who enjoyed political representation—­was 98 percent Protestant, even if relatively few regularly attended church. And while many of the Founding Fathers were Deists, others were not. Even the issue of an established church at the state level was contested. Jefferson’s desire for a separation of church and state contrasted with Patrick Henry’s wish to make the Episcopal Church the state church of Virginia. In Virginia it was Jefferson’s side that prevailed, but elsewhere the reverse occurred. The last state to give up the practice of state-­established churches was Massachusetts, which disestablished the Congregationalist Church in 1834; still, until 1877 New Hampshire’s state constitution required all members of its legislature to be Protestant. Further, throughout the nineteenth century, U.S. public schools were a flashpoint in the debate over the role of religion in society. Controversy, for example, erupted over the use of the King James Bible in public schools for instructional purposes, with Roman Catholics being denied the use of their Latin Bible for the same reason.24 Regardless of the lack of an established church even at the state level, U.S. culture was broadly Protestant and, in that sense at least, sectarian. The hostility experienced by Irish immigrants following the Great Famine was in large part owed to this sectarianism. Whatever its constitutional status in the United States, as elsewhere, religion mattered—­it mattered a great deal.25 Part of the reason for this religious revival lay in the fact that the nineteenth century was a period of profound change. First and foremost, there was the challenge of the continued growth of nationalism, of liberal forms of government, and of emerging new ideologies with an emphasis on class conflict, like Marxism. Although Marx famously dismissed religion as the opiate 144

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of the people—­here he merely simplified Seneca’s observation, “Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful”—­the fact remained that the nineteenth century’s new technologies and sweeping social changes, including urbanization and industrialization, were unsettling for many, and religion served as a stabilizing factor. Religious belief, however, faced other challenges, including the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), whose theory of natural selection removed the need for a prime mover. Yet despite these challenges and probably in part because of them, religion continued to play an important role in the daily lives of most people. It also contributed to social, political, and military conflicts in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. The religious spirit—­rather like the Lord—­moved in mysterious ways. When the United States contemplated expansion to the Pacific Coast and conflict with Mexico, religiously infused arguments appeared to increase the popularity of the war. John O’Sullivan borrowed from the Puritan ideal that the United States was divinely selected to become a shining city upon a hill in order to justify Manifest Destiny. According to O’Sullivan and his supporters, the United States was fulfilling a divine mission with the expansion of liberty, democracy, and republican institutions across the continent.26 As in any other era, invocations of religion could provide governments with additional support from their people at a time of crisis. The separation of church and state, even when proclaimed, was sometimes a decidedly temporary one. The religious revival, however, also sparked a new set of reform movements. Evangelicals were heavily involved on both sides of the Atlantic with respect to temperance, peace movements, prison reform, child-­labor restrictions, and a host of other issues. In the case of Britain, it is difficult to separate nonconformism from the history of the labor movement. As Morgan Phillips, the general secretary of the Labour Party, once declared, British socialism owed more to Methodism than to Marx.27 U.S. and British Methodists maintained strong links throughout this period, with the latter being one of the groups most inclined to support the North in the American Civil War despite the U.S. denomination’s split into northern and southern factions.28 John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, had owed some of his ideas to German Pietism, with its emphasis on personal transformation, which itself witnessed several renewals into the nineteenth century in both Germany and Scandi145

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navia. Indeed, German and Scandinavian immigrants to the United States brought their faith with them, shaping the development of U.S. evangelism.29 One area in which evangelicals were conspicuous was abolitionism. Indeed, this was very much part of a wider program of social reform. Yet abolitionism was not exclusively religious in origin, nor indeed were all abolitionists necessarily religious. The Somerset decision in England, for example, was based very much on legal and not theological grounds. Revolutionary France, meanwhile, was undeniably antireligious but at the same time became the first nation to outlaw slavery both at home and abroad. Like all causes, abolitionism attracted a range of human types. That said, evangelicalism was a motivating factor for most abolitionists, from William Wilberforce in England to Garrison in the United States. And although they remained a minority throughout the antebellum period, their demands for an end to human bondage were deeply imbued with religious terminology. Using New Testament language, abolitionists demanded the moral uplifting of the country and the removal of the stain of slavery. Religious leaders were reform-­movement leaders at the same time.30 Given this, it was thus inevitable that the Almighty would be conscripted into the American Civil War, just as He had been in earlier conflicts and would be in subsequent ones. For example, the Prussian and then German military used the expression Gott mit uns (God is with us) throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and into the First World War.31 When the American conflict broke out, the leaders on both sides needed to find justifications for the conflict. As the war for the Union morphed from the maintenance of the republic into emancipating the slaves, making it then one of union and abolitionism, the struggle took on a more just appearance. Claims that the preservation of the United States was required to ensure the survival of freedom elsewhere had never been particularly convincing. Similarly, for the Confederate States to say the war was about the freedom of national independence and therefore based on the same principles as 1776 meant that both sides fought a war of ideas. To increase the strength of those ideas and demand the highest sacrifices from their people, both causes relied on clergymen to promote the cause.32 As Harry Stout summarizes, “While few judged or questioned the recourse to total war, many saw in the unprecedented destruction of lives and property something mystical taking place, what we to146

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day might call the birthing of a fully functioning, truly national, American civil religion.” 33 To clergymen on both sides, the growing sacrifices of the soldiers and the devastation brought to communities foreshadowed a rebirth of the country, a spiritual revival. Soldiers were not only casualties but also martyrs for the new country to emerge on the other side. Although religion in the United States had its own unique aspects, the Civil War experience of faith was seen elsewhere. Using religion for political purposes was, especially for conservative-­minded politicians, a means to rally citizens in an age of mass politics. Continental European liberals had learned from the uprisings of 1848 that, especially in Roman Catholic countries, priests continued to have influence over the people and could often retard the emergence of liberal, democratic nation-­states.34 On the other hand religion, particularly in the shape of nonconformism, could be broadly liberal in outlook and temperament. And religious language could be used to justify beliefs on either side of the political spectrum. After Louis Napoleon received the widespread endorsement of the French people in the presidential election in 1848, he made sure to improve his standing with his Catholic citizens and increase his popularity. Although the French emperor was never viewed as being particularly devout—­despite being Catholic, his religious devotion resembles that of Lincoln and Palmerston—­his Spanish wife, Eugénie de Montijo, was an entirely different proposition. Eugénie was a staunch proponent of ultramontanism, which promoted supreme papal authority in matters of spirituality and governance—­in other words, no meaningful separation between church and state. Nor was it a school of thought much inclined toward ecumenicalism or religious tolerance. While for obvious reasons it was most common in Catholic Europe, as with evangelical Protestantism, it also crossed the Atlantic, making headway in French-­ speaking Canada and in Latin America. While Eugénie was not central to her husband’s activities with respect to either Russia or even (perhaps fatally) Prussia, Rome and Italy were a different matter. She essentially forced the emperor to include her in cabinet meetings and undeniably helped direct French policy in Italy. She also, it appears, was influential with respect to French involvement in Mexico, which she saw as a case of defending a Catholic people from rapacious Protestants—­in this case, the Americans, recalling the U.S. campaign against Mexico from 1846 to 147

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1848—­stating “the war in Mexico is my war.” Indeed, such was Eugénie’s influence and determination that Bismarck went so far as to refer to her as “the only man in Paris.” 35 With respect to Italy, when Giuseppe Mazzini’s Roman Republic ousted the pope from his seat of government and challenged religious rule in the Papal States, the pontiff called on the Catholic monarchs of Europe to come to his aid. France jumped on the opportunity, sending thousands of French soldiers on board vessels bound for Rome, where they overwhelmed Garibaldi’s revolutionary armies and restored the pope to his seat of power. French troops remained in Rome to protect the pope for twenty more years. Assistance to fellow Catholics was popular, and Napoleon used the religious card at least twice more in the future.36 The relationship between Catholicism and the state, however, was very different elsewhere. The conflict between liberals, concerned that the Catholic Church might undermine the authority of the newly emerging states, and those who divided their loyalty between their home government and papal authority underlay Bismarck’s Kulturkampf of 1871–­78. Like the Empress Eugénie, but unlike either Lincoln or Palmerston, Bismarck was apparently devoutly religious. Suffering a crisis of faith as a teenager, he became an orthodox Lutheran, a devotion he never abandoned. Bismarck was neither shy in proclaiming this nor had any doubt about the workings of Providence. Indeed, he believed he was a beneficiary of divine guidance, stating to guests at his dinner table in 1870: “I do not understand how one can live in a well-­ regulated society and fulfil one’s duties to oneself and to others, without the belief in a revealed religion, a God whose will is for good, a supreme judge, and a future life. If I were not a firmly convinced Christian, if I did not possess the admirable support of religion, I should never have been the Chancellor you know.” 37 Bismarck also, according to one historian, consulted the Bible to foretell future events, allegedly foreseeing the 1866 defeat of the Austrians when he chanced upon Psalms 9:3–­4. As one of Bismarck’s early biographers put it, such an incident demonstrates “that religious ideas were mixed in his conduct as a realistic and matter-­of-­fact statesman.” 38 It is hard to imagine the more worldly Lincoln or Palmerston attempting anything remotely similar, but at the time, the practice of predicting the future through a random selec-

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tion from Scripture was quite common on both sides of the Atlantic—­even if never granted sanction by any of the major denominations. Perhaps because of his devoutly held Lutheranism, Bismarck was more sectarian than either Lincoln or Palmerston, not sharing their tolerance for Roman Catholicism. While it would be wrong to claim his Kulturkampf was purely a consequence of this antagonism, it played a role nonetheless. After German unification in the 1870s, Bismarck sought to undermine Catholic authority as a challenge to his nation-­state. Working in tandem with German liberals, Bismarck abolished the Roman Catholic Bureau in the Ministry of Culture, barred priests from voicing political opinions from the pulpit, submitted all religious schools to state inspection, excluded religious teachers from state schools, and dissolved the Jesuit Order in Germany. From there he attempted to impose state controls over religious training and made civil marriage obligatory. As member of the Catholic Zentrum Party, Ludwig Johann Ferdinand Gustav Windthorst claimed: “The Chancellor is not the State. Until now no minister has been so presumptuous as to call his opponents enemies of the state.” 39 A combination of Catholic opposition combined with Bismarck’s belief that the Socialists were, in fact, the greater threat to the German state brought the crackdown on the church to its end. Nor was Germany the only place to experience such a kulturkampf. Austria, Italy, and Belgium all had their own versions. Emperor Francis Joseph promoted the power of the Austrian state over the Catholic Church. In Belgium liberals attempted to wrest education away from the church in the “school war.” The contest essentially ended with the defeat of the liberals in 1884 to more Catholic conservatives, who provided support for both religious and state schools but nonetheless inserted compulsory religious education. Italy’s struggles in the nineteenth century, of which the French intervention in Rome was a part, also had a kulturkampf aspect. During the revolutions of 1848, King Charles Albert of Sardinia banned the Jesuits and imprisoned archbishops. His successor, Victor Emmanuel, went further, ending ecclesiastical immunities, introducing civil marriage, and banning monasteries. In 1860 the Kingdom of Sardinia annexed all church territories and introduced further restrictions on the powers of priests. This process would continue well into the 1880s.40

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The American Civil War itself had a kulturkampf aspect to it, as the conflict helped create in many respects a separate Roman Catholic America. As William B. Kurtz points out, Catholicism had long had a troubled status within the United States. Many Americans, after all, saw themselves as a chosen people of a Protestant nation entrusted with the divine mission of redeeming mankind from Old World corruption, of which Roman Catholicism was often regarded as the most obvious example. The Mexican-­American War had an anti-­Catholic aspect. The nativist Know-­Nothings of the American Party in the 1850s were notoriously anti-­Catholic—­their anti-­immigrant position did not apply to Protestant migrants—­but certainly did not create such sentiment. Catholics’ loyalty to the republic over the pope was constantly questioned throughout this period. That Catholics overwhelmingly supported the Democratic Party ensured that numerous Republicans (many of whom were former Know-­Nothings) attacked their opponents as being the party of “Rum, Rebellion, and Romanism.” Numerous Copperheads, northerners sympathetic to the South, were Roman Catholic, which did not help the church’s reputation. And the Catholic Church was slow to embrace emancipation, although because abolitionists were often evangelical Protestants, this meant that Catholics were frequently made to feel unwelcome in the movement. Although Catholics did indeed enlist in the Union armies and nuns were, relative to their numbers, overrepresented among Civil War nurses—­their conduct won them widespread admiration and acclaim—­Irish Catholics’ role in the 1863 New York Draft Riots did incalculable damage to the church’s reputation. As Kurtz notes, “For those who already believed that Catholics were proslavery and unpatriotic, this event served to symbolize all that was wrong with Catholicism and its influence on American society.” 41 As with other groups, Catholics’ participation in the conflict was varied and complex. There were ethnic divisions, too, as German Catholics differed quite markedly from Irish Catholics on the question of slavery. Irish animosity toward Great Britain may well have driven opposition to abolition, given that the United Kingdom was the leading antislavery power in the world—­the idea of Britain’s difficulty being Ireland’s opportunity might easily translate into proslavery positions. Unfortunately, the widespread anti-­Catholic sentiment within the United States meant that the negative was emphasized. Staunch supporters of the Union and emancipation such as Orestes Brownson and 150

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Major General William S. Rosecrans were offset by men like Chief Justice Roger Taney and Archbishop John Hughes of New York. Pope Pius IX’s letter to Jefferson Davis, which unwisely referred to him as the “illustrious President” of the Confederacy (which may have been in retaliation for the Lincoln administration’s 1862 recognition of the Kingdom of Italy, which was hostile to the Papal States), was seized upon as proof that the Vatican supported the South. Consequently, despite that many Catholics fought for the Union, their faith was equated with support for the Confederacy. This accusation would be made repeatedly in the 1870s, such as in the cartoons of Thomas Nast, when the battles over the use of the Bible, whether the King James Version or Latin edition, in public schools occurred. President Grant, a former Know-­ Nothing, explicitly equated the struggle of 1861–­65 with the school issue. Consequently, as Kurtz notes, “anti-­Catholicism in American politics became nearly as prominent as it had been in the days of the Know-­Nothing Party.” 42 Perhaps unsurprisingly, Bismarck’s Kulturkampf received wide approval in the United States, as did the destruction of the Papal States in 1870. In response to this popular onslaught, American Catholics took steps to protect themselves from Protestant, Republican, and continued nativist interference. They opened parochial schools, established Catholic colleges and universities, and created organizations such as the Knights of Columbus and the Ancient Order of Hibernians. Yet quite possibly the most dramatic non-­German kulturkampf was the Sonderbundskrieg, the nineteenth-­century struggle that Carl Degler saw as most akin to the American Civil War.43 The Swiss Confederation was divided between Catholic and Protestant cantons. Conservative Catholics desired to improve instruction brought in Jesuit teachers. Protestants and liberals regarded the Jesuit Order as the army of the pope, among whose tasks was to undermine modern liberal states. The liberal-­minded Protestant cantons, bent on modernizing the confederation to ensure competitiveness with its neighbors, were determined to industrialize Switzerland under state protection, a process requiring constitutional changes and centralization. In this sense their program had points in common with the Republican Party and its belief in tariffs and variants of Henry Clay’s American System. The conflict between the two sides escalated in mid-­1845 over the closure of Catholic monasteries in a Protestant-­dominated canton and a failed invasion of Lucerne by Protestant 151

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militia. The perceived threat brought together the Catholic cantons to form the so-­called Sonderbund, a defensive alliance against the Protestant and liberal parts of the Swiss Confederation. This process was not entirely dissimilar to the later actions of the southern U.S. states. Not until mid-­1847 did the liberals and Protestants have the necessary majority in the Tagesatzung, the Swiss lawmaking body, to demand the disbandment of the Sonderbund. When the organization refused, civil war broke out between the two religious groups. Unlike the American Civil War, the so-­called Sonderbundskrieg was short in duration and light in casualties: after only twenty-­six days, the Sonderbund had to surrender, with fewer than a hundred men killed on both sides. A religious-­infused political challenge had failed against another religiously motivated political organization aiming to bring changes to their civic society. The Swiss Confederation adopted a new, centralizing constitution to modernize the country in the aftermath of the war. Ironically, one of their models was the pre-­1865 U.S. Constitution, itself soon to be transformed by the American Civil War. That there was so little reaction by the rest of Europe to the Sonderbundskrieg was partially owed to its brevity; in any case, the Revolutions of 1848 swiftly overshadowed it.44 The Sonderbundskrieg was not the only European conflict with religious motives. Napoleon III, now an emperor, looked for additional opportunities to increase his popularity in France and his standing among the peoples of Europe—­especially those religiously inclined. Twice the Middle East offered him the necessary openings. While Russian expansion, Ottoman decline, and growing international tensions contributed, Napoleon’s desire to take a larger role in the protection of pilgrims to the holy sites in the Levant brought on hostilities. Greek Orthodox Christians had increased their footprint in Jerusalem since the start of the century and enjoyed the financial support of Tsar­ ist Russia to maintain their pilgrimage buildings. In 1847 a star placed by the French in consideration of the biblical story was removed from the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and not replaced by the Ottoman authorities until 1852. The tsar used the opportunity to demand a Russian protectorate over all the Christian people in the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans, with French support, were unwilling to grant such an extensive infringement of its sovereignty.45 As would be the case in the nineteenth century as opposed to earlier periods, 152

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these religious factors were only part of the story. In the resulting Crimean War, two Catholic powers and a Protestant power joined with the largest Islamic empire against a Greek Orthodox power. Nevertheless, the conflict has been seen as a crusade to interpose Christian strength into the Middle East as the Ottoman Empire tottered on the verge of collapse. During the Crimean War, British, French, and Piedmont-­Sardinian armies arrived on Ottoman territory to assist in the war against Russia. Yet most of the fighting occurred in the Danubian Principalities, the Crimea, and along the border to the Caucasus, as European soldiers did not fight in the Holy Land. That situation was still to come.46 In May 1860 longstanding religious, economic, and political differences between Christian peasants and their Druze rulers and overlords culminated in fighting. During a couple of months of civil war, often called the Mount Lebanon Civil War, about 10,000 Christians were killed and around 350 of their villages and 560 churches destroyed. Incidents like the massacre at Damascus especially drew European attention. Once more the Ottoman Empire seemed unable—­or unwilling—­to protect Christians within its realm. As with the Crimean War, Napoleon III referred to his country’s role to protect Christians in the Holy Land to justify a military expedition in the region. A European congress came together and agreed that they had a moral obligation to intervene. Faced with a unified European position, the Ottomans agreed to allow European forces into Syria. By mid-­August 1860, 6,000 French soldiers arrived in Beirut, but by then the civil war was largely over, Ottoman authorities having restored order.47 Nevertheless, Napoleon’s soldiers remained in the region until June 1861, when he even asked for an extension of the mandate, giving the impression to many that he preferred not to leave at all and assume a direct French protectorate over the Levant and its Christian population. While the expedition could be seen as humanitarian in nature, Napoleon’s ulterior motives undermine such an assessment. A failed attempt at French expansion and empire building is the more accurate way of seeing these events, which were nonetheless, religiously motivated. The French were hardly alone in using religion as a justification for an imperial project. Britain’s longstanding conflict with its Irish Catholic subjects and the disastrous lack of compassion and support during the Great Famine only confirm notions about religious-­influenced conflicts. Similarly, the 153

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religious-­abolitionist-­moral-­infused arguments to fight the slave trade in the African interior provided a precursor for the dramatic expansion of European empires there in the second half of the nineteenth century.48 The most massive religious rebellion of the nineteenth century, however, was also the largest conflict of the period: the Taiping Rebellion. After the opening of China during the Opium War, missionary activities had dramatically increased. Even more, China had come under foreign influence, causing resentment among the people, especially economic exploitation and the sale of opium. The Chinese government and emperor seemed unable to address the growing problems within the country.49 Christianity had arrived as early as European explorers and merchants had developed a foothold in the region. To increase the religion’s visibility, some biblical texts had been translated into Chinese. Although most of these were of poor quality and theologically unsound, they had also been tailored to suit Chinese perceptions. Hong Rengan from Guangdong Province was born into a poor farming family. He aspired to the career of a bureaucrat but had failed the rigorous civil-­service exams twice. Having visited Guangzhou for his first test, Hong had heard a missionary preach. Interested, he received translated Christian texts. The second failure triggered a series of visionary dreams in which Hong claimed he was visited by a divine figure and emerged with a mission to end the worship of demons and idols. He wanted to not only lift the Chinese people out of their provincial and superstitious belief system, as he saw it, but also socially reform the country, calling for the end of foot binding, among other practices. Once again, religion and social reform were intertwined, albeit within a local context. Hong believed that he was the Chinese son of God, a younger brother of Jesus, and actively preached his interpretation of Christianity.50 Hong started in his own home with the destruction of Confucian and Buddhist materials. His early missionary work remained restricted to his local area, but he attracted family members and other failed civil-­service applicants to his cause. Many residents and officials were angry with the destructive element of this new movement. In 1844 Hong and his followers had to flee persecution and sought refuge at Mount Zijing in Guangxi. That province was well selected since the authorities had to deal with mountain bandits and river pirates and had little time to chase religious dissenters. By then, communal utopianism had entered the Christian message of the movement, which finally 154

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took on the name God Worshippers. Hong did return briefly to Guangzhou to study under a Southern Baptist missionary, Issachar Roberts, from the United States—­an example of the global nature of nineteenth-­century evangelicalism. After his return to Guangxi, where 2,000 converts awaited Hong, the God Worshippers continued to grow, as many rebel factions decided to join the movement to escape the authorities. This inflow of less religious-­and more economic-­minded individuals, however, diluted the movement.51 By 1851, the authorities were alarmed enough to finally eliminate the God Woshippers. As with the First Battle of Bull Run, the initial engagement resulted in a rebel victory against government forces. Hong afterward proclaimed, on January 11, 1851, the Heavenly Kingdom of Transcendent Peace. The fighting in 1851 set off a fourteen-­year-­long conflict, the Taiping Rebellion, that cost about 20 million people their lives, making it by far the bloodiest conflict of the nineteenth century. The revolt, which bore a closer resemblance to a proper civil war than did the later events in the United States—­federal officials actually called the fight against the Confederate States the War of the Rebellion, not the American Civil War—­initially appeared to have momentum, winning battles and capturing Nanjing, which Hong declared as his capital. There, he created a civil bureaucracy to oversee the many reforms he implemented in his realm. The tide, however, began to turn against the rebellion, not the least because French and British military personnel under the command of U.S. mercenary Frederick Townsend Ward—­evangelism was not the only force that was global—­assisted Chinese government forces. Hong’s failure to capture Beijing and Shanghai, where his forces encountered the Western-­supported Chinese troops, laid the foundation for the rebellion’s demise. By 1864, Chinese armies had recaptured Nanjing. This, combined with the death of Hong, ensured the Taiping Rebellion had run its course. The religiously motivated uprising against Western influence, superstition, and government incompetency—­ironically halted in part by Western influence—­had failed to bring lasting changes to China.52 Returning to the Western world, religion would continue to motivate and aggravate throughout the nineteenth century. On July 18, 1870, Pope Pius IX formally proclaimed the new dogma agreed upon by the First Vatican Council. Under the dogma of papal infallibility, the pope cannot err when defining the doctrine and morals of Roman Catholicism. A long-­established tradition 155

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of the papacy never doing wrong was enshrined in papal law. In part, this codification meant that the Catholic Church took the perceived growing assault on the faith serious and sought to counteract it. Yet it was exactly the new infallibility doctrine that led to the Kulturkampf in Germany.53 It inflamed Protestants and unbelievers alike, all of whom saw it as a return to the reactionary notion of divine right of kings—­something even few political reactionaries would accept. So, while the nineteenth century was the age of nationalism, it was also the age of religion. Indeed, nationalism and religion were frequently joined at the hip. Religious differences sparked conflict and sometimes large-­scale wars during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Even when these were not based on religion, the Almighty—­by whatever name his worshippers called him—­was inevitably conscripted into the cause. Everyone had their battle hymn, even if not necessarily of a republic. Given that the middle decades of the nineteenth century witnessed a clash between a resurgence of religion and newly emerging ideologies such as liberalism and Marxism, which challenged the role and power of religion, these developments were to be expected. Nevertheless, religion remained powerful and influential. As four individuals—­Lincoln, Palmerston, Eugénie, and Bismarck—­demonstrate, political engagement with religion was inevitable, whether from a broadly ecumenical and pragmatic perspective (as in the case of the first two) or from a more sectarian and doctrinaire approach (as with the latter pair). As leaders in the United States fought a great war and tried to invoke God to connect with the many people of faith in the country, others did likewise. Many imperial struggles and expansion projects during the period used religion. When the maritime powers went to war with Russia in 1854, religions played a significant role in escalating the tensions between Catholic France, Orthodox Russia, and the Islamic Ottoman Empire. Finally, the bloodiest of conflicts of the century, the Taiping Rebellion, crystallized around an effort not only at the modernization but also at the Christianization of China to oust the superstitious ways of its people. Whatever one’s views on the existence or lack thereof of the divine, there is no denying that religion was a powerful and ubiquitous force, for better and for worse, in the culture, politics, and conflicts of the nineteenth century.

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8 REALPOLITIK BEYOND OTTO VON BISMARCK We are too hot-­blooded, we have a preference for putting on armor that is too big for our small body; and now we’re actually supposed to utilize it. Germany is not looking to Prussia’s liberalism, but to its power; Bavaria, Württemberg, Baden may indulge liberalism, and yet no one will assign them Prussia’s role; Prussia has to coalesce and concentrate its power for the opportune moment, which has already been missed several times; Prussia’s borders, according to the Vienna Treaties [of 1814—­15], are not favorable for a healthy, vital state; it is not by speeches and majority resolutions that the great questions of the time are decided—­that was the big mistake of 1848 and 1849—­but by iron and blood. — ­O T TO V O N B I S M A R C K ,

1862

O

tto von Bismarck, in a speech before the Prussian Landtag in September 1862, represented a new political reality. He embraced a conservative nationalism that focused on the advancement of Prussia by any means necessary. Liberalism and democracy had had their chance to bring about the unification of Germany in 1848 and had failed; Prussian military power and Bismarck’s diplomatic prowess instead accomplished the deed. He was not the only new type of leader who embraced what has come to be called “realpolitik.” Among a lengthy list of individuals who embraced fully or aspects of realpolitik were Camillo Paolo Filippo Giulio Benso, Conte di Cavour; Aleksandr Mikhaylovic Gorchakov; and, at various times, Lord Palmerston. Two others should also join the list: Napoleon III and Abraham Lincoln. Each of these politicians embraced realpolitik, in one form or another,

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to advance his state’s interests. The American Civil War was part of this global rethinking of political leadership. Realpolitik is usually seen as a political system that places the need of a country ahead of any questions of morality. The origin of its underlying principles dates to Renaissance writer Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli and his work The Prince (1532). There, Machiavelli outlines the ways leaders should act: For many have imagined republics and principalities that have never been seen or known to exist. However, how men live is so different from how they should live that a ruler who does not do what is generally done, but persists in doing what ought to be done, will undermine his power rather than maintain it. If a ruler who wants always to act honourably is surrounded by many unscrupulous men his downfall is inevitable. Therefore, a ruler who wishes to maintain his power must be prepared to act immorally when this becomes necessary.1

Many politicians easily accepted the last part during the middle decades of the nineteenth century and embraced policies of questionable morality, against neighbors or their own people, for what they perceived as being in the best interests of their country. The second half of the nineteenth century was an age of new political leaders who placed the interests of their states ahead of anything else. There were, of course, precedents. In Europe Klemens Wenzel Lothar Fürst von Metternich had dominated the political landscape in central Europe, promoting a conservative form of government that aimed to prevent or retard the popular radicalism released by the French Revolution. The revolution and the decades of war that followed it motivated many European states and monarchs toward a more conservative stability. While in many cases this meant at least some concessions to liberalism and nationalism, in others it meant a reactionary response to various forms of popular radicalism. Metternich embraced a policy apparently belonging in the latter camp but only insofar as it benefited his state; his was thus at best a morally neutral position, one that many others would embrace or mimic after him.2 By the 1850s, a new group of political leaders emerged who challenged the established political order, viewed the settlement created by the Congress 158

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of Vienna as obsolete, and planned to enhance the power and prestige of their own countries, some of which were still in the making. Among the first challengers to the political order was Louis Napoleon, eventually Napoleon III. Twice in the 1830s he had challenged the Louis-­Philippe government to restore his family’s dynasty and recreate the Napoleonic Empire. His ambition to overthrow the French monarchy was not founded on returning to a republican form of government, but for him to mimic his uncle, the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon III was very different from the remaining European aristocrats and reactionaries, who lamented the demise of absolute monarchy and despised popular sentiment, as he was very willing to use the people—­ and populism—­to accomplish his projects. He was both a visionary, ahead of his time, and a reactionary, romanticizing past French glory.3 While it is debatable whether Napoleon III was the first modern populist politician—­ both Napoleon Bonaparte and Andrew Jackson, for various reasons, could be so described—­what matters is that he was one. He was not in any meaningful sense a throwback to the ancien régime. When in February 1848 the French ousted their king, a republican form of government was selected for the postmonarchy state. In the summer the constitutional convention—­Alexis de Tocqueville was a delegate—­agreed to create a presidential republic, with universal manhood suffrage for an election in November to determine the first president of the Second Republic. Louis Napoleon returned from his British exile four days after Louis-­Philippe was deposed. But the French government, fearful of a resurgence of Bonapart­ ism, asked him to leave. During the by-­election of June 4, 1848, Napoleon was elected in four different districts as representative, followed by protests in favor of Bonapartism in Paris. Once more the government banned Napoleon, who remained in London watching events unfold. In September, with the presidential election only three months away, he returned to France and entered his name in the race, in addition again winning election to the legislature. On December 10 the people of France had six candidates to select from for president, with the moderate republican Louis-­Eugène Cavaignac appearing to have the advantage. Cavaignac, however, only won 1.5 million votes to Louis Napoleon’s 5.5 million, or 74.2 percent, of ballots cast.4 It was a stunning electoral victory by any margin, and it undeniably gave the latter a mandate. Napoleon used this to outmaneuver the republican system of government 159

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under which he had won election. He had no intention of letting his ministers determine the country’s policies, desiring absolute power for himself.5 Recognizing that public popularity was a necessary step to achieving this goal, he devoted attention to cultivating the masses. He also recognized that he needed time to achieve his goals and so sought to revise the constitution to allow himself a second term in office. Here, however, he met with serious opposition and shelved the project—­temporarily. In the summer and fall 1851, Napoleon laid the foundation for a coup d’état against the republic. On December 2, the anniversary of his uncle’s victory at Austerlitz and his coronation, Napoleon had opposition leaders arrested and crushed what violent resistance occurred, especially in the provinces; in doing so he ended the Second Republic. Its death certificate was signed precisely a year later when Napoleon installed himself as emperor of the Second French Empire. Again, the ballot box was utilized—­considerably less honestly than the first time—­as the emperor received 97 percent of the vote in favor, with 2 million abstaining. That said, the evidence suggests that Napoleon did enjoy popular support. His actions thus set a new standard for politicians in Europe.6 Realpolitik had just been extended into the realm of democracy and the plebiscite. Having achieved, like his uncle, close to absolute power in France, Napoleon III attempted to emulate the first Napoleon in other ways, too. He wanted to dramatically revise Europe’s political map and dramatically enhance the power of France. This, however, meant that he had to destroy the Congress of Vienna system established after his uncle’s downfall, which limited French expansion opportunities. Napoleon sought to expand the eastern edge of his empire toward the Rhine River and the German states. In this respect, he was no different from President James Polk and his ambitions to annex Mexican territory for U.S. westward expansion. Napoleon wanted to simplify the map of Europe—­again to France’s benefit—­and eliminate the so-­called Kleinstaaterei (territorial fragmentation). This would be his principal goal during the 1850s.7 One attempt to realign the European map was a revisionist proposal. Napoleon III offered the Habsburg court the leadership role in restructuring the German states. In return, Austria, Prussia, and Russia would surrender their Polish provinces to recreate the Kingdom of Poland, with an Austrian archduke as its monarch. Austria also had to surrender Venetia to the new Italian kingdom, although compensated with one of the Danubian Principali160

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ties.8 Other versions of the plan included Austria gaining all German territory south of the Main River and Prussia receiving everything to the north, thus dramatically enlarging the two countries. Since many European princes would be left without a realm, Napoleon suggested their relocation to the Americas to “civilize and monarchize” the republican governments there.9 Regardless of what exactly he planned for the reorganization of Europe, France was always to benefit by gaining additional land and, as architect of these changes, assuming a powerbroker role among the European states. Napoleon had clearly illustrated in the war in northern Italy his willingness to use force, but his options were limited, and alone France could not make the necessary changes. His realpolitik ambitions were checked by the weakness of his country’s military and his worry of significant dissent at home. Plans of this sort usually require accomplices, and Napoleon gained assistance from another one of these new generation realpolitik disciples, the Conte di Cavour. When Pope Pius IX appealed to the Roman Catholic powers of Europe for help against the revolutionary Roman Republic, which had ousted him from Rome, Napoleon was all too ready to curry favors with his Catholic people and assist the pontifex. A French army not only liberated Rome from the revolution but also remained to protect papal authority in Rome.10 Napoleon’s involvement in the Italian situation gave rise to his support for Italian unification. In cahoots with Cavour, he challenged the Austrians for supremacy in northern Italy. He had read the situation rather well, understanding that Austrian reluctance to participate in the Crimean War and offending the Russians with a policy supporting the maritime powers had left the Habsburg dynasty isolated. Napoleon, however, had misread his own people, who did not have an interest in a war in northern Italy. While his support for the unification of large parts of northern Italy gave him Nice and Savoy as additional territories, he quickly lost control of developments in that region, undermining his policies.11 Undaunted, Napoleon continued his attempts to advance the French frontier to the Rhine and overthrow the Congress of Vienna system. He also embarked upon new adventures in places such as Mexico and Indochina. In northern Italy the French leader’s realpolitik was superseded by the realpolitik of Conte di Cavour. After having assumed power in Piedmont-­ Sardinia as prime minister in November 1852, Cavour was ready to do any161

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thing he could to make his sovereign, King Vittorio Emanuele, ruler of a unified Italy. To improve Piedmont-­Sardinia’s standing with the European powers, he dispatched soldiers to assist Great Britain, France, and the Ottoman Empire against Russia in the Crimean War. Establishing close ties with Napoleon III, Cavour willingly surrendered marginal Italian territory to France if that meant the unification of Italy. He had learned from Napoleon and used plebiscites to justify the annexation of the northern Italian principalities.12 Indeed, Cavour and his king used the Italian nationalist Garibaldi to create upheaval in the Two Sicilies and manipulated the situation to ensure the integration of that kingdom and parts of the Papal States into a virtually unified Italian nation-­state.13 The peoples of southern Italy learned the ruthlessness of realpolitik. Garibaldi tried twice during the 1860s to help integrate Rome into the Italian nation-­state by invading the sovereign realm of the pope. European pressure and threats, however, forced the new Italian nation-­state to prevent him from achieving this. As a result, Italian soldiers fired on their national hero, wounding Garibaldi.14 Worse off were the so-­called Brigands, who had long challenged the social order of the southern part of the country. There were significant linguistic, economic, and sociocultural differences between southern Italians and their counterparts in the North, and the former felt excluded from the unification progress. Although they had sided with Garibaldi, southerners received little reward. Instead, they faced the full brunt of the Italian army, determined to bring about the unification of the country. In one of history’s ironies, the firing on Fort Sumter was only weeks apart from the Northern Italian Army’s bombarding of Fort Gaeta, midway between Rome and Naples. Although forgotten now, people in the United States at the time did see parallels between the two conflicts. Secretary of State Seward conveyed his sympathy and support to the northern Italian foreign minister as his own nation dealt with its own southern insurgency.15 Following Antietam, Seward wrote to American minister George Perkins March: “The President has not recognized at all the insurrectionary movements which have recently occurred in Italy, and has proclaimed no neutrality between the state and the insurgents. We know there only the Government, the authorities and the flag of the Kingdom of Italy.” 16 As in the United States, southerners lost the fight in Italy. Further, while the exact number of Brigands killed (including in mass 162

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executions) is disputed, the minimum number is at least 8,000 and possibly as many as 250,000. As with the United States, Italy was unified by blood and iron—­not to mention guile. Cavour was what one historian has called “the most successful and authoritative parliamentarian.” 17 He was only in office for about a decade but left a permanent imprint on Italian politics. While embracing the parliamentarian system, Cavour preferred to use parliament for publicity, not to get input for policies. He hardly consulted legislators or his cabinet when making important decisions, such as involvement in the Crimean War. Even though Cavour did not violate the constitution in doing this, his actions did not create an environment fostering a parliamentary system of government. Even when violating the constitution with his secret treaty with France to hand over Nice and Savoy, he made sure to use a carefully staged plebiscite to justify his action. If he could claim the existence of a national emergency, many decisions could be implemented.18 Just like many other proponents of realpolitik, “Cavour was evidently not a man to let constitutional niceties stand in his way.” 19 One might justifiably make the same claim about Lincoln. To ensure speedy implementation of laws, Cavour used decrees on a regular basis. He allowed parliament to debate an education bill for weeks but only two days for the Treaty of Paris. Those who questioned government policies faced suspension from their jobs and often exile. Cavour even contemplated a military coup in 1849 to overthrow the liberalized political institutions in Piedmont-­Sardinia. He was cautious, however, not to push matters too far and tried to avoid open conflict. When necessary, he continued to manipulate and vacate election results for his benefit in an illegal fashion. Cavour limited the freedom of press and worked to alter the free selection of juries.20 He “liked parliament, . . . not to restrain the executive, nor to help formulate policy, but more to reinforce his own authority and perhaps also to enhance his reputation in parliamentary countries abroad.” Nevertheless, he was able to convince the king of the benefits of liberal, parliamentary government.21 Cavour’s “mild parliamentary dictatorship was a barrier against any monarchic or Garibaldian dictatorship and excluded any possibility of a radical Mazzinian republic.” 22 Just like so many others, and in contrast to his own statements, Cavour was a calculating Machiavellian.23 If Cavour was personally reluctant to admit his Machiavellian attitudes, 163

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his Prussian counterpart, Bismarck, had few such qualms. Over the course of the nineteenth century, Bismarck turned into the archetype of realpolitik. This could be seen early on, such as during the 1848 rebellion in Prussia, when he had worked to keep the Hohenzollern dynasty in power. That March Bismarck had rushed to Potsdam to protect royal interests and, if necessary, stage a military infused counterrevolution. He talked about replacing the king with another member of the royal family, but this plan never came to fruition. When faced with the revolutionary tide and the king on the defensive, however, even Bismarck had to temporarily accept a liberalization of the Prussian state, which reinvigorated him to defend monarchical principles in the future.24 For the next decade, Bismarck occupied lesser political offices, representing Prussia in both Frankfurt and Saint Petersburg. Bismarck’s moment of glory came when, in 1862, the Prussian king Wilhelm I called upon him to solve a constitutional crisis in Prussia. Wanting to increase the military and requiring more taxes to fund it, the Prussian government faced a legislature unwilling to grant tax increases without constitutional reforms. With the Abgeordnetenhaus voting in favor of a new budget and the Herrenhaus opposing, Bismarck determined to rule without a budget. The government continued to collect the already permitted taxes and spent them on the military. Since the Landtag could not stop the executive from collecting taxes, Bismarck could do as he pleased. As he bluntly observed: “If a compromise cannot be arrived at and a conflict arises then the conflict becomes a question of power. Whoever has the power, then acts according to his opinion.” 25 This situation, where the constitution did not provide an answer—­ or was silent about—­an issue became the Lückentheorie, which allowed the executive to circumvent the constitution and act as it saw best.26 Unlike with Louis Napoleon, democracy did not necessarily work in Bismarck’s favor. Wanting to work with a Landtag comprising different representatives, he dissolved the chamber and called for a reelection, yet every time he did so, the same antimilitary reform majority returned.27 Like the French leader, Bismarck introduced a period of dictatorship, except without the plebiscite.28 Bismarck’s constitutional circumventions did not stop with the financial interests of the executive. In June 1863, having suffered a foreign policy disaster with the Polish Insurrection and the Alvensleben Convention, Bismarck looked to limit the freedom of the press, which increasingly supported the op164

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position and asked awkward questions about government policy.29 He asked the king to order the necessary suppression, hoping that suppressing the press during the election would help return a favorable majority. Not achieving the desired results, the order ended after five months. Much to the appreciation of the Prussian people, the crown prince opposed this infringement and violation of constitutional rights.30 Yet Bismarck’s violation of the constitution and the legislative prerogatives were all intended to strengthen the Prussian state for the upcoming struggle for supremacy among the German princes. First and foremost, as with Cavour, Bismarck’s goal was to increase Prussian power and prestige among the German states. Unlike the Italian, Bismarck was less fearful of open conflict to unify Germany. Having overstepped during the Polish Insurrection, he nevertheless had gained the support of Russia. When the Danish king once more escalated the Schleswig-­Holstein question, Bismarck got the Austrians involved. Lord Clarendon, the British foreign secretary, commented bluntly on how Bismarck had involved the Habsburgs in a conflict without benefits for Austria: “Je ne veux plus jamais rien avoir à faire avec cet homme sans foi ni loi qui s’appelle M. de Bismarck, ni celui qui est son nègre M. de Rechberg” (I never want to have anything to do with this man without faith or law known as Mr. Bismarck, nor the one who is his Negro [the Austrian prime minister] Mr. de Rechberg); Clarendon thus implied that de Rechberg was Bismarck’s slave.31 After the defeat of Denmark and the occupation of Schleswig by Prussia and Holstein by Austria, Bismarck waited for an opportunity to turn on his most recent allies. He reached out diplomatically to the Italians and Russians to ensure that during such a war, Austria would remain isolated. He also benefited from its isolated position in Holstein, making it difficult to get reinforcements to the small duchy on the other side of the German states. Even the king of Prussia worried that Bismarck intended to dethrone a German prince, while the crown prince questioned his policy of fraternal war. The minister president outmaneuvered both of their concerns. By mid-­June 1866, Austria and Prussia, with their respective German allies, were at war to settle the Schleswig-­Holstein and German questions once and for all. Bismarck had played a high-­stakes poker game and won. A Prussian general supposedly told Bismarck at the time, “Excellency, you are now a great man. But if the Crown Prince had come too late you would now be the greatest villain,” referring to the Battle of Königsgrätz, where the crown 165

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prince of Prussia arrived with his command in time to tip the scale of battle.32 But Bismarck was now Prussia’s hero, and he concluded the unification of Germany with the Franco-­German War of 1870–­71, when he again relied on his conniving use of diplomacy to corner the French emperor into war over the candidacy of a member of the Hohenzollern-­Sigmaringen family to the Spanish throne.33 Even with the accomplishment of German unification, Bismarck still faced domestic political opposition. Military victories, however, strengthened his hand. The opposing liberals increasingly occupied an untenable position and remained divided enough to preclude a firm and unified resistance to Bismarck.34 In the lead-­up to the war with Austria, Bismarck intensified his attack on constitutional freedoms by undermining the freedom of speech in parliamentary debates. Working with the minister of justice, he was able to get a member of the Abgeordnetenhaus indicted for slander. Eduard Simson, later president of the Reichsgericht, remarked: “The present Government cannot rule with a free press; they cannot govern without improperly influencing the judges; they cannot govern with a parliament in which speech is free. But how they can squander irreplaceable hundredweights of Prussia’s future for one grain of the moment, only to keep things going for a short while,—­that is incomprehensible for my poor brain.” 35 Events took a more serious turn after Prussia defeated Austria and Bismarck accomplished the partial unification of Germany with the North German Bund: the Landtag debated an indemnity bill to absolve the government of all blame for its constitutional infringements. Even weakened, the liberals were still a danger to Bismarck, and he increasingly felt the need for at least some of their support in the long term. Despite grave objections, the indemnity bill was a necessity that divided the liberal party. Many did not wish to grant Bismarck a pass for his violations of the constitutional rights of parliament because he had brought about the unification of Germany. Others willingly overlooked these constitutional violations to celebrate the German nation-­state. The newly formed National Liberal Party became the backbone for Bismarck’s policies in the coming decade.36 His domestic political conflicts continued, frequently singling out enemies of the state and challenging constitutional rights for his own political advancement. Nobody characterized realpolitik as completely as Bismarck during the nineteenth century. 166

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Historians have largely agreed on Cavour and Bismarck being proponents of realpolitik during the nineteenth century. Depending on the interpretation favored, Napoleon III can be classified as an exponent of realpolitik as well. So, too, to an extent can Lord Palmerston, who served as foreign secretary and prime minister of the United Kingdom. With respect to the United States, where do American politicians in general fit, particularly Lincoln? In the first place, it is impossible to deny that the United States followed, at times, a foreign policy that can be accurately described as realpolitik. For example, Manifest Destiny and Polk’s war against Mexico very much follow a realpolitik approach. Polk took great care to first escalate and then resolve the dispute over the Oregon Territory with Great Britain, even going so far as to abandon his own party’s proclamation of “Fifty-­Four Forty or Fight!” thus ensuring, at a minimum, British noninterference with respect to Mexico. He then goaded the Mexicans into war, ostensibly to protect U.S. territory. Polk here behaved very much like Bismarck later did with respect to the Danes. Indeed, so ruthless was Polk’s campaign against Mexico that Grant would later describe the subsequent war as “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation,” adding, “it was an instance of a republic following the bad example of European monarchies, in not considering justice in their desire to acquire additional territory.” 37 Grant was writing this in later years, but the reality remains that when it came to acquiring territory throughout the nineteenth century, the United States behaved very much in the manner of the “European monarchies.” As with Bismarck’s activities, Polk’s Mexican adventure certainly faced political opposition. One of the president’s opponents in Congress was Lincoln, although he nonetheless voted in favor of supplying the U.S. military with the necessary materials to win the war. But where Lincoln fits on the realpolitik scale still divides historians. Some of the criticism of the sixteenth president’s behavior with respect to civil liberties and other related issues have merit. In many respects Lincoln very closely resembled Napoleon III, Cavour, and Bismarck: his overriding goal was to protect and enhance his nation and, like them, he was not above Machiavellian tactics to achieve this. His situation was different in that his entire time in office was consumed by a civil conflict at home, which he needed to win by any means, even if they were ethically questionable. 167

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Even though Maryland and Virginia did not secede with the first seven slave states, there were many sympathizers for secession in both. Because of the danger posed by secessionists, Lincoln secretly passed through Baltimore on his way to Washington, D.C., in April 1861. The precaution was not misplaced. After the firing on Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor, Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers, precipitating the secession of Virginia. On April 17 the Sixth Massachusetts passed through Baltimore, where a mob bombarded the troops with rocks, resulting in a firefight that left several residents and soldiers dead. After the incident, Confederate sympathizers in the city destroyed bridges and telegraph wires. Lincoln was unprepared for a standoff from his weakened position but kept a close eye on events in Maryland. Eventually, he had some members of the state’s legislature arrested. Next, he ordered General in Chief Winfield Scott to suspend the writ of habeas corpus along the military communications line with Philadelphia. Scott quickly used this authority and arrested John Merryman for recruiting for the Confederacy. When Merry­man sued the federal government, Supreme Court Justice Roger B. Taney overturned Lincoln’s order on the grounds that only Congress had the power to suspend the writ of habeas corpus.38 Despite Taney’s judgment, during the summer session of Congress, Lincoln once more asserted his right to suspend the writ of habeas corpus and asked Attorney General Edward Bates to provide an opinion. The guidance predictably asserted that the president had the right to suspend habeas corpus. Strongly believing that his office gave him this power, Lincoln again asserted his right by further suspending it between Philadelphia and New York. On September 24, 1862, the president extended the suspension of habeas corpus and imposed martial law: All Rebels and Insurgents, their aiders and abettors within the United States, and all persons discouraging volunteer enlistments, resisting militia drafts, or guilty of any disloyal practice, affording aid and comfort to Rebels against the authority of the United States, shall be subject to martial law and liable to trial and punishment by Courts Martial or Military Commission. . . . [T]he Writ of Habeas Corpus is suspended in respect to all persons arrested, or . . . imprisoned in any fort, camp, arsenal, military prison, or other place of con-

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finement by any military authority or by the sentence of any Court Martial or Military Commission.39

The proclamation was broad and the act of a Machiavellian politician willing to do anything to deal with a domestic rebellion. This, as one historian notes, “had resulted in hundreds of cases of violations of civil liberties, when civilians were subjected to arbitrary and quite often unreasonable arrests.” 40 But “hundreds” is a severe underestimate. Probably at least 14,000 persons—­some historians put the number closer to 38,000—­could legitimately be classified as political prisoners in the Union during the war, excluding Confederate prisoners of war.41 Despite Taney’s ruling, it was not until March 3, 1863, that Congress passed legislation suspending the writ.42 Lincoln had effectively ignored the courts, or at the very least circumvented them, not unlike Bismarck ignoring the Prussian Landtag during the constitutional crisis. While Lincoln faced problems with the writ of habeas corpus, he also suppressed newspapers that criticized him or his war efforts. This applied not only to those sympathetic to the Confederacy but also to those fully supporting the war effort but nonetheless criticizing Lincoln’s administration for specific policies, which could afterward find themselves in trouble. That said, it was Lincoln’s Democratic opponents who were most likely to find themselves in the line of fire. As David W. Bulla points out, “in the first two years of the war, the suppression and/or intimidation of the Democratic press in the North proceeded with little restraint.” 43 Among the several methods to suppress the press were telegraphic censorship; orders to silence editors from Union officers; the arrest of editors by U.S. marshals; the postmaster general’s banning of journals from the mail; the military arrest of reporters; mob violence, often by soldiers ransacking printing offices; campaigns to reduce advertising revenue; and straightforward intimidation by individuals or groups of civilians. Throughout the conflict, at least 300 newspapers were shut down on either temporary or permanent grounds.44 Missouri, as a contested border state, was particularly hard hit by this censorship, with some 55 of its 148 newspapers facing suppression or intimidation—­ some 37 percent. Like his predecessor in command in Missouri, Major General Henry Halleck had ordered the provost marshals to maintain a close

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watch over the material printed in local newspapers. He even ordered papers from outlying towns to provide copies for approval; if they refused, then they could face suppression. Despite the looming threats, newspapers continued to carry critical pieces on Lincoln, the administration, and the military. In contrast to habeas corpus and Bismarck’s assault on the press, Lincoln never developed a coherent policy or set of guidelines for his officers to follow regarding journalists.45 A group of Missourians wrote the president voicing their concerns about his infringements on freedom of speech and press: We solemnly protest against the attempt of the military authorities to violate a vital principle of Republicanism, by interfering with the freedom of speech of citizens who have proven their true loyalty by the ready sacrifice of blood and treasure; that in the language of the Constitution even “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances”; and we deny the correctness of the proposition that those who support the President must support all “his appointed agents” and are forbidden to criticize their acts.46

That noted, there is evidence that Lincoln moderated his view on press suppression as the war continued. Nor was he willing to give his officers an entirely free rein in the matter, as his written instructions of October 1, 1863, to Major General John M. Schofield in Missouri indicate: “You will only arrest individuals and suppress assemblies or newspapers when they may be working palpable injury to the military in your charge, and in no other case will you interfere with the expression of opinion in any form or allow it to be interfered with violently by others.” 47 The press also found itself under reduced pressure as the war turned against the Confederacy. Yet Lincoln’s most notorious attempt to silence political opposition came with the Clement Vallandigham incident. The Ohio representative had long spoken out for compromise and peaceful secession. Even fellow congressmen accused Vallandigham of supporting the Confederacy by opposing all appropriation bills to provide money to the military. By early 1863, the Democrat was outspoken in his support for separation and opposition to the new emancipation policy of the Union. In the early morning hours of May 5, 1863, a 170

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company of Union soldiers arrested Vallandigham at his residence in Dayton, Ohio. There was significant indignation over this among the city’s Democrats, and only the timely arrival of additional troops prevented a riot. Charged with violation of General Orders No. 38, which allowed for the prosecution for treason of anybody who supported the enemy, Vallandigham was tried before a military tribunal since no civil or criminal court would convict him. The officers found the accused guilty. Despite all the controversy surrounding the arrest and conviction, the Supreme Court upheld that it could not issue a writ of habeas corpus to a military commission. (After the war, however, the court ruled to the contrary in a similar case, indicating that the war and the court’s weakness may have influenced its support for Lincoln’s wartime policies.) On May 19, 1863, Lincoln ordered Vallandigham deported to the Confederacy. To the South, however, Vallandigham was an alien and treated as such. Ultimately, the now-­former Ohio representative headed for where Union draft dodgers, escaped Confederate prisoners of war, and other individuals wanted by the federal government went—­to Canada. While there, Ohio’s Democratic Party nominated Vallandigham for governor; he ran his campaign from Windsor, Canada, which had granted him political asylum.48 Lincoln’s actions have been debated by historians ever since, and they were fiercely contested at the time—­and not simply by opponents of the Union war effort. Indeed, even Lincoln’s political allies thought he had overreached. Orville Hickman Browning, for example, believed the arrests were “illegal and arbitrary, and did more harm than good, weakening instead of strengthening the government.” 49 Similar criticism came from those sympathetic to the North abroad. The London Spectator, a staunch opponent of the Confederacy and slavery, reported of Vallandigham’s treatment, “the mode of his punishment suggests that courts-­martials have been adopted as part of the machinery of government; that the President holds a military sentence on a civilian for scurrilous chatter to be a legal and just proceeding.” 50 The previous year the British journal had also criticized Lincoln for “shutting up suspected people who could never have done anybody any harm.” 51 As with other publications, it pointed to the fact that vocal opponents of the Crimean War in Britain had been free to express their dissent as the fighting raged. As with other political and military events of the period, the American Civil War raised issues pertaining to freedom of the press and the rights of political opponents. 171

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Lincoln was certainly more ruthless than his Confederate counterpart, Jefferson Davis. One can see this in the commutation of death sentences handed down by military courts for desertion: Davis pardoned nearly every case that crossed his desk; Lincoln was considerably less merciful. Indeed, if historian David Herbert Donald is correct, not only was the Confederacy more willing to tolerate dissent, but its unwillingness to crush it in the manner of Lincoln also may be cited as at least one cause of its defeat.52 Ruthlessness paid dividends for Lincoln as surely as it did his contemporaries. Indeed, on the question of emancipation itself, Lincoln could stand accused of at least partially practicing realpolitik. Certainly, he avoided as long as possible directly tackling the issue that had caused the American Civil War, in large part because he did not want to alienate either loyal slave-­owning border states or the, as he believed, many loyal southerners who nonetheless owned slaves. In some respects, Lincoln was pushed toward emancipation by Congress, which issued the confiscation acts well before his Emancipation Proclamation. As for the proclamation itself, as Lincoln’s opponents at home and abroad noted, it did not apply to slaves in states loyal to the Union.53 Yet it was not only the president’s opponents who were unimpressed. As the London Spectator noted, “The principle asserted is not that a human being cannot justly own another, but that he cannot own him unless he is loyal to the United States.” 54 Further, there was undeniably a realpolitik aspect to the Emancipation Proclamation in that Lincoln issued it believing it would discourage any foreign intervention in the war by giving the Union a moral cause. Even if the proclamation, contrary to what is so often claimed, in the end probably had little or no effect on any of the powers’ views on intervention, the intent was undeniably there. Machiavellian policies and realpolitik are usually seen as the hallmarks of Bismarck’s and Cavour’s policies, especially with respect to their unification attempts of their respective nation-­states. Yet they were hardly alone as hardheaded practitioners of realpolitik. Others were just as committed in the new age of nationalism to advance the self-­interest—­perceived or real—­of their country. Many politicians learned from Napoleon III and his uses of public opinion, influencing the people, and plebiscite referendums of policies, creating a certain dependence of government on the people. Public opinion, however, could not provide a solution to everything. Indeed, sometimes it 172

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needed directing or, when necessary, coercion. Nationalist leaders like Cavour and Bismarck were willing to undermine constitutional rights or ignore them entirely to accomplish their domestic and foreign policy goals. Similarly, Lincoln convinced himself that the rebellion gave the presidency extensive powers to suppress domestic dissent. As for the argument that Lincoln did so in the name of liberty and not simply national interest, one is reminded of Bismarck’s remark about how politicians demanded in the name of Europe that which they dared not ask for themselves. Lincoln was acting in the interests of his nation as he saw them—­so were all the others.

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9 IMPERIAL FRONTIERS AND INDIGENOUS PEOPLES The withdrawal of that Expedition and the reabandonment of that People & Country to the forces of the Confederate States leaves them in a position frought with distress, danger and ruin! What the Cherokee People now desire is ample Military Protection for life and property; a recognition by the Govt. of the obligations of existing Treaties and a willingness and determination to carry out the policy indicated by your Excellency of enforcing the Laws and extending to those who are loyal all the protection in your power. —­J O H N R O S S

E

to Abraham Lincoln, September 16, 1862

mpires and imperialism have a history far beyond the scope of this work—­or virtually any other—­to cover comprehensively. The earliest examples of recorded history originate with empires of some form or another. With respect to the modern era, although European imperialism has generally been equated with racial supremacy, the fact remains that many Europeans themselves were subjects of empires of one form or another headed by fellow Europeans—­a point chapter 2 makes clear. To an extent, the United States itself was an imperial project. British foreign secretary Lord John Russell’s characterization on October 14, 1862, of the Union’s and Confederacy’s respective causes as “the one for empire and the other for independence” is an argument that has never been entirely rebutted, either by Charles Sumner’s enraged response or more sober scholarship since.1 Nonetheless, imperialism in the nineteenth century and earlier was largely carried out by Europeans or European settler societies and was broadly racial and racist in outlook and approach, although this was not always a constant factor either. 174

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As hundreds of thousands of Union and Confederate soldiers slaughtered each other on the battlefields, Native Americans became pawns in the American Civil War. Equally, that war witnessed the consolidation of the country’s rapid westward expansion. Considering the Civil War had started over the issue of the westward expansion of slavery, the West contributed greatly to the conflict’s origins and witnessed major events during the fighting. The imperial notion of Manifest Destiny, as embraced during its existence in the late 1840s and early 1850s, called for the expansion of the United States across the North American continent—­even beyond that, according to many of its supporters. Contrary to what is sometimes asserted, the notion of frontier is not unique to the United States. Many regions around the world have experienced similar patterns of expansion, usually defended as the advancement of civilization, with the consequent displacement or massacre of Indigenous peoples or the suppression of linguistic, racial, ethnic, or religious minorities seen as impediments. The literature of various nations reflects this phenomenon. For example, it is difficult to read Leo Tolstoy’s novella Hadji Murat (1912; 1917), which uses Russia’s expansion into the Caucasus as its backdrop, without detecting echoes of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales series (1823–­41).2 Cooper himself, meanwhile, was in debt to Sir Walter Scott’s novels set in the frontier of the Scottish Highlands. These are three very different writers utilizing very different locations set in different times, yet their works concern the question of the frontier and the consequences of cultural and national collisions. In the 1890s Frederick Jackson Turner established a mainstay of U.S. history: the Frontier Thesis.3 To Turner, the frontier in North America was not equivalent to a European boundary line between two states but one demarking “the meeting point between savagery and civilization.” This frontier provided a constant and frequent revitalization of the country. By expanding and pushing it, the identity of the country grew and matured on a regular basis. According to Turner: “The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonist.” 4 His thesis remains controversial to say the least, especially as it essentially glorifies the westward expansion of a racially conscious white civilization and regards Indigenous peoples as simply an obstacle to progress. As one scholar notes, it implies a “nationalistic and often racist” understanding of a region better perceived 175

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through a prism of “invasion, conquest, colonization, [and] exploitation.” 5 Further, Turner’s argument that the frontier made Americans fundamentally different from Europeans ignores the realities of the contemporaneous European expansion, including one very close to the United States: the British westward expansion and development of present-­day Canada.6 Indeed, historians have long made comparisons between nineteenth-­ century U.S. and British expansionism and the frontier.7 Even expressions in American and British English refer to this: the American term “Indian country” is synonymous with the British phrase “bandit country” (the latter used to describe places as far apart as India and Ireland). Britain, of course, was merely one other nation with expanding frontiers—­Spain and France had been doing so even earlier. Indeed, Turner’s foreign contemporaries questioned the originality of his thesis from the beginning. Briton James Bryce believed Turner had borrowed his ideas from German nationalists, essentially replacing the “Teutonic forests” with the North American ones.8 It was unsurprising, therefore, that Turner’s contemporaries had few problems applying the notion of the frontier to parts of the globe beyond North America. The United States had been an expansionist power from the very beginning. Originally, this collection of British colonies represented the frontier of a European imperial power. The War of Independence was in part initiated by the British government’s attempts to slow or even halt further westward expansion into Native American territory. After independence, the young United States purchased the Louisiana Territory, annexed part of Florida, and attempted to annex British North America during the War of 1812—­the last being one of its few failures. Expansionism then directed itself toward Mexican territory, starting with Texas, as propagandists in the United States developed arguments to increase the popularity of the impending conflict with its southwestern neighbor. In 1845 John O’Sullivan explained to his readers about “the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” Furthermore, he already indicated that the annexation of Texas was not the end, but only the start of expansion. California’s “right to independence will be the natural right of self-­government belonging to any community strong enough to maintain it—­distinct in position, origin and character, and free from any mutual obligations of membership of a common political body, binding it to 176

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others by the duty of loyalty and compact of public faith.” 9 The United States was ordained to expand across North America, accomplished as a result of the war with Mexico, but which then raised the specter of the expansion of slavery, eventually causing the American Civil War. Among contemporary similarities to the American experience was British expansionism in their part of North America, present-­day Canada, involving a people whose situation was not entirely unlike that of the Mexicans or the Native Americans: the Métis. Shortly after the conclusion of the American Civil War and Canadian Confederation, in the Red River Colony (now present-­day Manitoba) the Métis, a French-­speaking people whose origins were part European (mostly French) and part Indigenous and who were primarily Roman Catholic, faced aggressive Protestant and English-­speaking settlers entering their territory. Indeed, the similarities between their situation and that of the Mexicans in California after the Mexican-­American War are obvious. With a new, hostile, English-­speaking governor, William McDougall, appointed in 1869 by the newly formed Canadian government, the Métis and their leader, Louis Riel, established a provisional government that blocked McDougall’s entry into the colony. This provisional authority also arrested several English-­speaking, Protestant, and pro-­Canadian/British settlers, including one Thomas Scott, who had threatened to kill Riel. Scott was subsequently executed by the insurgent government following an illegal trial of dubious impartiality. Despite this and the fact that Riel was a rebel, the Canadian government nonetheless decided to negotiate with the Métis. After winning several key concessions, including the provision of French and Catholic schools for the Métis, the colony entered Canadian Confederation as Manitoba. The velvet glove, however, contained a mailed fist: the Canadian government sent troops into the new province to enforce federal authority. Riel, facing demands he be charged with Scott’s murder and failing to obtain a pardon, decided to decamp to the United States. The Red River Rebellion was over.10 Both Riel and the Métis, however, were not finished. In 1884 the Métis rebelled against the Canadian government again, this time in Saskatchewan in the North-­West Rebellion. Riel was called upon to lead the uprising, given his partial success in Manitoba. This time, however, the federal government was in no mood to compromise or tolerate any challenge to its authority. Taking advantage of the recently built, if not entirely complete, Canadian Pacific 177

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Railway (which had not existed during the earlier Red River Rebellion), the government sent thousands of troops and militia to suppress the revolt. Large crowds in eastern Canadian cities cheered on the embarkment of the soldiers, who were able to defeat the rebellion despite some initial, impressive Métis victories such as the Battle of Fish Creek (also known as the Battle of Tourond’s Coulee) on April 24, 1885, when two hundred rebels defeated a nine-­ hundred-­strong government force. Strength of numbers, however, was not the only reason for the eventual defeat of the Métis—­political divisions were also responsible. Part of the problem was Riel himself, who had become erratic, one hostile historian noting that “his megalomania had grown greater than ever. His ungovernable rages, delusions of grandeur, messianic claims, and dictatorial impulses had all become more extreme.” 11 Riel became increasingly antagonistic toward the Catholic Church, which alienated significant numbers of the Métis. Further, unlike Red River, the rebellion’s supporters initially included both English-­speaking Métis and Canadian settlers, neither of whom trusted Riel and were disinclined to accept his leadership. Surrendering on May 15, he was tried for treason in Regina. As with John Brown in the United States, an individual with whom he shared more than a few personality traits, including a messianic self-­belief combined with a peculiar religious fervor, Riel rejected any attempt by his defense to plead insanity. With that, the verdict was never in doubt. The jury, consisting entirely of Anglo settlers, found him guilty as charged, one juror later admitting that he and the others also considered the murder of Thomas Scott in their deliberations. That said, the jury also recommended Riel be shown mercy, something he had denied Scott. The judge and more importantly, the federal government, ignored the recommendation, however, and Riel was hanged on November 16, 1885.12 Riel was a rebel but not a secessionist. He was not trying to create a separate nation for the Métis, but rather wanted to secure their rights within the Dominion of Canada. At the same time, he represented, or came to represent, a fundamental divide in Canadian society, just as the reaction to Brown in the United States often split along sectional lines. For many French Canadians, Riel was a hero who had stood up for both Catholicism and French speakers against the English-­speaking, Protestant majority. They never forgave the Conservative administration of Sir John A. Macdonald for executing Riel, long remembering and resenting the prime minister’s alleged statement, 178

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“He shall die though every dog in Quebec bark in his favour.” 13 Yet Macdonald spoke for many, if not most, English-­speaking, Protestant Canadians: Riel was a rebel and a murderer who richly deserved his fate. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s comment about Brown—­“No man was ever more justly hanged”—­in their eyes applied to Riel. Even today he remains a controversial and divisive figure in Canadian history. He was, at various times, a Canadian founder, an Indigenous anticolonial rebel, a proponent of Western sovereignty, a messianic prophet, a statesman, and to some a lunatic and homicidal felon. Riel and his rebellions represent numerous struggles of the nineteenth century, including over nationalism, ethnicity, race, minority rights, and religion. Fundamentally, whatever one’s opinion of the man, the Métis had legitimate grievances and were a subjected minority who had the misfortune to be dominated by a more powerful imperial authority.14 Thus, although the Americans may have coined the term “Manifest Destiny,” the idea underpinning it was familiar to many others. In Eurasia the Russian Empire had for over a century marched eastward toward the Pacific Ocean, just like the United States did in a westward direction. The Russians had initially searched for fur-­trade opportunities and, despite being treated as barbarians by the Chinese, had developed strong trade relations with their numerous neighbors. The opening of China to Western trade through the First Opium War and the growing tensions between the European powers and Russia, however, indicated that strengthening the eastern provinces was necessary. Therefore, Russia desired an adjustment of its border with China to use the Amur Valley as a trade and transportation artery deep into the Siberian hinterland. The acquisition finally materialized during the Second Opium (or Arrow) War in the late 1850s.15 Perry McDonough Collins was the first U.S. representative to the Russian outposts in Siberia, establishing a consulate in the Amur Valley. Being among California’s earliest politicians after admission to the Union, Collins translated those views and perspectives into Russia’s Far Eastern Province. He assumed that the trade interests in the region could be “half-­a-­million dollars.” Collins even suggested the construction of a telegraph line from the United States to Siberia to compete with the trans-­Atlantic cable.16 During his voyage on the Amur River, he observed the similarities and potentials compared to his homeland: “The scenery is picturesque, and nothing is wanting but an occa179

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sional steamboat puffing along, with more cultivation, scattered farm-­houses, and pretty villages, to give it a strong resemblance to some portions of the Upper Mississippi.” 17 There were many who considered that the possibilities of Siberia and especially of the Amur Valley compared to those of the Mississippi Valley. Furthermore, Russians assumed that just as early fur traders had opened North America, fur traders now could open Siberia. With their own Mississippi, could Russia achieve something akin to what the Americans had?18 Just as settlers in the United States had tamed a perceived virgin wilderness, to use Turner’s words, so, too, could Russians civilize Siberia.19 Collins was not alone in those views. Alexander Herzen wrote: “The dead hand of the Russian government . . . cannot give the vital impetus that would carry Siberia forward with American rapidity. We shall see what will happen when the mouths of the Amur are opened for navigation and America meets Siberia near China. I said long ago that the Pacific Ocean is the Mediterranean of the future.” 20 Russia had desired to exploit the Amur Valley to expand its trade relations with the Pacific Rim region, including Australia, China, and Southeast Asia.21 It even contemplated a “free-­trade zone” to increase commerce.22 Despite these high hopes, the Amur Valley turned out to be a disappointment. The upper course of the river was especially shallow and only permitted flat-­bottom boats to navigate it. As a result, deep-­draft oceangoing vessels could not reach far inland. The lack of water in the summer months made navigation of the entire river difficult. Shipping companies charged exorbitant rates to move goods and people along the Amur. Furthermore, between October and April nothing moved at all since the river was typically frozen under a deep ice sheet. With its banks heavily forested, there was no room for transportation lines along the sides of the river. The extreme climate of the region included cyclonic storms in the summer months, which could destroy wooden vessels.23 Yet as the United States experienced westward expansion, so Russia pushed its frontier eastward to gain access to the valuable Pacific and China trade. Both nations were determined to be Pacific powers. Much to the concern of the British in India, the Russians also had their eyes set on the Central Asian steppes and the small principalities of the region. The “Great Game,” as imperial expansion would be famously called in the late nineteenth century, had started as early as the 1830s. The Islamic 180

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khanates at Khiva, Bokhara, and Khokand drew the tsar’s attention and British alarm. The Russian advance was swift and steady. Historian Peter Hopkirk writes, “Every week seemed to bring news that the hard-­riding Cossacks, who always spearheaded each advance, were getting closer and closer to India’s ill-­guarded frontiers.” By 1865, Tashkent was under Russian rule, three years on and Samarkand and Bokhara had fallen, until by the mid-­1870s, the tsar’s banner flew over Khiva as well.24 The official Russian reasoning for this push into Central Asia was remarkably akin to why U.S. troops relentlessly pursued Native Americans. Hugo Stumm, who chronicled the assault against Khiva in 1873, wrote: Such restless inclinations on the part of her subjects and their proneness to all possible disorder, rebellions, and acts of plunder were in the highest degree inconvenient to Russia, and thus the entire administrative energy of the General Government of Orenburg has been directed, within the last ten years, to confining the migratory impulses of the nomads within fixed and not too expanded limits, and to making them in actual fact tributary within the widest possible compass. It is unquestionable that these very costly efforts would have been attended with greater results at an earlier date had it not been for the ancient traditional enmity of Khiva, who, lurking like a spider in her web, had continually striven, even after the conclusion of peace in 1842, to paralyse Russian influence in the steppes east and west of the Sea of Aral, and more particularly to incite the Kirghiz frequenting the Ust-­Yurt, the Mangischlak Peninsula, and the steppes on the Emba to perpetual rebellion and raids upon Russian territory.25

Few generals in the United States involved in fighting Native Americans would have phrased this any differently, aside from the names. Indeed, Philip Sheridan’s alleged statement, “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead” (popularized as “the only good Indian is a dead Indian”), would have struck the Russians as entirely unremarkable.26 Most frontier conflicts were between civilization and barbarity to nineteenth-­century thinkers. The Pacific region was already well connected by the time of the American Civil War. San Francisco had become one of the country’s largest ports by the middle of the conflict. Commodities traveled from San Francisco all 181

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along the coast of the Americas, from Chile and Peru up to British Columbia. Furthermore, ships traversed the Pacific to Australia, Japan, China, and many other lands.27 Along these lines of transportation, immigrants came to the United States. The California gold rush had drawn people from all over the world, including French prostitutes, Peruvian miners, disillusioned Australian gold seekers, and many Chinese fortune seekers.28 Even on the eve of the Civil War and during the conflict, precious metals continued to draw people westward. In the summer of 1858, prospectors found gold in the Pike’s Peak region of what at the time was Kansas Territory. Fifty-­ Niners flocked to the region using the slogan “Pike’s Peak or Bust!” Attracting about 100,000 new settlers to the region, the gold rush put Colorado on the map and allowed for the creation of the Denver mint.29 Just as Americans grew concerned about the large numbers of foreigners entering, so, too, did the Boers in South Africa, faced with the so-­called “Uitlanders” (“outlanders” or “foreigners”) in their goldfields. The gold rush and desire for access to mineral fields of California, Nevada, and Colorado prompted the disastrous Confederate invasion of New Mexico in 1862.30 Similar to how diamond and gold interests contributed to the later, equally abortive were the 1895 Jameson Raid and the Second Anglo-­Boer War of 1899–­1902.31 These issues were reflected throughout the globe, however, as anti-­Chinese riots took place in Australia’s goldfields in 1860–­61 in the so-­called Lambing Flat riots.32 Similar assaults on Chinese took place in the American West during the Civil War and Reconstruction eras, with the lynching of eighteen Chinese Americans in Los Angeles in October 1871 being one of the worst cases, something historians have not fully tackled as they consider a national racial Reconstruction process.33 Precious metals, however, were not necessarily the main cause of conflicts. The Great Plains had changed dramatically since the days of Lewis and Clark’s expedition. Having dominated the southern plains for much of the colonial period, the Comanche were in sharp decline by the nineteenth century.34 The creation of Indian Territory and the arrival of tribes from the eastern side of the Mississippi especially caused conflicts. The northern plains were undergoing change as well. The arrival of white settlers in the upper sections of the Mississippi, the creation of Iowa and Minnesota, plus the constant flow of people to the West Coast territories had uprooted tribes.35

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The U.S. government had a long history of broken treaties with Native Americans to obtain more and more land. In 1851 the Dakota handed over large amounts of land in Minnesota Territory for promised money and materials. But the compensation and annuity payments were slow or entirely failed to arrive, increasing the tension between the tribe and the settlers and their government. With the continued encroachment of white settlers and the interruption of the Native hunting habits, the Dakotas’ animosity grew. Without food or payment, antagonism by the summer of 1862 reached a boiling point.36 On August 17, 1862, a couple of groups of Dakota rose in rebellion and attacked white settlements in the Minnesota River valley. Just as Robert E. Lee’s rebel army moved off the battlefield at Second Manassas and into Maryland for its next showdown with the Army of the Potomac at Sharpsburg, the Dakota burned homes and farms, killed settlers, and forced Minnesota volunteer troops to devote their attention to fighting Native people. Faced with a devastating assault on the frontier, Lincoln had to act. He created the new Department of the Northwest under the command of the disgraced Major General John Pope to oversee the punitive mission against the Dakota. Pope declared: “It is my purpose to utterly exterminate the Sioux. . . . They are to be treated as maniacs or wild beasts, and by no means as people with whom treaties or compromise can be made.” Still, the Dakota survived. By the end of September, however, hundreds of them were incarcerated and swiftly tried before military tribunals, with some three hundred sentenced to death. After Lincoln reduced that number to thirty-­eight, the condemned were all hanged together in the largest mass execution in U.S. history.37 The United States even violated Canadian sovereignty to apprehend individuals wrongfully suspected of participating in what was known as the Dakota War.38 Yet the war did not actually end with the execution of the Dakota leaders. In the next few years, U.S. troops pursued the Dakota into neighboring territories. The conflict eventually expanded into the wars that gave rise to Red Cloud, the fight over the Black Hills, George A. Custer’s disastrous charge against Sitting Bull’s encampment along the Little Bighorn, and ultimately the final defeat of the Ghost Dancers at Wounded Knee.39 The imperial expansion of the United States into the western territories displaced the Indigenous population, offered missionaries opportunities to Christianize and civilize the

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tribes, and expanded the farmland of the country. These expansionist adventures offered many Civil War officers the opportunity to put their experiences fighting rebels to use against Native Americans. Less than three years apart, the imperial military disasters at Little Bighorn in June 1876 and Isandlwana in January 1879 saw two expanding imperial powers—­the United States and Great Britain respectively—­defeated decisively, but temporarily, by Indigenous peoples. In each case the Indigenous peoples, Lakota and Zulu respectively, faced a rapidly changing environment, one that strongly disadvantaged them. Settlers in North America and southern Africa had invaded their territory. With or without government involvement, these settlers and the Indigenous people collided over territorial issues. These increasing conflicts, however, gave governments reasons to involve themselves to the benefit of the settlers, sealing the fate of the Native peoples.40 Indeed, the success each nation’s military forces enjoyed suppressing Native forces was such that the two spectacular defeats acquired near-­legendary reputations. But that notoriety did not help either the Lakota or the Zulus. In the North American case, Lieutenant Colonel Custer and the Seventh U.S. Cavalry were only part of a three-­prong expedition against Sitting Bull’s coalition of Native Americans. Elsewhere, the Lakota enjoyed far less success and found themselves pursued by the U.S. Army, with units commanded by officers such as George R. Crook, Alfred H. Terry, and Nelson A. Miles, all of whom had distinguished American Civil War careers. Thus, Little Bighorn did not prevent the defeat of the Native American coalition. Similarly, when the Zulu annihilated a battalion of the Second Warwickshire Regiment, commanded by Colonel Anthony William Durnford, at Isandlwana, they were unable to follow up on their stunning success. Only days later a small force of British troops defeated a much larger Zulu contingent at Rorke’s Drift. Although the Zulus enjoyed some successes in various skirmishes, among them Intombe, such events merely delayed the inevitable. The British inflicted the final defeat upon the Zulus at the Royal Kraal at Ulundi on July 4, 1879.41 Ultimately, imperial governments, however brutal, could rarely compete with the actual settlers themselves when it came to hatred and abuse of Indigenous people.42 This could be seen with respect to the American colonists’ views of the Native Americans compared to that of the British government 184

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prior to the War of Independence when the Royal Proclamation of 1763 was resented. It could be seen as well in South Africa, where the encounters between Piet Retief and Andries Pretorius and the Zulus caused lasting animosity and hatred between the Boers and an inferior African people, as they perceived them, who were in their way.43 Indeed, it was in the American Civil War era that some of the most notorious engagements between Native Americans and American settlers took place. In the southern plains, to provide one example, the Cheyenne and Arapaho had surrendered land in 1851. The arrival of new settlers during the Colorado gold rush forced additional territorial concession on the Native people. There was much anger among some younger members of the Cheyenne and Arapaho over these concessions, and the Cheyenne Dog Soldiers chose to resist the land handovers. Earlier, settlers already predisposed against Native people gained an opportunity to arm themselves in support of the defense of New Mexico against Brigadier General Henry Hopkins Sibley’s Confederate invasion force in the spring of 1862. Having performed their duty at Glorieta Pass (March 26, 1862), the Colorado volunteers returned home under Colonel John Chivington, who supported the territorial governor’s hardline policies against the Native people. On November 29, 1864, over 150 peaceful Native people were massacred by these same Colorado volunteers at Sand Creek.44 The incident raised questions about whether this attack was justified or a massacre. The Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War investigated the incident and concluded that Chivington had unjustly massacred peaceful Native people. Senator Benjamin F. Wade suggested, “In conclusion, your committee are of the opinion that for the purpose of vindicating the cause of justice and upholding the honor of the nation, prompt and energetic measures should be at once taken to remove from office those who have thus disgraced the government by whom they are employed, and to punish, as their crimes deserve, those who have been guilty of these brutal and cowardly acts.” 45 While the Joint Committee was much better known for its investigation of the conduct of American Civil War officers, the West was part of the country, and military actions there reflected just as much on the Union and its military. Interestingly, the imperial push of the frontier forward and the slaughter of Native people was connected but not yet fully accepted at the time of the Civil War. In a similar manner Great Britain was forced to address the actions of 185

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Governor Edward John Eyre in Jamaica in 1865, when he suppressed a rebellion with extreme brutality. Some eighteen people were killed by rebels in the Jamaican, or Morant Bay, Rebellion. By contrast, Eyre’s troops killed close to five hundred, whether by military action or executions carried out under martial law, including of individuals who almost certainly played no role in the revolt. Two committees were established in Britain, one in favor of Eyre, the other opposed and wanting the former governor tried for murder. He was in fact twice charged with murder, but no trial ever took place. Although the victims of Eyre’s repression were Black Jamaicans, either former slaves or the descendants of slaves rather than Indigenous peoples, his approach was remarkably akin to that of the United States and other imperial powers in dealing with rebellious peoples. Eyre’s case, like Chivington’s, is unusual in that it spawned a negative public reaction and an attempt to impose justice on the persons responsible.46 Thus, hatred for Native peoples or cultural, racial, or ethnic minorities seen to be opposing imperial authority was not restricted to the United States. Some countries dealt with the problem differently and even more brutally. The Rio de la Plata region was a fragmented federal system, with Buenos Aires competing for influence with other provinces while an Argentinean identity was long in the making. Relying heavily on the cattle-­hide trade, the region had large gaucho-­watched herds roaming the wilderness on the edge of Native American country. Chile’s expansion into the Araucanía and the creation of Punta Arenas challenged the Argentine claim to Patagonia. When in 1872 Calfucurá and thousands of his followers attacked a series of frontier settlements, the government determined the region needed pacification in a way very similar to what the United States was doing.47 Argentina’s Conquista del Desierto was the result. The initial plan called for the populating of Patagonia but not the destruction of the Native people. But additional assaults by the Native population on settlements forced the government into action by constructing a 374-­kilometer long Zanja de Alsina (a trench). With dimensions three meters wide and two meters deep, authorities thought the Indigenous population would be unable to cross it and reach the “civilized” parts of the country. Yet the raiding continued until the tribes signed treaties in which the government provided food to them. Things changed when Julio Argentino Roca took charge of the Ministry of War and 186

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implemented his policy of either full subordination by the Native people or their removal.48 In 1878 Roca launched his campaign against the Native people and their settlements. The army engaged and killed them, freeing settlers to take over their lands. The well-­equipped soldiers with their modern breech-­loading rifles also captured large numbers of Natives. As the Argentinian army pushed south, some Natives escaped across the Andes Mountains into Chile. In the wake of the campaign, new settlements appeared in the region. The conflict finally ended in October 1884, having resulted in thousands of Native Americans losing their lives. The frontier experience during the nineteenth century was global. The Antipodes (Australia and New Zealand) also faced problems with an expanding settlement population and Indigenous resistance. This expansion in Australia meant “Aboriginal hunting and foraging grounds were cut off.” 49 The Aborigines suffered from diseases like smallpox and having less land upon which to roam, decreased water sources, and less game. Historian Matt Matsuda reveals: “Settlers organized their own bands to hunt down and kill [Natives]. In a notorious 1838 incident at Myall Creek, settler men from cattle stations murdered twenty-­eight men, women, and children; they [the white vigilantes] were hanged even while claiming it was not a violation of the law to kill blacks.” By the 1850s, Chinese immigrants had arrived to work in the mining territories and faced riots and xenophobic behavior.50 As in the United States, these frontier experiences created an Australian mythology: “The Australian past developed as a story of [not only] vast landscapes and hard beginnings, but also opportunity and new wealth from trade, natural resources, and strong laboring traditions of farms, ranches, and in mines.” 51 In New Zealand the British settlers were on the advance just like Americans in Minnesota. Increasingly they undermined treaty promises and obligations, increasing tensions during the 1850s and causing unrest among the local Māori population. This soon forced the colonial government into action to defend the frontier settlements in New Zealand.52 From 1845 to 1872, the British fought the so-­called Māori Wars, as they have traditionally been called, although some modern historians prefer the term “New Zealand Wars.” At the peak of the hostilities, during the 1860s, almost 20,000 British soldiers, supported by artillery and colonial militia, battled some 4,000 Māori war187

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riors in a series of engagements.53 While the Natives failed to inflict a defeat on the imperial forces on the scale of either Little Bighorn or Isandlwana, many at the time and since saw the First Taranaki War (1860), in which almost 4,000 British troops clashed with fewer than 2,000 Māori, as a victory for the latter. This conflict resulted in a stalemate and ceasefire, therefore halting—­ temporarily—­the settlers’ imperial advance. Frontier conflicts at the time of the American Civil War were remarkably similar across the globe. Richard Francis Burton visited the United States in 1860, traveling across the continent to the Salt Lake in Utah Territory and to California. He had served in India after dropping out of Oxford in 1842 and stayed with the East India Company’s army until 1849. He was famous by the 1860s for his incognito visit to the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Burton had also traveled extensively along the African coast and to the interior of the central African lakes area. Going across the United States reminded him of some of his visits to other remote areas in the world, such as “the Arabian desert, the jungles of India, or the African Bush.” 54 In 1862 Burton recollected his experiences and often referred to the dried-­up rivers in the western United States as nullahs, an Indian/Hindu term for a ravine or gully.55 Burton commented: “Four miles beyond this ‘Waterless Lake’—­Bahr bila Ma as the Bedouin would call it—­we arrived at Rock Independence, and felt ourselves in a new region, totally distinct from the clay formation of the mauvaises terres over which we have traveled for the last five days. Again I was startled by its surprising likeness to the scenery of Eastern Africa: a sketch of Jiwe la Mkoa, the Round Rock in eastern Unyamwezi, would be mistaken, even by those who had seen both, for this grand echantillon of the Rocky Mountains.” 56 He continued by comparing the Salt Lake and Great Basin to “the Tartar plains of High Asia.” 57 Historian Ben Wilson summarizes: “Stepping into the forts along the way, he felt that if he closed his mind he could fancy himself entering a military cantonment in Gujarat, Algeria, southern Africa, or Australia. Grouped around a parade ground, the whitewashed, verandahed bungalows, low-­rise barracks, storehouses, and offices were virtually indistinguishable from the outposts of British India or French North Africa.” 58 When the American Civil War started, the United States had provoked Native American resistance to its expansion for a long time already. With many broken treaties, conflicts were a given on a regular basis. During the Civil War, 188

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the Dakota in Minnesota resisted their broken treaties by taking up arms, just like the Māori and Zulu would do in other parts of the world. Just like the British at Isandlwana, however, U.S. forces suffered a significant setback in their handling of Native Americans at the Battle of Little Bighorn. The conflicts with Indigenous people were part of an advancing frontier around the world, as Western powers pushed the borders of their civilization into Native lands. Just like the United States relying on, for example, gold rushes to populate California or Colorado, so, too, did Russia advance its settlement frontier into the Amur Valley, with it vast promises, and the Central Asian Steppes toward the Indian Ocean. The American Civil War—­like the Crimean War, the Indian Mutiny, the Guerra del Paraguay, and many other conflicts—­delayed but did not stop or significantly deter migration into the frontier regions. Finally, there was at least one imperial adventure that had a direct influence upon the diplomacy of the American Civil War. While Napoleon III’s attempts to establish a puppet government in Mexico at this time is well known to scholars of the period, far less attention has been paid to his adventures in Indochina from 1858 to 1867. As many foreign invaders, before and after, were to learn, the Vietnamese were a tenacious people who ferociously resisted all imperial encroachments.59 Although the French were to prove successful, their war in Indochina distracted resources away from both Europe and North America, including Mexico. One of the reasons why Napoleon III could not intervene in the American Civil War, even to defend his imperial interests in Mexico, without an alliance with Britain (which was not forthcoming) was because of this overextension. As Britain was unwilling to intervene in the American conflict, France declined to do so as well, which saved the Union and doomed Napoleon III’s protectorate in Mexico.60 A century later, however, thanks to France’s involvement in Indochina, the United States found itself in Southeast Asia as well—­this time to maintain a Western-­imposed frontier dividing Vietnam. Ultimately, Indigenous resistance ensured that the United States was to fare no better in its ambitions in Vietnam than had its predecessors.61 Thus, in some respects the Vietnam War was Napoleon III’s posthumous revenge upon the United States.

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10 RECONSTRUCTION(S) The instinct of self-­protection prompted that organization [of the Ku Klux Klan]; the sense of insecurity and danger, particularly in those neighborhoods where the negro population largely predominated. . . . It was therefore necessary, in order to protect our families from outrage and preserve our own lives, to have something that we could regard as a brotherhood—­a combination of the best men of the country, to act purely in self-­defense, to repel the attack in case we should be attacked by these people. —­J O H N B . G O R D O N ,

J

1872

ohn B. Gordon of Georgia sought to justify the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan in the South during Reconstruction. Yet the Klan was a terrorist organization created by former Confederates in the post–­Civil War South to restore political power to the white population while denying it to African Americans. The Reconstruction era in the United States was a period of massive change, resulting in successes and failures. As with other postemancipation societies, the United States attempted a form of racial political equality—­at least for a while. This experiment fits into a larger dynamic of similar societies in the Americas. At the same time, the resistance of southerners to the racial changes caused serious divisions that culminated in the emergence of terror. The result was the United States rethinking its racial system, not only in the South but also in the West. When the Civil War ended, Andrew Johnson’s administration, following Abraham Lincoln’s “Ten Percent Plan” and with Congress in recess, determined to make the integration of the seceded southern states a swift process. Johnson only required a statement against secession, the acceptance of slavery’s end, and the abnegation by southern states from claiming war damages

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against the federal government to qualify for readmission into political participation in the Union. These lenient terms were quickly accepted by southern state governments. They soon established new constitutions, which included harsh restrictions on the freedoms of African Americans, the so-­called Black Codes, with no voting rights for freedmen. These state governments also included many former Confederate politicians and officers. Thus, when Congress assembled again in December 1865, many northern representatives came face to face with their former foes in the chambers, staunch Confederates turned members of Congress, and blamed the situation on Johnson.1 Determined not to accept former Confederates back into government—­ traitors in northern eyes—­Congress assumed control of Reconstruction. Under the Reconstruction Acts and the ratified Fourteenth Amendment, many white southerners were disenfranchised and lost their rights to participate in the political process in the United States. At the same time, the new governments in the southern states, dominated by the Republican Party, offered opportunities to the now politically enfranchised African Americans. The result were coalitions of southern and northern whites and African Americans, who all had their own agendas. Ex-­Confederate southern whites, meanwhile, had their own agenda: to see their people regain the political franchise and control of their societies. Although whites continued to hold most of the influential political offices, African Americans often provided the necessary voting majorities, occupied many lesser offices, and benefited from patronage positions. Black leaders sought to develop educational and business opportunities for the freedpeople under these governments. The Republican alliance, however, was never a stable entity, and the lack of economic opportunities for African Americans undermined their ability to develop a lasting political engagement.2 Among the most demanded changes by African Americans were land reform and education. The exceptional Port Royal region offers a look at how Reconstruction could have been. There, wartime Reconstruction started shortly after its occupation by Union forces in November 1861. The Port Royal experiment brought northern teachers to the area and saw the establishment of schools on Saint Helena Island, with the Penn School, among other places. In addition, left with plantations and enslaved people but not the enslavers who had escaped, U.S. authorities decided to change land ownership by insisting on 191

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property-­tax payments. When the enslavers failed to pay, the land ended up on auction, and many a formerly enslaved individual became a small landowner. This was the exception and not the rule, but it illustrates the desire of African Americans and formerly enslaved people across the continent to own their own land—­land they had worked on for so many years without recompense.3 Unfortunately, for many freedpeople, land ownership remained elusive. Emancipation thus brought significant changes to the agricultural sector that posed structural issues as well as personal choices. Not unlike the United States, in Peru some former slave-­owning planters alleged that the “laziness” of the freedpeople undermined the ability of the plantations to stay afloat. The claim of a labor shortage following the end of slavery was universal across South America. Considering that many formerly enslaved families desired to mimic their white counterparts and have women stay at home meant fewer workers. Many former slave societies in the Americas, although not in the United States, looked to coolies. These indentured laborers from India or China worked under slavery-­like conditions, undermining the ability of freedpeople to earn a living. At the same time, it was common for the formerly enslaved people, from South Carolina to Peru, to remain on the plantation where they had lived and worked.4 The start of Congressional Reconstruction in the United States sparked white violence and resistance. One of the first incidents of racial violence was the Memphis Massacre, May 1–­3, 1866. Following a shooting between white police officers and some recently demobilized Black Union troops, white mobs attacked the city’s African American community. Federal troops were required to restore order. Officially, forty-­eight individuals—­forty-­six were Black—­ died in the massacre, with an additional seventy-­five injured. Tensions had lingered for a long time in Memphis, and violent encounters between police and Union soldiers and veterans were common. In the end, the white mob destroyed many buildings and business, yet not one of the perpetrators was ever prosecuted.5 Such events would be a common occurrence throughout the South during the next few decades. Other former Confederates continued the war by creating secret terror organizations with a militaristic structure. As a result, some historians have suggested that Reconstruction is better understood as a “Southern Civil War.” 6 Two such groups were the Ku Klux Klan and the Knights of the White Camelia, 192

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both organizations were white supremacist in nature. These night riders used intimidation and violence to undermine the voting power of the Republican Party and prevent Africa Americans from acting upon their recently gained political rights. The groups intended to place Black southerners in a subordinated position, akin to their place under enslavement. The violence was limited regionally to where African Americans were in a minority and where the white population felt more threatened in their status by the emergence of a free people of color. In response, the federal government and military authorities in the South made efforts to suppress these terror activities. The Enforcement Act of 1871, also known as the Ku Klux Klan Act, placed federal soldiers rather than state militias in the role of law enforcement and took all cases involving Klan activity out of state jurisdiction and placed them in federal courts.7 It was a delicate balancing act the U.S. government had to strike between providing a sufficient army-­based police force for the South without relinquishing and jeopardizing its constabulary role in the western parts of the country against Native peoples. The terror activities of the Klan were in part a continuation of Confederate guerilla activities during the war. While conflicts fought by irregular troops probably predate recorded history and the use of terror tactics likewise, the use of terror as a means whereby a small population could fight a vastly superior enemy returned in the nineteenth century.8 The term “guerilla” originated with the Spanish during the Napoleonic occupation after 1808.9 Yet the Spanish bequeathed more than a term, for their tactics and strategy against the occupying French troops more or less set the template for all future irregular conflicts into the present-­day. Revolutionary leaders in Ireland and Hungary had called on their people in 1848 to use farm tools to defend themselves against an enemy occupation—­guerilla warfare, in other words. The Irish Republican Brotherhood, often called the Fenian Society, had intended to start an uprising in 1866, but a vigilant British government ensured nothing materialized. Therefore, the Irish changed their approach and embraced terror tactics. Their first action came in 1867, when a group of Fenians attacked a prison transporter carrying fellow brotherhood members, killing a guard. British authorities had a difficult time finding witnesses willing to testify to secure convictions in this matter.10 A similar situation emerged after a much more high-­profile terror act on December 13, 1867. The Fenians 193

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attempted to free members held inside of Clerkenwell Prison in London by blowing a hole into the wall. The authorities, however, learned of the plot beforehand and had relocated the prisoners. This did not, however, prevent 12 people being killed with another 120 injured as many houses neighboring the prison were leveled by the explosion.11 Later Irish terror groups would continue to use such tactics, as would other groups in the nineteenth century.12 While former Confederates created the Klan, former Union soldiers—­of Irish extraction—­brought into existence the Fenians in North America. Unable to jumpstart another Irish rebellion, these Fenians decided that the best course of action was to exploit the tensions between Great Britain and the United States in hopes of causing a conflict between the two nations that the Irish could somehow use to their benefit. In April 1866 John O’Mahony led a raid of 700 Fenians from Maine into New Brunswick. But when warships and British soldiers approached them, the Fenians lost heart and fled. In June another Fenian army, numbering 1,000–­1,300 men, crossed the Niagara frontier into present-­day Ontario. Despite winning some victories over inexperienced Canadian militia at the so-­called Battles of Ridgeway and Fort Erie, the Fenians soon faced a growing force of militia supported by British regulars, forcing them to retreat. Within days the invasion was over, a final Fenian force being captured by Canadian militia at Pigeon Hill in present-­day Quebec in June. The Fenians had to wait until 1870 to make another attempt, which met with similar results, being defeated at the so-­called Battles of Eccles Hill and Trout River in Quebec that May.13 While one could claim the Ku Klux Klan contributed to the so-­called redemption of the South, the Fenians’ sole achievement was to encourage the various British colonies in North America to join politically in Canadian Confederation. Nonetheless, both these organizations provided a blueprint for many other nineteenth-­and later twentieth-­ century terror groups. Southerners and the Irish were hardly alone when it came to nontraditional means of fighting more powerful foes. Native Americans across the Americas had adjusted to the onslaught of settler encroachment with hit-­and-­ run tactics. But not just Native peoples embraced guerilla warfare and terrorism. The Benito Juárez government refused to accept defeat in the face of the French intervention in Mexico in the 1860s. Consequently, guerilla fighting became commonplace, which eventually softened the imperials and allowed 194

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Juárez to claim victory against the French occupiers.14 Spanish authorities faced a similar guerilla conflict, first during their occupation of the Dominican Republic, then later during both the Guerra de los Diez Años (1868–­78) and the Guerra de Independencia Cubana (1895–­98). The guerilla experience in the Dominican Republic, featuring jungle surprise attacks and avoiding government forces in a pitched battle, taught Cubans how they could successfully defeat the Spanish. The Dominicans, meanwhile, had already gained experiences with irregular fighting during their country’s occupation by the Haitians.15 Guerilla and terror tactics were not just the tools of stateless nations or nations fighting to gain freedom from real or perceived overlords. With the development of radical-­left ideologies, terror seemed a tool to give their demands a voice. The Paris Commune and its struggle against the French state reasserting itself represented an early form of this new type of conflict.16 The Commune was the first large-­scale experiment of communist government. The political left had fractured by the 1870s, with Marxism providing a new revolutionary ideological basis. Pierre-­Joseph Proudhon, who coined the term “property is theft” and was one of Marx’s influences, had as early as the 1840s promoted anarchist ideas to undermine the state.17 But his anarchism paled in comparison to the arguments of Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin, who participated in the Lyon Commune and was often seen as a proponent of revolution and violence.18 Increasingly, terrorism was not just the means of occupied nations to make their voices heard and find ways to add force to their demands for independence, as some groups on the political left also used it to overcome their sociopolitical and socioeconomic oppression—­real or perceived. Thus, despite their very different goals, the activities of the Ku Klux Klan in the United States were part of a wider deployment of armed insurgency. Emancipation in the United States signaled that one of the largest slave societies in the Americas had the difficult task of integrating their newly freed people of color into society and what their freedom, especially economic freedom, entailed. Such societies had taken decidedly diverse routes since 1804, when the former French colony Saint Domingue gained its independence.19 Haiti was a unique case as it was the first slave society to emancipate itself in modern times in a violent revolution. The death and departure of its white planters created an Afro-­Caribbean entity. But the economy was devastated, with the plantations dissolved and much of the land under individual culti195

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vation. The government made the ill-­advised decision to turn everybody into laborers for the state in trying to recreate Haiti’s former wealth. As soon as emancipation came to the island, freedmen started expanding their own gardening plots and taking their obligations to the plantation, even if paid for, less seriously. Even where a work routine existed, however, freedmen tried to have as much control over their time as they could, often in violation of the rules set out by their new employer. Freedmen worked five days, arrived late for work, and generally worked hardly at all.20 Those were the internal problems. Externally, Haiti was effectively put under an embargo by the Western nations determined to crush the slave uprising. Indeed, the embargo lasted until Haiti paid France significant damages for the loss of life and property (that is, the freed slaves) as a result of its revolution. Although Haiti was highly militarized and able to defend itself, these economic factors ensured the postemancipation state was utterly impoverished and unable to maintain a stable, let alone accountable, government.21 A more successful, if less dramatic, example was the British Caribbean. Building on a longstanding emancipationist legacy (starting with the Somerset decision of 1772) and accelerated by the Baptist War in Jamaica (also known as the Christmas Revolt or the Great Jamaican Slave Revolt, 1831–­32), the British government determined that slavery needed to end. There was a growing religious and moral perception that enslavement was no longer acceptable for a civilized country. Although the violent abolition in Haiti is often contrasted unfavorably with the relatively peaceful process of emancipation by the United Kingdom, the Maroon Wars (1728–­40) and the Baptist War serve as reminders that rebellion played a role in ending slavery in the British Empire as well. Nonetheless, the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 meant the end of slavery in the entire empire by 1840 except for young children who were apprenticed until adulthood. Abolitionist pressure ensured this date was moved forward to 1838. Planters received large sums as compensation for their lost property, remained in charge of their plantation estates, and therefore retained through the property qualification their political power. The formerly enslaved received their freedom but little else. There were no land reforms to grant Afro-­Caribbeans land and with it economic freedom; they even lost access to their gardening plots.22 Making matters worse in this regard, freedmen had to compete with newly arrived indentured servants from India and 196

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China, who provided cheap agricultural labor.23 Considering the lack of land available on the Caribbean islands, property ownership was impossible to accomplish for the freedpeople, thus political rights remained elusive. The process of compensated emancipation, leaving freedpeople with solely their personal freedom, became a common occurrence over the next decades. This situation led to the Morant Bay (or Jamaica) Rebellion in October 1865, which is generally remembered for Governor Eyre’s brutal suppression of the uprising that killed almost five hundred people through an at-­best questionable legal process—­the dubious application of martial law—­in retaliation for the murder of eighteen individuals by the rebels. The spark that caused the revolt was an attempt by magistrates to imprison one Paul Bogle, a prominent Baptist preacher and peasant leader, for stirring up dissent. Yet the political and economic problems faced by Jamaica’s formerly enslaved Black population were real. While they were not denied the vote because of race, as was the case in the United States, most were denied the franchise because of property qualifications. Only some 2,000 Black Jamaicans out of a total population of roughly 436,000 could vote—­fewer than 0.5 percent. That was the political problem. The economic trouble was that most Black Jamaicans depended upon the island’s sugar plantations for work, but Britain’s free trade policies in the 1840s forced Jamaica to compete with slave-­grown crops in Spanish-­ controlled Cuba as well as Haiti, and this greatly reduced the wages for their labor. Add to this a series of poor harvests and negative consequences from the Union blockade on the Confederate States, which increased the price of certain imports to Jamaica, and the situation on the island became a powder keg. The attempt to arrest Bogle provided the spark that led to widespread, deadly riots.24 As Edward Rugemer points out, the Morant Bay Rebellion directly affected Radical Reconstruction. The example of the British West Indies had always formed part of the American abolitionist debate, emancipation having occurred there a generation before 1865, serving as both a positive and a negative example. Thus, the Morant Bay Rebellion, its causes, and its consequences were noted by Republican politicians faced with U.S. emancipation. The American public received sensationalist accounts of what was termed the “negro insurrection” on the island as it took place, making a subject of popular interest. Newspapers—­both northern and southern, Democratic 197

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and Republican—­covered the events in Jamaica closely, seeking confirmation in them of their various positions on race and emancipation. It reinforced southern (and indeed some northern) fears about the behavior of freed Black people, helping fuel the “Christmas Insurrection” fear of 1865.25 Opponents leveled accusations that emancipation had thus proved a disaster in Jamaica just as it would in the American South, Black people being unable to adhere to civilized values. On the opposite side of the political aisle, the Radical Republicans, believing that the rebellion was the consequence of the failure to secure sufficient political and, to an extent, economic rights for the formerly enslaved, were determined not to allow the same to happen to African Americans. Senator Sumner, for example, one of the leaders of the Radical Republicans, was quick to reference Morant Bay as the consequence of “the denial of rights to colored people.” 26 Americans were thus aware of the results of emancipation abroad and had several templates available to help them avoid the mistakes of others. Yet freedpeople in the United States were hardly any better off. Having gained their personal liberty during the war as advancing Union armies put the Emancipation Proclamation into effect, many ended up in desolate contraband camps.27 Once the Thirteenth Amendment guaranteed their emancipation, they still owned no property of any sort. Therefore, many had no choice but to return to the plantation to work. Renting a small piece of land, Black families often found themselves, as did their poor white counterparts, in an ever-­deepening debt crisis.28 Unlike in the British West Indies, African Americans temporarily gained full voting and civil rights in the early days of Reconstruction. These accomplishments, however, did not last. This was a story common across the Americas as states and societies struggled with the realities of emancipation and the future role of freedpeople. The United States was neither alone nor unusual in how it addressed the desires of freedpeople. Yet most Latin American societies contained too few slaves for emancipation to make a dramatic difference. In Peru by the mid-­ 1850s, there were still 25,505 enslaved people, less than 1 percent of the population. Emancipating such a small segment had a limited effect compared to the emancipation of over 50 percent of the population in places like South Carolina or Mississippi.29

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When emancipation finally came to slave societies, as in the British and U.S. examples, many offered very little to the formerly enslaved. Historian Peter Blanchard summarizes the situation of the Peruvian freedpeople: “As for the former slaves, they obtained their freedom but little else. They still had to cope with the prejudice and discrimination of the ruling class and the rest of the white population.” Diminishing the importance of Afro-­Peruvians, the labor market diversified with the arrival of Chinese coolies and European immigrants. In addition to discrimination, Afro-­Peruvians, just like their North American kin, suffered from various insults and pervasive fears over miscegenation, including the perception of white society having to protect white women’s innocence.30 Between 1868 and 1877, Reconstruction in the United States and the brief experiment in racial equality ended.31 Although the white South—­now “Redeemed”—­did not immediately destroy African American political power, the process was already underway. Laws segregated people of color to the back of trains, undermined their ability to obtain a meaningful education, and especially diminished their ability to exercise their political rights. As the increasing threat of racially motivated terror organizations intimidated voters, southern states passed various laws that prevented African Americans from voting. The Jim Crow era not only created a New South built around a more industrial economy but also disenfranchised a large body of people.32 The American Civil War severely disrupted the global cotton economy and forced realignment. This would lead to a decrease in the value of cotton, something that would negatively affect southern sharecroppers and the planter elite. Similarly, by the 1880s, the sugar market was facing major changes, undermining the wealth and prosperity of Cuban planters. With Cuba’s war for independence, the Guerra de los Diez Años (1868–­78), having already caused serious upheaval in the island’s economy and to the socioeconomic elite, the increased interest rates and growing debt burden added to the problems faced by planters, already at risk of default. Small plantations with outdated mills could not compete in the global marketplace, working conditions remained dismal, and unrest was common.33 In many respects, postwar Cuba faced a similar economic and social crisis to the postwar South caused by the declining value of the crop underpinning their respective economies.

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A similarly desolate situation faced the enslaved in Brazil when they finally gained their freedom in the late nineteenth century. With the end of slavery, abolitionist societies disappeared. The legal framework in the country, meanwhile, especially after Dom Pedro’s abdication, remained skewed against the majority, who were illiterate. Many formerly enslaved were simply left to go looking for employment as best they could. Vagrancy laws, very similar to those that had already come into existence in the postwar South, now came into force in Brazil. Agro-­industrial sugar factories could hire day laborers for a small amount of money, maximizing profits and leaving workers as casual labor and in a permanent state of poverty. As in every other industrializing society, the working class, especially those formerly enslaved, were ignored and exploited.34 The issues of racial equality and race relations in post-­emancipationist societies were not confined to the South but affected the entire United States.35 The treatment of ethnic or racial minorities, meanwhile, went beyond African Americans. Recent scholars, in particular Elliott West, have defined the period from 1846 until 1877 as “Greater Reconstruction.” Pekka Hämäläinen argues that this Greater Reconstruction witnessed “a continent-­wide racial crisis, the extension of northern state power to the South and the West, and wholesale dispossession of native societies.” 36 There remained the question of the Native American residents in the western territories. As the U.S. Army destroyed the food sources and ways of life of tribes like the Lakota and Comanche, the nomadic people of the Great Plains faced extinction.37 The territories of the American West during this period also offered an opportunity to strengthen the powers of federal authority. As the United States expanded westward, it took increasing charge of the economy and political decisions in these regions, including the imposition of officeholders.38 As the country grew, the question arose, “does the Constitution follow the flag, and, if so, how?” 39 With secession, the question of federal authority and constitutional powers required new answers. With Union victory and Reconstruction, free-­labor ideology came to dominate the western territories. At the same time, the enslaved and then freedmen problem was juxtaposed with the “Indian Problem.” Despite the notion of a democratic government, the western states utilized authoritarian ways to undermine the independence of the Native people.40 In the same racialized language Lincoln spoke to African 200

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Americans, he similarly addressed Native Americans. Despite the persistence of racism, there was a growing desire to integrate the Native peoples into society and find ways to supposedly “uplift” them to white society’s standard. To end tribal identity and traditional way, a full-­scale assault on Native American sovereignty began in the early 1870s.41 As strained as relations between the federal government and Native Americans were, however, the western parts of the country do offer an example of what Reconstruction could have been. When the United States forced the tribes of the Southeast—­Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole—­ from their homelands and into what became known as Indian Territory, many tribal members brought their slaves with them. The tribes had embraced Euro-­American civilization, which not only included the adoption of a new constitution and written language, in the case of the Cherokee, but also the incorporation of slavery and plantation economies in all five tribes. Partly their hope was that by showcasing their similarity with their white neighbors, the Native peoples would be accepted and allowed to remain. It was a failed hope. In the process of removal, the tribes brought their enslaved populations along and created in Indian Territory, especially in the river valleys, plantation economies growing cotton. The Civil War saw these tribes join with the rebellion, which brought dire consequences after the conflict.42 The Reconstruction Treaties of 1866 between the United States and each of the five tribes illustrate that the federal government thought about the West just as much as it did about the South when it came to the postwar process. First and foremost, there was the punitive aspect of the treaties. For siding with the rebellious states, the U.S. government forced the tribes to surrender land in the western parts of Indian Territory, which the government used to resettle the Plains tribes. Article 2 of the Choctaw Reconstruction Treaty included the important clause that the tribe would abolish slavery. While the Thirteenth Amendment had done so already in the United States, as the Choctaw were a sovereign tribal people, the amendment did not apply. Ending slavery and providing freedpeople rights were two different things. Because the United States had a far more prominent role in governing Indian Territory, freedpeople fared better overall there than in the southern states. As recent scholarship on Reconstruction in Indian Territory has illustrated, the region is a case study of what Reconstruction could have been if 201

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the U.S. government had remained more involved and supportive of African American rights during the process and afterward. The tribes made limited concessions to include the freedpeople in the tribe polity, but that does not mean they were full tribal members. By the time Jim Crow took hold in the South, the Cherokee, for example, had decided to recognize members based only on blood ties to the tribe, thus removing the formerly enslaved. To this day the Oklahoma tribes struggle with how to include the descendants of their formerly enslaved, a struggle forcing them to address their own exclusionary practices. At the same time, Black members of the tribes created their own towns and institutions. Because they were not part of the tribal community, land ownership was elusive. While the vast majority of tribes suffered from the provisions in the Dawes Act (1887) that turned their communal land into individual parcels, the formerly enslaved gained greatly as they were included in the rolls and eligible to receive land. Racism still haunted the Indian Territory, however, although Native Americans were marginally better neighbors than white southerners. But a more involved and activist U.S. government did provide some limited support to African Americans among the Native peoples, a support missing in the South. Reconstruction was not only restricted to racial questions, however, as there was also the wider international cotton market that permanently changed. The dearth of cotton during the Civil War and the search for new sources of the fiber changed the international cotton trade. Globally, there were questions over the reliability of freedpeople’s work ethics. There was joy when news from the United States indicated that the flow of cotton and the reliability of plantation labor was returning with the end of the Civil War. Yet as Sven Beckert asserts, “the Civil War had disempowered the world’s last politically powerful group of cotton growers.” 43 Nevertheless, by 1877, the United States had largely recaptured its pre–­Civil War market share for cotton in Great Britain.44 While the United States sought to reconstruct its domination of the global cotton market, other parts of the world stood to benefit from its absence and produced more cotton. For example, in response to the Civil War, Great Britain encouraged the growth of cotton in India. Although progress was slow, eventually, the subcontinent provided cotton for the Japanese and Continental European markets. Britain, by contrast, received only a limited amount—­6 percent of the 1910 crop, for example. At the same time, Indian 202

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cotton growers produced for an expanding domestic manufacturing business, with half the crop staying at home and turned into fabric. Indian cotton, however, always remained inferior. Brazilian planters produced a cotton strain like those in the United States. Overshadowing all was Egyptian cotton, which quintupled during the Civil War.45 At the same time, local authorities got involved in the production and expansion of cotton growing. In India the government pushed the south-­central province of Berar to increase production; by the turn of the century, it produced 25 percent of India’s cotton.46 In Egypt the state provided not only the infrastructure at high cost for the irrigation of fields but also experimented on its own land with various types of cotton.47 All of these actions were in addition to altered property laws. Reconstruction with its economic upheavals fell into a period of global commodities realignment that greatly disadvantaged the U.S. South. Finally, Carl Degler has observed that the political transformation of the Swiss Republic following its civil war bore some resemblances to the United States in the Reconstruction era. As with the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, the victorious side in the Sonderbundskrieg likewise made constitutional changes, rewriting the relations among the cantons to ensure the existence of a new national republic. Ironically, given the occurrence of the American Civil War some thirteen years later, the Swiss borrowed from the antebellum U.S. Constitution to ensure a more cohesive body politic. Similarly, as with the United States, the winners were determined to extirpate those institutions held responsible for the (temporary) dissolution of the republic. In this case, the cantons of the Sonderbund were compelled to agree to bar the Jesuit Order from their territory before they could rejoin the confederation, the acceptance of the order into Lucerne having been a major source of cantonal conflicts. As Degler notes, it took almost a century and a half before the Jesuit Order was readmitted into Switzerland: “in that context, it is perhaps worth remembering that a century passed before a president of the United States—­Lyndon B. Johnson—­could be elected from a state of the former Confederacy.” 48 Despite some recent efforts to globalize the history of Reconstruction, the post–­Civil War and postemancipation period in the United States remains uncontextualized and marred by insular assumptions, albeit with some ex203

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ceptions.49 For example, there has been no scholarly inquiry into the relationship between Garibaldi’s Red Shirts invading the Two Sicilies and claiming the area for the new Italian nation-­state and Wade Hampton’s 1870s terroristic Red Shirts or the red-­shirted North Carolina terrorists who influenced the 1896 and 1898 elections.50 The Reconstruction era in the United States bore a resemblance to events elsewhere. Other societies faced the consequences of emancipated enslaved societies. Freedpeople largely desired education, political rights, and most importantly land. The conversation about land redistribution was not one solely held in the United States nor was the larger conversation of inclusion in the body politics, something the freedpeople in the British Caribbean especially struggled with. Postemancipation societies also faced the problem of guerilla war and terror tactics used by a people for whom a conventional war had not produced the desired result or had proven disastrous. Reconstruction was not the same thing as reconciliation, and yet the United States had to achieve the latter or find itself embroiled in permanent civil war.

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11 REMEMBRANCE AND R ECO N C I L I AT I O N? Although the great State of New York was not represented among the troops who won deathless renown at Chickamauga, the Empire State honors the soldiers of all other States—­North and South—­who wrought there such a splendid example of human courage and martial valor in defense and maintenance of what each side believed to be a natural right and principle. Their conspicuous bravery has placed the American soldier alongside the heroes of Marathon, of Thermopylae, of Waterloo, and Balaklava. — ­L E V I P. M O R TO N ,

1895

N

ew York governor Levi P. Morton’s words were part of one of the many speeches given during the ceremonies opening the Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park, September 18–­20, 1895. The park was the first of a kind. Veterans’ groups had long lobbied Congress for the allocation of land to commemorate the entire Battle of Chicka­ mauga. This pressure came from both sections of the country, and markers and monuments were placed by veterans of both sides to illustrate their work. This was not without controversy. The Scioto Gazette in Ohio declared, “it makes a true soldier’s blood boil to think of having those battle fields covered with Rebel Monuments.” 1 The American Civil War, like so many other conflicts of the period, failed to bring reconciliation; instead, tensions continued to linger.2 At the same time, the explosive appearance of monuments and parks devoted to the Civil War was not an isolated occurrence. Throughout the world in the hyper-­nationalistic, imperial-­militaristic age of the late nineteenth century, erecting monuments to past and recent heroes was a reminder 205

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to the present generations of the struggles their nation had faced and how to safeguard those accomplishments. Nevertheless, the American Civil War is one of the few conflicts where the losing side was able to cover the landscape with monuments and impose its narrative on the country. By studying the remembrance of the Civil War in comparative perspective and in the hypernationalism and imperialism of the late nineteenth century, we come to realize that what happened in the United States, especially in the southern states, was not a unique development. Indeed, winners and losers of war the world over have erected monuments to their national, political, and military heroes, adding faces and names to the growing cult of nationalism. Civil War veterans were part of a global trend developing a new nationalistic memory culture. When the American Civil War ended, the United States not only faced the challenges of Reconstruction but also how the two deeply antagonistic sections of the country could reconcile. Reconciliation, however, remained an elusive goal. Veteran groups in the North and South quickly emerged in the aftermath of the conflict. Already, in 1866, the Grand Army of the Republic formed, giving Union veterans an outlet to commemorate their achievements and hold reunions, not to mention lobby Congress for various veteran-­related causes. It was almost a quarter of a century later, in 1889, when Confederate veterans organized their own group with the United Confederate Veterans. Eventually, other organizations formed, such as the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States, Dames of the Loyal Legion, the Union Veterans’ Union, Veteran Nurses of the Civil War, and the United Daughters of the Confederacy.3 These organizations did not embrace a spirit of reconciliation. They often distinguished between forgiving those who had fought against them and the illegitimacy of their opponents’ cause. “We are ready to forgive. But we will never consent to public national tribute to obliterate the wide gulf which lies between principles for which we fought,” wrote Union veteran W. T. Collins. Union and Confederate veterans tirelessly defended their section’s cause and reasons for fighting.4 Their nationalistic interpretation of their past deed did not allow them to embrace a reconciliation that downplayed their own achievements. Where Union veterans perceived their cause as the legitimate one, so did their rebel counterparts. The contradictory national identity of each section had strengthened and entrenched among the veteran generation. There 206

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was nothing particularly novel about this, even with respect to U.S. history, as demonstrated by the starkly differing accounts of the causes and consequences of the War of 1812 between the Americans, on the one hand, and the British and Canadians, on the other.5 By the early 1870s, former Confederates were well on their way to crafting the “Lost Cause” interpretation, allowing the losing side to write a narrative that mythologized their cause and suffering. In 1873 Jubal A. Early, a former general in the Confederate army, historically contextualized the war in favor of his side. Arguing that the South’s was a “struggle for the right of self-­government,” he pointed to the great archaeological discoveries of the period, such as the excavations in Egypt and Mesopotamia, where archeologists had discovered “authentic traces of the history of peoples whose descendants no longer have a distinct or recognised existence on the face of the earth.” Ancient history pointed to the extinction of peoples and their cultures, and this, Early feared, was a potential fate for southerners unless they acted to prevent it. After all, the Confederate States of America was just a few years earlier extinguished. This Early portrayed as a criminal act, promising that “a just retribution will overtake the commission of the foulest political crime the world has ever witnessed[:] the utter annihilation of the autonomy of eleven free, sovereign States, and the subjection of the intelligent, virtuous populations of most of them to the rule of an ignorant and inferior race, utterly incapable of understanding the first principles of government.” 6 Plainly, in his eyes, southerners had a righteous cause and heritage to defend. Early’s fellow Confederate army veteran, Stephen D. Lee, could not agree more. Lee argued that the conflict had destroyed self-­government and transferred responsive local power to the far less accountable national government— ­all at the point of a bayonet. This was not simply a conflict about self-­govern­ ment, as Lee argued: “The Southern people knew that they alone could solve the great social problem of the races. They, white and black, lived together; they had seen that the effort made by strangers from the North, who had attempted to administer their affairs when local self-­government had been suppressed, had proven to be a woeful failure.” Only when the southern states had recovered their rights and property, Lee declared, was the region able to restore good government with racial superiority.7 Equally belligerent in her support of the racist Lost Cause mythology was Mildred Rutherford of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. In 207

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1923 Rutherford argued, in line with all the declarations of secession, that the United States was a “Republic of Sovereign States.” The conflict, therefore, was not a civil war in which people fought to control a national government because the United States was not a nation in 1861, 1865, or for that matter in 1923. Rutherford refused to surrender the principles of secession and state sovereignty, thus denying that the Union victory had either democratic or political legitimacy. It was simply a war of conquest and a violation of the sovereign rights of the southern people. As Rutherford put it, “the war was caused by the North attempting to coerce us back into the Union, contrary to the Constitution, and for no reason save that the States of the South demanded their rights.” While she believed that “War of Coercion” was an adequate title, she claimed that the conflict was a “War between the States” and demanded that the term be used and taught since one group of states had made war on another group of states.8 Like her predecessors, Rutherford was a deeply loyal southern nationalist and defender of her—­as she saw it—­national heritage. Ironically, as the Lost Cause was still in its intellectual infancy in the rebellious states in North America, a form of it already existed in Great Britain. There, a small group of supporters of the rebel cause had looked with hearts filled with romanticism to the southern states and especially the heroic exploits of Lieutenant General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson. Reminding them of individuals such as Lajos Kossuth and Giuseppe Garibaldi, Jackson after his death in 1863 took on a whole new persona as the charismatic defender of his home nation who died fighting against overwhelming odds in an all too tragic fashion. Some of the key tenants, including the dismissal of slavery as a cause for the war, were already present in this British romanticizing of Stonewall Jackson. This small group of individuals even raised money to commission and donate a statue of Jackson to Richmond, Virginia. The Jackson statue is one of the earlier Lost Cause monuments and an important reminder that this phenomenon was not limited to just North America.9 The worldwide success of Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone with the Wind (1936), and the probably even more influential movie version of the book three years later, is an even more obvious example of the Lost Cause’s global reach. Indeed, it is not too much of an exaggeration to claim that until comparatively recently, most people’s understanding of the American Civil War—­both inside and outside the United States—­was based in whole or in part on the film version of Mitchell’s book. 208

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The United States was hardly alone in having to come to grips with a defeated state, continuing such attempts at national identity and reconciliation during the second half of the nineteenth century. Irish nationalists had made several attempts to secede from Great Britain and then the United Kingdom, most recently in 1848. Unlike southern secession, however, the Irish Confederation’s uprising was ill prepared and lacked support from the mass of the people in Ireland. The failure nonetheless gave birth to a propaganda-­savvy body of disgruntled and displaced Irish diaspora—­especially in the United States—­whose hostility toward Britain increased with every year that Ireland lacked independence. Despite various attempts at allowing Home Rule (self-­ government for Ireland short of independence) on the part of successive British governments, reconciliation between the Irish and British was increasingly unlikely. The resentment against British oppression appeared in many publications by members of the Irish Confederation and the later Fenian Movement. In 1867 Michael Doheny published The Felon’s Track. Based on his nonsectarian views, he questioned Daniel O’Connell’s policies and pointed to his Roman Catholic allies’ failure to support the Irish Confederation. Doheny blamed the Young Ireland movement, too, for having missed opportunities. He blamed the Irish people for not rebelling against Britain. He also emphasized that only if the Irish people stood as a unified whole behind independence could such a dream become a reality. The 1848 uprising was therefore a premature engagement.10 Others would be far less kind. In 1880 Charles Gavan Duffy added Young Ireland: A Fragment of Irish History to the growing unreconciled literature. His account intended to both vindicate the leadership of the Young Ireland movement and to educate Britons on what he saw as the legitimate grievances of the Irish people. Even as Duffy justified his role in bringing about the 1848 rebellion, he noted that he did not actually participate in it. Attempting to share the blame for the failure to bring about Irish independence, he cited the Great Famine, massive poverty, and the lack of education among the Irish.11 Yet Doheny’s and Duffy’s accounts paled in comparison to the diatribes unleashed by one of the most vocal and unreconciled Irish revolutionaries, John Mitchel. His Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps) leveled serious accusations against the British government. Mitchel blamed London for the Great 209

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Famine and the lack of relief for the starving Irish. He claimed that the government’s allocation of relief money was equal to that of the British Museum’s. Far more damning, however, was his claim that the famine was a deliberate action to pacify Ireland. According to Mitchel, British officials recognized the Irish population was too large for the island’s agriculture and too large to police by royal authorities. The famine offered a chance to deal with this “surplus population” and end pauperism, the need for a poor law, and frequent famine-­relief appropriations. Mitchel further accused London of stripping the country of food at the time of the Great Famine. In other words, the famine had been deliberately engineered by British authorities. Mitchel’s diatribe concluded: The subjection of Ireland is now probably assured until some external shock shall break up that monstrous commercial firm, the British Empire; which, indeed, is a bankrupt firm, and trading on false credit, and embezzling the goods of others, or robbing on the highway, from Pole to Pole; but its doors are not yet shut; its cup of abomination is not yet running over. If any American has read this narrative, however, he will never wonder hereafter when he hears an Irishman in America fervently curse the British Empire. So long as this hatred and horror shall last—­so long as our island refuses to become, like Scotland, a contented province of her enemy, Ireland is not finally subdued. The passionate aspiration for Irish nationhood will outlive the British Empire.12

Perhaps ironically, Mitchel’s inflammatory account probably did more to influence U.S. views of Anglo-­Irish relations than it did Irish nationalists. Indeed, his view completely overshadowed the support Irish nationalists gave the Confederate States of America during the American Civil War.13 Just as in North America, where unreconciled Confederates, lacking their own nation-­ states, wrote libraries of works justifying and remembering their noble cause, so, too, did Irish nationalists work to defend their own cause to continue the struggle for independence. The same clash of regional, nationalism-­infused remembrance also appeared in the German states. For example, in Schleswig-­Holstein, historians and former revolutionaries quarreled over the narrative of the German nation-­ 210

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state’s creation. In 1870 Heinrich Gotthard von Treitschke—­he would ultimately serve in the Reichstag as a supporter of Otto von Bismarck—­started publishing a history of the German states during the nineteenth century. He was followed in the late 1880s by Heinrich Karl Ludolf von Sybel, who added to Treitschke’s work with his own studies on the creation of the German nation-­ state. To both these historians, as to many contemporaries, German unification under Prussian leadership was a natural and positive development. They were critical of liberal experiments, such as the 1848 parliament and state-­formation process, deeming them failures. According to Sybel’s and Treitschke’s accounts, only once the strong hand of Prussia ousted Austria from the German states and a conservative political identity became established could the new Germany acquire the strength it required to prosper. Therefore, all of Bismarck’s steps and actions were justified in this interpretation. While criticism of this narrative was initially rare, it nonetheless existed among groups who had reason not to be satisfied with the new German construct.14 The Schleswig-­Holstein nationalists who had fought from 1848 to 1852 to bring about the independence of their duchies under their own duke, for example, did not appreciate their integration into Prussian territory, depriving them of the sovereignty for which they had fought two bitter wars. While the necessity of German assistance to free themselves from Danish rule existed, Schleswig-­Holstein nationalists’ criticism of Prussia had been muted; opposition to Danish rule was their chief focus. With the Prussian and Austrian victory over Denmark in 1864, however, the situation had changed. Schleswig-­ Holstein now had new rulers but once again no independence. The two rulers became one in 1867, following the 1866 Austro-­Prussia War, and a clause in the subsequent peace treaty promising the people of Northern Schleswig a referendum on whether they wished to live under Danish or Prussian authority was never enacted. Consequently, the Schleswig-­Holstein nationalists’ version of events was not always in agreement with those of the later German national histories.15 In 1896 Werner Frölich published a history of the duchies up to the Treaty of Vienna of 1864. To him, the 1848 revolution was a justified war for independence, one of many in the history of the duchies as they tried to escape Danish oppression. He accused the Danes of having increased the suffering of the inhabitants of Schleswig unnecessarily and blamed them for losing the war, 211

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the peace, and, as a result, the duchies. To Frölich, the Danish were clearly on the wrong side of history, with Prussia being the savior of the duchies.16 This was an example of the pro-­Prussian spirit shared by some Schleswig-­Holstein nationalists. Karl Jansen’s history of the “liberation” of Schleswig-­Holstein maintained support for the Schleswig-­Holstein-­Sonderburg-­Augustenburg dynasty. Karl Samwer, who edited Jansen’s posthumous work, not only supported the close ties between the duchies and Germany but also their incorporation into Prussia. This favorable view of Prussia fit well into the growing literature of German nationalism.17 There was, however, another interpretation, one far more critical of the emerging pro-­Prussian narrative, which came from the Schleswig-­Holstein nationalists who wanted independence and the rule of their legitimate sovereign, as they viewed him, the prince of Schleswig-­Holstein-­Sonderburg-­ Augustenburg. A leading voice among these nationalists was the former revolutionary Rudolph Matthias Schleiden. Having earlier published accounts justifying the legitimacy of the failed Schleswig-­Holstein uprising in 1848, Schleiden again weighed in on the debate in the 1880s. His personal memoirs—­ a four-­volume set—­criticized the European powers for their actions or lack thereof with respect to Schleswig-­Holstein. While Schleiden was predictably harsh toward the Danish government, he reserved some of his most scathing criticism for the Prussians, whom he resented for deserting the duchies during the revolution. Although Schleiden did criticize members of the duchies’ government, especially the trigger-­happy radicals, his four volumes primarily defend the Schleswig-­Holstein cause against the version found in German national histories. Even decades after the unification of Germany, Schleiden, like the Irish with respect to Britain or the southerners toward the United States, remained unreconciled to the loss of Schleswig-­Holstein’s independence and deeply committed to his local national identity.18 The remembrance of wars was also a crucial element in the emergence of national identities. These remembrances created an often mythical past and glorified heroes who the present generation could look up to and relate to, instilling in them a sense of national pride and exceptionalism. As historian Bálint Varga has observed: “National historians particularly searched for the origins of their communities and medieval histories. These endeavors were, however, limited by the available pasts.” Such efforts resulted in what became 212

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known as the “hero cult,” referencing the well-­known work by Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-­Worship, & the Heroic in History (1841). Even more, visual images of a national past were crucial; after all, the nineteenth century was the age of “statuomania.” Varga writes, “throughout Europe, monarchs, national governments, local authorities, and grassroots organizations raced to inscribe their heroes into landscapes and cityscapes.” Monuments thus became the conduit for bringing the national, often militaristic, myth to the people.19 Statuomania was just as widespread during the nineteenth century as it would be during the twentieth century. According to research by Helke Rausche, Paris added a total of seventy-­eight new statues between 1848 and 1914. Berlin, with about fifty-­nine new statues, and London with sixty-­one, could each rival the French capital in statuomania. Statues to Joan of Arc at the Place des Pyramides, Oliver Cromwell at Westminster, and Friedrich II of Prussia at Unter den Linden were just some of the most prominent new statues erected during the late nineteenth century.20 In many ways, the German states and later the German Reich lead the way in this monumentation of the nation-­state, with statues to individuals like Gottfried Leibnitz, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Martin Luther, Johannes Gutenberg, Friedrich Schiller, and many other of its intellectual greats. While several of these honored local legends, they also served to connect local history and pride to the larger nationalism.21 This is very similar to cities in the southern states erecting monuments to local Confederate soldiers, creating ties between an imagined Confederate national community and a small town. The creation of the German Reich brought about the need for new rounds of monumental imagining, adding also a new group of heroes to commemorate. Probably the two most monumental of these icons celebrating the German nation—­not all were constructed post-­1871—­were the Hermannsdenkmal near Detmold, honoring the victory of the Germanic tribes over the Roman legions, and the far more imposing center of German celebration near Regensburg on the Danube, Walhalla, a Germanic hall of fame.22 Work on Walhalla started in 1830 as a project by the Bavarian king to foster German nationalism. After twelve years of planning, replanning, and construction, the ancient-­looking temple to great Germans was completed.23 This was an enterprise not unlike the National Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol started after the Civil War. 213

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As a living legend, even outshining the kaiser, Germans celebrated Bismarck as the architect of the unified Germany. Already during his lifetime, sixteen columns and towers were erected in his honor. Hundreds of other memorialization efforts followed.24 But as Bismarck became an outspoken critic of the government after his dismissal as chancellor, his image and memory could serve not only to celebrate the strength and greatness of the German nation but also as justification to resist the national government, creating a complex and often contradictory image.25 Thus, as Confederate monuments served as opposition symbols, some of their German counterparts likewise argued against national unity. While revolutionary leaders of secession movements around the world voiced their unreconciled opinions toward their continued occupiers, veterans of the many wars during the middle decades of the nineteenth century had helped create these new national identities. Veteran organizations started to become common during the latter decades of the century, with frequent meetings. Where former Union and Confederate soldiers congregated on the fields of their past glory, men in other countries did the same. Similarly, as the adornment of Civil War–­era graves eventually created Decoration Day, now known as Memorial Day, such memorial occasions also appeared in other parts of the world. This process began early in Europe. Well before London’s Trafalgar Square became so named in 1830 and before Lord Horatio Nelson’s column was erected in 1843, the workmen of the Bonawe Furnace in the Scottish village of Taynuilt completed a monument to Nelson in 1805. Originally intended to celebrate the Royal Navy’s victory on the Nile (August 1, 1798), by the time it was completed, Nelson had been killed at the Battle of Trafalgar (October 21, 1805), so the monument became one of commemoration. The furnacemen had particular interest in the matter, as they had made cannonballs for the British fleet.26 Matters accelerated following the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. With respect to the British veterans, a public subscription was opened to relieve those who had suffered on June 28, 1815, raising £100,000—­then an enormous sum—­within two months. Other subscriptions were raised elsewhere. Not only that, but every British veteran or member of the King’s German Legion at Waterloo (and the earlier battles of Ligny and Quatre Bras), regardless of rank, received a campaign medal—­a first in British history.27 Other nations, 214

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including Prussia and the Netherlands, did the same.28 The battlefield itself, meanwhile, became a destination for tourists almost from the moment the guns fell silent. The earliest watercolors of the battlefield date from June 1815, depicting the unburied dead. Monuments soon followed. The most impressive of these is probably the Lion Mound, constructed on the orders of William I of the Netherlands at the site where his son, the Prince of Orange and future William II, was struck from his horse by a shot. The lion mounted on top of the hill was cast from French guns captured during the battle.29 While the occasional monument and tourist or veteran visit to a battlefield is a far cry from the massive battlefield parks of the end of the century, they were the precursors to those later developments. By contrast, British veterans of the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny never received the same attention as those of Waterloo, certainly nothing like the same memorialization or the scholarly inquiry that the Great War generation was subjected to—­the Royal British Legion, for example, did not come into existence until 1921. Nonetheless, veterans of these conflicts were given opportunities to commemorate their service on the local level. Evidence, much of it photographic, points to local reunions held by these British veterans. An image of the 1894 Birmingham Military Veteran’s Association shows at least three likely Crimean War veterans, survivors of the Charge of the Light Brigade.30 Similarly, an image from Perth, Australia, of the 1909 King’s Birthday Review shows veterans of the Crimean War and Indian Mutiny.31 The arrival of the phonograph also led to the recording of veterans’ voices. The British Library contains recordings made in 1890 from the Light Brigade Relief Fund, founded to assist veterans of the Battle of Balaclava in 1854. One of these recordings is of Florence Nightingale herself, while another is of the bugler who had sounded the charge at Balaclava repeating the call on the original bugle.32 Although the public did not celebrate the conflict’s end—­it appeared to do so before victory was achieved—­the government nonetheless commissioned John Bell to create a set of three bronze statues to commemorate the contributions of the Coldstream, Fusilier, and Grenadier Regiments, each cast using Russian cannons. Thus, common soldiers, not officers, represented the heroes of the Crimean War, something akin to the soldier monuments erected around the former rebel states. Before 1850, military valor and honors, excluding campaign medals, were solely bestowed on the aristocracy, never taking 215

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into consideration the common soldier. This changed with the creation of the Victoria Cross in 1856, awarded for bravery “in the presence of the enemy” regardless of rank. The British finally had a medal to honor the military achievements and bravery of the common soldier in battle. On June 26, 1857, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert awarded the first ever Victoria Crosses to Crimean War veterans. This first set of the small bronze medal went to sixty-­two men, among them “sixteen privates from the army, four gunners and one sapper, two seamen and three boatswains.” 33 One could call this the democratization of war; indeed, the United States followed suit in 1863 when the first Medal of Honor was awarded during the Civil War. The Crimean War undeniably altered British attitudes toward war veterans. It also gave birth to the quintessential “Private Smith” or “Tommy,” who took their place in British folklore.34 For Russia, the Crimean War was a humiliation and as such not something to commemorate. Nonetheless, there was also the national pride felt by the defenders of Sevastopol. Thanks in large part to Leo Tolstoy’s Sevastopol Sketches (1855), the war gained public attention. Much like the Mexicans after the war with the United States, Tolstoy and other Russian writers turned defeat into victory and, as Figes notes, helped create a mythology of “selfless heroism, resilience and sacrifice.” 35 The war became many things to many people. Conservatives and religious leaders saw it as a defense of the Orthodox faith. To others, it was comparable to Russia’s defeat of Napoleon I. With the large number of casualties, Sevastopol assumed not only a mythological place but also a “quasi-­sacred” one. Only with the successful conclusion of the Russo-­ Turkish War of 1877–­78 did the government take part in the commemorations. Much later, in the Soviet era the commemoration of the Crimean War gained additional ideological meaning as a struggle between East and West. As with the American Civil War, interpretation and use of the conflict was never static. “Memories of the Crimean War continue to stir profound feelings of Russian pride and resentment of the West.” 36 Monuments could thus assist a losing side create a false impression of victory—­a moral victory, if one prefers. Russia developed its own memorial landscape, much of it the result of its armies fighting in foreign territories or in faraway frontier regions and expanding the empire, which made it difficult for those wishing to mourn a fallen soldier to visit his gravesite. Russian war monuments were often obelisks, which not only were cheap and easy to produce but also representa216

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tive of the religious and military culture. As an Orthodox country, Russia frequently constructed small memorial chapels in cemeteries to honor the dead. By the end of the nineteenth century, Russia—­just like the belligerents in the United States—­embraced a figurative style for monuments, with pedestals and often some protective fence against vandalism. The government erected such memorials on the battlefield of the nineteenth century’s wars, including the Crimea.37 Like their U.S., British, and Russian counterparts, German veterans of the Franco-­German War of 1870–­7 1 also looked to commemorate their accomplishments. Never an official national holiday, by 1873, celebrations of Sedantag, honoring the victory of German forces at the Battle of Sedan, were widespread. Most of these were communal, on the local level, organized by local clubs and associations, and fostered by the education system.38 Despite concerns about celebrating a battle as a national holiday, proponents could easily point to the commemorations of the Battle of Leipzig as a precedent.39 Some critics believed that Leipzig, fought on German soil October 16–­19, 1813, as a battle to free German lands from French oppression, had far more symbolic value than Sedan, fought on French soil during an attack on another country. One, after all, appeared defensive and a case of national liberation, while the other offensive and a possible example of conquest. Therefore, the announcement of the new German Reich on the day of the peace agreement was instead chosen to celebrate the new German unity.40 Although Sedantag remained a cause of celebrations, opposition toward it remained strong enough that it never assumed an official character as a national holiday. At Lichtenfels in 1876, the local warrior and veteran club organized its own Sedantag. Since the local clergy did not provide a separate sermon for the veterans, they attended the regular service before visiting the cemetery and the graves of fellow veterans. Finally, members engaged in a parade through the flag-­decorated city streets. After the parade came speeches and cheers for the king of Bavaria and the emperor.41 In certain respects the veterans’ presence and a general sense of militarization contributed to a peculiar notion of German national identity.42 Yet similar commemorations took place elsewhere in Europe and the Americas. While Germany primarily celebrated its victory over France and achieving German unification—­avoiding the divisive and diplomatically problem217

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atic memory of the Austro-­Prussian War—­Italians commemorated the unification of their nation, settling on 1861 as the date of accomplishment. Thus, in 1911 the fiftieth anniversary celebration of a unified Italy occurred. But this was not to be a mixed emotional event like what transpired two years later at Gettysburg. Just like the United States commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the American Civil War, Italy could look back at a mixed situation. There was much to be proud of and to celebrate, such as the maintenance of the liberal institutions of Italy, but there was also much work left to do, with national leaders and journalists worried about backwardness and corruption in the southern parts of Italy.43 In the aftermath of unification, especially by the 1880s, Italy’s urban landscape had transformed to commemorate these events. New monuments to the heroes of the war of unification appeared, streets and city squares bore the names of unification leaders, and new museums opened. Finally, like Memorial/ Decoration Day added to the U.S. festival calendar, so, too, did Italians add holidays celebrating and commemorating the unification of their country. As a monarchy these celebrations centered on the king, of course, and were styled to create “a densely woven mythological discourse, which was designed to exploit the image of the national-­popular monarchy.” There was also room for individuals like Garibaldi and Mazzini to share in the fame of the “great makers.” 44 In contrast to the militarist reunions on the battlefields honoring veterans, Italy staged expositions to showcase the accomplishments of industry and labor as well as to celebrate the national government. The expositions were also an opportunity for the different regions and cities of the kingdom to show their distinctiveness. The result was very much like in Germany, the opportunity to weave together regional, local, and national identities and to show Italy as a “quintessentially plural” country, very much in contrast to the brutal repressions in southern Italy in the aftermath of the early stages of the Risorgimento. But there was the problem that Roman Catholics were not in favor of this secularized version of the Italian unification story, perceiving a union between secular liberals and anticlerical Freemasons.45 Neither Europe nor the United States were unique in paying close attention to their respective veterans. In South America Peru and Chile engaged in two conflicts during the 1860s and 1880s. While during the Guerra Hispano-­ Sudamericana, Peru and Chile fought side by side against the Spanish Empire, 218

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the Guerra del Pacífico pitched the two former allies against each other. Chile provided its veterans who had suffered significant injuries, about 4,081 soldiers, with a pension.46 Just like in other wars, such veteran support from the state was required by those returning wounded or injured in the line of duty.47 On April 3, 1886, veterans of the Regimiento Cívico No. 1 “Atacama” decided to form an organization to lobby to improve their lot and gain additional benefits. They held occasional reunions, with some aged veteran coming together as late as the 1920s.48 Furthermore, only six years after Agustín Arturo Prat Chacón died in the Battle of Iquique (May 21, 1879), a Chilean defeat, Chile erected a massive monument to him and the unknown sailors of his vessels to honor their sacrifices.49 Veterans visited the monument for regular laying of wreathes. In many ways, war memories helped with the continued imagining process of the Latin American nations. Among the hardest hit countries in the Western Hemisphere during the American Civil War era was Mexico. After suffering significant territorial losses after the war with the United States in the late 1840s, the country suffered from almost a decade of civil war, then the French invasion. After 1848, seeking to explain their role in the country’s defeat, many Mexican officers published memoirs. Very similar to their defeated Confederate counterparts, these officers tried to explain their defeat by showing the duplicity of their American enemies. From the Mexican perspective, the United States had brought crime, anarchy, and fear to a peaceful country. The invaders had destroyed the country and terrorized the civilian population. Like the rebel soldier of the American Civil War, the brave Mexican soldier was overwhelmed by the modern technology of U.S. forces. To honor those heroic veterans of the Guerra de la Intervencion Norteamericana, the Mexican government gave out a series of campaign medals and awards for bravery. The longest-­lasting legacy centered around the Niños Héroes of Chapultepec Castle, which was—­and remains so to this day—­a military academy. The cadets had heroically defended the castle on September 12, 1847, with some refusing to surrender and giving rise to the myth of the “Boy Heroes.” The legacy of the Niños Héroes grew during the Porfiriato of Porfirio Diaz as a mechanism of state and identity building. In 1881 the state dedicated a large marble cenotaph designed by Ramón Rodríguez Aranguity, a cadet captured during the battle. The Obelisco a los Niños Héroes y al Honor Militar became a centerpiece for commemorations.50 219

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An even larger mark was left on Mexico during the American Civil War years—­the Guerra de Reforma and the French Intervention—­but the legacies of the reforms in the late 1850s were a secularization of society, which opened the door to the renaming of public spaces for war heroes. Diaz accelerated the monumentation of Mexico’s public landscape. In the year of its great victory, the Mexican government had already declared Cinco de Mayo a national celebration of the victory over the French in Puebla. It is not, however, a national holiday in Mexico—­despite its popularity in the United States—­and any celebration is regionally limited. Emperor Maximilian, like so many other rulers, had also tried to use the erection of monuments and the commissioning of public art projects to add legitimacy to his regime before its fall, including a monument at Plaza Mayor to commemorate Mexican independence.51 The restoration of the national government to Mexico City allowed Benito Juárez to add further to the commemorative landscape there with the renaming of the Paseo del Emperador as the Paseo de la Reforma in February 1872. Future governments added to the plaza, with more trees, new pavements, and other beautifications. In 1877 the railroad entrepreneur Antonio Escandón donated a statue to Christopher Columbus to the park.52 Farther south, despite their complicated and often unsuccessful military histories, South American countries made every effort to create a commemorative landscape that could help foster a national identity. While not littering the landscape with monuments as was done in the southern states, Latin American nation-­states did erect memorials infused with nationalism and patriotism to bring people together and foster a national mythology. Then there was Africa. Between the American Civil War and the First World War was the Second Anglo-­Boer War, where many of the commemorative innovations of the American conflict were refined and further developed before being picked up for the global one. As one might expect, both Boer and Briton interpreted the war very differently. As with the Confederates, the Boers’ descendants, the Afrikaaners, emphasized the David and Goliath struggle. The sufferings of Boer civilians—­particularly in British concentration camps—­ were highlighted in much the same way as southern civilians’ hardships caused by Sherman’s March to the Sea were upheld in the South. Both peoples emphasized the violation of the sacred political right of self-­determination, each conveniently overlooking the same right for either Africans or African 220

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Americans. Further, if southerners would refer to the American Civil War as the “War between the States” or the “War for Southern Independence” (or even the “War of Northern Aggression”), the Afrikaaners called the Boer War variously the “English War” (die Engelseoorlog) or even the “Second War of Freedom” (Tweede Vryheidsoorlog). Boers and southerners had another thing in common: slavery. Although slavery was most certainly not the cause of either Boer war, nor was the institution practiced on anything like the scale in the American South, the Boers were enslavers. That said, they inhabited independent republics, which were maneuvered into fighting and being conquered by the far more powerful British Empire. Yet the respective responses to their defeat by Boer and Confederate is instructive.53 As during the American Civil War, the warring sides in South Africa were deeply divided. Just as the Union had the so-­called Copperheads (Confederate sympathizers and antiwar Democrats), the British had the so-­called pro-­Boers (Britons opposed to the war generally and the concentration camps in particular).54 Just as the South had Unionists, southerners who opposed secession and supported the North, a surprisingly large number of Boers sided with the British.55 Later Afrikaaner histories—­as with southern ones—­tended to omit this inconvenient fact. Although there certainly were later Afrikaaner histories, such as Rayne Kruger’s, that took an approach based on reconciliation akin to those of some southerners and emphasized the valor on both sides, others were less forgiving and had no interest in conciliation.56 Further, these unreconciled Afrikaaners despised their equivalent of “Scalawags,” southerners who joined the Republican Party during Reconstruction, among them Lieutenant General James Longstreet. One of the most famous of these hensoppers (literally “hands uppers,” that is, those who surrendered) being Jan Christiaan Smuts, a former—­and formidable—­Boer commando who ended up serving as a British general during the First World War, later promoted to field marshal, and to all intents and purposes ended his days as a servant of the British Empire.57 As in the United States, both the British and the Afrikaaner commemorations were different. Monuments to the fallen were erected in both Britain and South Africa and structures named after the struggle. This also occurred throughout Britain’s Dominions, particularly in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, which had provided troops to the war effort; by contrast, monu221

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ments were erected and streets and buildings pointedly named after various Boers in the Netherlands.58 Initially, those in South Africa were restricted largely to commemorate men who had fought on the British side, although a monument to the Boers who died in the British concentration camps had been erected by 1913. Gradually, however, monuments to the Boers were erected, too, including a museum opened by the former Boer general, now in the capacity of South African prime minister, J. B. M. Hertzog (an unapologetic defender of Afrikaaner culture) in 1931. This process rapidly accelerated after the Afrikaaner National Party (Nasionale Party)—­sometimes referred to as the Nationalist Party—­took power in 1948, defeating Smuts’s government.59 Unlike the South, the Boer republics did rise again, when all formal ties with Britain were terminated and South Africa became an independent, Afrikaaner-­dominated republic in 1961. Like the Redeemed South’s segregation, the racial supremacy and discrimination that had previously existed was resurrected and redeveloped, with the system known as Apartheid legally instituted in 1948. Jim Crow may have preceded Apartheid, but the end results were very similar.60 There was another similarity, too: both Apartheid and southern segregation were born out of a legacy of military defeat, which should serve as a reminder that history—­and how it is remembered—­has consequences. In the end, death brought many rebellious and victorious leaders together in how their national communities commemorated their passing. By the 1890s, irreconcilable Kossuthists had emerged in Hungary demanding independence.61 The Ausgleich, which had granted Hungary extensive autonomy within the renamed Austro-­Hungarian Empire in 1867, was not an acceptable solution to these leaders, especially since Lajos Kossuth remained committed to Hungarian independence and had not acknowledged the legitimacy of this compromise government. Just as Confederate veterans and emblems offered a rallying point for supporters of Jim Crow legislation, Kossuth offered a symbol for those opposed to the imperial government in Vienna. Kossuth had not accepted Franz Josef as emperor, just like some southerners never accepted defeat in the Civil War. Somewhat comparable to the twenty thousand residents who had wished farewell to Jefferson Davis upon the former Confederate president’s death in New Orleans five years earlier, when Kossuth died in 1894, hundreds of thou222

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sands participated in funeral parades around Hungary, among them veterans of the 1848 struggle beneath their ragged battle flags. Politician Julius Justh gave a powerful eulogy, saying: “In Louis Kossuth, we mourn one of the greatest, most honorable, and most selfless figures of history. He is not only our dead, but the dead of humanity . . . for the services of Kossuth were larger, worldwide in significance, immortal.” Southerners could hardly have stated the importance of their cause and leaders any better. Just like Confederate veterans who, in some respects, accomplished more off the battlefield and in death for their cause, so, too, did Kossuth achieve more in death as a national symbol of Hungarian resistance than he ever did alive.62 In the United States the Civil War brought about a dramatic sea change in the commemoration of war and soldiers. Especially, the Lost Cause myth allowed southern nationalists a means to continue their identity politics well after their state experiment had failed. Yet this was hardly an isolated occurrence, as other failed separatist movements embraced similar storytelling to keep their imagined community alive and ready for the next major struggle. As monuments went up everywhere, the commemorative landscape changed from the generals and kings to the individual soldiers of individual communities. The United States participated in this global rethinking of the commemorative landscape. The imagining process of the nation-­state does not just rely on language or culture but also history—­including mythologized or perverted versions that serve a nationalist purpose. Few forms of history have served nationalist purposes better than remembering veterans and wars in writing and monumentation.

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n June 28, 1914, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, were assassinated in Sarajevo, Bosnia-­Herzegovina. Bismarck had allegedly predicted thirty years before that if war came to Europe, “it will be some damn fool thing in the Balkans that sets it off.” The murders did indeed set in motion a chain of events that culminated in the First World War and the end of the long nineteenth century. The British referred to it as “the Great War,” a name recycled from the struggle against Napoleon. But it was the Germans who coined the more accurate description, “Der Weltkrieg.” It was indeed a world war. Just how much of one may be demonstrated by a single fact: the Kingdom of Swaziland produced two flying aces—­not just pilots, aces—­for Britain’s newly created Royal Flying Corps (Royal Air Force after April 1, 1918).1 The assassin, nineteen-­year-­old Gavrilo Princip, had been very lucky; the archduke’s driver had taken a wrong turn, delivering Ferdinand to his murderer, who used, by the standard of the day, the very modern semiautomatic pistol; the technology of death was still advancing. At his trial Princip declared, “I am a Yugoslav nationalist, aiming for the unification of all Yugoslavs, and I do not care what form of state, but it must be freed from Austria.” 2 Of course, Princip’s Yugoslavia would be Serbian-­dominated, and hindsight tells us how that worked out. Nonetheless, from his nationalist perspective, assassinating Austria’s crown prince was the legitimate killing of a tyrant. “Sic semper tyrannis,” John Wilkes Booth allegedly said, and his motives were much the same as Princip’s, even if one assassination concluded a devastating war, while the other precipitated one. In any case, Ferdinand was the victim of the clash between imperialism and nationalism.

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Austria had only acquired Bosnia-­Herzegovina—­the plurality of its population was Serb but with large Muslim and Croat minorities—­very recently, in 1908. Previously, it had been part of the Ottoman Empire. By a cruel irony, Ferdinand had opposed the annexation of Bosnia-­Herzegovina by the Austro-­ Hungarian Empire. Having likened the Serbs to “pigs,” “thieves,” and—­again, more irony—­“murderers,” he believed that annexing the former Ottoman territory would simply make the volatile political situation in Europe even worse. Ferdinand was no fool. He was also brave and obstinate: several attempts had been made on his life during his visit to the region, including when a bomb bounced off the roof of his car, but he insisted on completing his tour.3 This fell under the heading of “duty.” It was under the same that millions of young men, not just from Europe but also from North America, Asia, and even Africa, enlisted to fight and die for their nations, just as previous generations had done during the Napoleonic Wars, the Crimean War, the Franco-­German War, and the American Civil War—­the last of which had been raging when Franz Ferdinand was born on December 18, 1863. Ferdinand was not the only individual of consequence with respect to the First World War born at the time of the Civil War. Britain’s King George V was born in 1865 and his prime minister, David Lloyd George, who took over from his unsuccessful predecessor, H. H. Asquith, was born in 1863. With respect to His Majesty’s dominions, all three of Australia’s prime ministers during the First World War were born between 1860 and 1862. Canada’s Sir Robert Borden and New Zealand’s William Massey were born just prior, in 1854 and 1856 respectively. Kaiser Wilhelm II also just preceded the Civil War, being born in 1859, but Erich Ludendorff was born in 1865 and Arthur Zimmerman, the German foreign minister of the telegram fame, was born in 1864. Although it is to be expected that those in charge in 1914–­18 would be of a similar age—­ there usually is a dominant generation at any time—­the number born within five years on either side of or during the American Civil War is notable; Tsar Nicholas II, for example, was born in 1868. Nor does this apply only to the statesmen and rulers: the commander of the American Expeditionary Forces in the First World War, General John “Black Jack” Pershing, was born in 1860, while the British field marshal Douglas Haig was born in 1861. Further, Philippe Pétain, who would later head Vichy France, was born in 1856. That

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same year saw the birth of Robert Nivelle, commander in chief of the French armies after 1916, who declared, “Ils ne passeront pas!” (They shall not pass!), at Verdun and arguably invented the creeping barrage. His opposite number at Verdun, German chief of staff Erich von Falkenhayn, was born in 1861. There are, however, two glaring exceptions. Austria-­Hungary’s emperor, Franz Josef, was born in 1830, while France’s fourth and final prime minister during the war, Georges “Le Tigre” Clemenceau, was born in 1841. Interestingly, Clemenceau was old enough to have participated in the American Civil War, and he had in fact hoped to serve as a doctor for the Union armies. Events conspired to prevent this, however, including his being imprisoned for political activities by Louis Napoleon. As a result, Clemenceau arrived in the United States only after the war had ended, residing there from 1865 to 1870. He traveled extensively throughout the country, meeting various individuals, including General (later President) Grant. While there, Clemenceau married Mary Plummer, the orphaned daughter of a Union general who had been killed in action. While they had three children, the marriage was not a success. Clemenceau was habitually unfaithful, and when he discovered that his wife had similarly lapsed, he divorced her. Although it is claimed he dispatched her back to America, Mary was still living in France when the United States entered the First World War, greeting American troops at her house. Regardless of his marriage, Clemenceau remained pro-­American throughout his life. For example, he aided the United States during the Spanish-­American War by assisting Captain William S. Sims, the U.S. naval attaché, to set up an intelligence network to trace the movement of Spanish ships. At that time, Clemenceau was out of government and working as a journalist, but his pro-­ American activities were at odds with both his country’s official neutrality and the broadly pro-­Spanish sentiment of the French public. His respect was often reciprocated on the American side. Both Clemenceau and Theodore Roose­ velt spoke highly of each other to colleagues, even though the two men only managed to meet once.4 The United States, however, was on the other side of the Atlantic, and the foreign nation Clemenceau became most familiar with was the United Kingdom, despite the age-­old rivalry between it and France. He did so to the extent that one political opponent noted, “L’idée fixe de Clemenceau est: ‘l’Angleterre’” (The fixed idea of Clemenceau is: England). He made many British friends 226

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and made connections with key figures in the nation’s political sphere, including William Gladstone (who had declared that the South “had made a nation” in 1863) and Sir Charles Dilke, as well as military men like Field Marshal Frederick, Earl Roberts, the man who oversaw the defeat of the Boer republics in the Second Anglo-­Boer War. Of course, there was a transactional aspect to all of this, namely, that Clemenceau wanted to bring Britain and France into an alliance against Germany. He was thus most cordial with Britons who were Francophiles or at least anti-­German. With Germanophiles, those favoring “splendid isolation” or even simply a reduction in British-­German antagonism, there was considerably less rapport. The pro-­German Queen Victoria recognized this and subsequently forbade her ministers to meet with him. By 1901, however, Victoria was dead, and Clemenceau received a better reception from her Francophile son, Edward VII. This explains why Clemenceau’s relationship with David Lloyd George, whom he first met in 1908, was distinctly unaimable. Lloyd George, whose mother tongue was Welsh and who had opposed the Boer War, was averse to Germanophobia generally and wanted to end or at the least mitigate the potentially dangerous British-­German tensions. Consequently, Clemenceau dismissed him as “appallingly ignorant.” The two men would have a similarly frosty relationship from November 1917, when Clemenceau became prime minister of France, throughout the war and then during the negotiations at Paris, although Le Tigre did grudgingly reevaluate the intellectual abilities of the “Welsh Wizard.” 5 To Clemenceau, the struggle against Imperial Germany was always much more than a Franco-­German one. In his view French civilization had an inherent value that transcended its borders, while what he conceived to be German militarism (whether Imperial Germany was more militarized than Republican France is surely debatable) posed a threat to the basic values of democracy and freedom. Clemenceau was a complex man. Thus, although undeniably a French patriot, he was more than that—­for example, he supported Radical Reconstruction in America and was a staunch Dreyfusard.6 His republicanism encompassed the principles of the French Revolution, political opposition to Louis Napoleon, and support for the Polish rebels and the Union’s cause in the Civil War. Clemenceau’s political stance was not only cosmopolitan, but it was also militant. He believed that democracy, in the final analysis, had to be not only defended but also promulgated by the sword; he was not called “The 227

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Tiger” for nothing. Clemenceau thus took inspiration from military leaders as varied as Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Field Marshal Roberts. Consequently, he despised politicians he saw as liberal-­pacifists, men such as Lloyd George and John Maynard Keynes (the latter returned the disdain, dismissing Clemenceau as a throwback from an older world and a prisoner of nationalism). It was this same hostility that underlay Le Tigre’s hostility to the “schoolmaster in politics,” President Thomas Woodrow Wilson. Clemenceau’s hostility toward Wilson for his opposition toward imposing a harsh settlement on Germany is well known. This is not to say the British and U.S. governments did not have their own serious differences—­they did—­ but these paled in comparison to those that divided the French and American leaders. Clemenceau acidly remarked that while the Almighty had contented himself with Ten Commandments, Wilson must have fourteen, referring to the president’s Fourteen Points.7 He also insisted on informing the American public, via a friendly journalist in the New York Times, that “Wilsonism” did not have a monopoly on idealism.8 In a very real sense, just as Metternich and Castlereagh represented two poles of opinion at Vienna in 1814–­15, the same must be said of Clemenceau and Wilson. Nonetheless, while the American’s idealism was very different to the Frenchman’s—­it was idealism. As Richard Holbrooke has noted, the Schoolmaster’s many supporters, from Herbert Hoover to Robert McNamara, have viewed his efforts in Paris as one of history’s noblest dreams, while the objections of his critics, such as George F. Kennan and Henry Kissinger, are based on what they see as his overly moralistic approach to foreign policy.9 Wilson had attempted to keep the United States out of the war, running on that platform to secure reelection in 1916. Further, he had offered in good faith to mediate between the belligerents to bring the conflict to an end, only to be rebuffed by the Entente. While Germany complained with some justice that America’s wartime neutrality favored the Entente, Wilson did attempt to act as an honest broker between the combatants but lacked the support of members of his cabinet, who actively pursued a pro-­Entente diplomacy.10 Whether he was right to take the United States into the war—­a question that should surely be asked of all those politicians involved—­remains debated, but American entry at the least broke a stalemate and brought it to an end. Wilson later claimed that he did this because “the world must be made safe for democracy.” 228

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During the Paris Peace Conference, Wilson’s call for the establishment of an association of nations to guarantee the independence and territorial integrity of all—­the League of Nations—­was the forerunner of the present-­day United Nations. Whatever its flaws and ultimate failings, the League of Nations was the first attempt to create a global body to prevent future conflict and ensure that “the war to end all wars” became exactly that. For this, Wilson was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919. More complicated, perhaps, was his call for national self-­determination: “We say now that all these people have the right to live their own lives under governments which they themselves choose to set up. That is the American principle.” The president’s statement sounded good, but what did it mean in reality? The British and French were not going to relinquish their global empires any more than the United States was going to return the territory it had seized from Mexico in 1848 or leave Hawaii. Nor was Wilson, who had invaded and occupied Haiti and had sent U.S. troops into Mexico and several other Latin American nations, about to reverse his efforts “to teach the South American republics to elect good men.” 11 It also did not apply to the Irish, who by 1919 had begun another war of independence, which would result in the island’s partition, and whom Wilson refused to support on the grounds that they rejected democratic means to achieve the same. On the other hand, it did apply to the American colony of the Philippines, to which the president granted more autonomy in preparation for full independence. Further, the idea of self-­determination encouraged later anticolonial and anti-­imperial movements, although not always in the manner Wilson or the United States expected or intended. One individual who was very attentive to the term was Ho Chi Minh of Vietnam, then a resident in Paris.12 Given the importance of the United States to global affairs in 1919 as opposed to 1776, 1815, or 1861–­65, Wilson had a claim to being the most important U.S. president in world history at the time. Further, his domestic legacy, especially prior to the U.S. entry into the war, was—­with one important exception—­broadly liberal as well. The only president to hold a PhD (from Johns Hopkins, which as earlier observed was modeled on German lines), Wilson’s background was academic (hence the “Schoolmaster” nickname) and cosmopolitan. As president he oversaw considerable progressive legislation, including women’s suffrage, after initial hesitation, persuading Congress 229

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to pass the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution. It is certainly true that during his lifetime, Wilson had his detractors; Clemenceau’s view of him was not unique. The Australian prime minister William “Billy” Hughes regarded the president as a pious humbug (while his comment on the Fourteen Points is best not repeated here). And the president had many political opponents in the United States, including Henry Cabot Lodge. Holbrooke’s observation that Wilson “inspired tens of millions who never met him, and frustrated those who worked with him,” is a just one.13 Nonetheless, when Wilson died on February 3, 1924, he did so as a liberal hero and regarded as one of the great presidents, not merely in the United States but across the world. True, the U.S. failure to join the League of Nations and the league’s failure to prevent the Second World War fatally damaged the reputation of the Paris Peace Conference. Even before the rise of Adolf Hitler, men like Keynes had described the treaty as a “Carthaginian Peace” imposed upon a prostrate Germany, a claim seized upon by the Nazis. As was the case with the Congress of Vienna, the contradictions inherent to the Paris Peace Conference ultimately doomed its aspirations. This failure inevitably contributed to the decline of Wilson’s reputation. Yet even after the Second World War, he was still broadly regarded as a great president, as the establishment of the prestigious Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (or Wilson Center), founded in his memory in 1968, demonstrates. But his reputation has declined precipitously in the early twenty-­first century. At the time of writing, his alma mater, Princeton University, is in the process of removing his name from various campus institutions. But why this fall from grace for a once-­considered great president? Wilson, as with many of his First World War contemporaries, was born within a few years of the Civil War—­in his case, on December 28, 1856, in Virginia. Wilson’s parents were proslavery—­whether they ever had any enslaved persons, as opposed to hired servants, working for them is unclear—­and staunch supporters of secession and the Confederacy. His father, a minister, was one of the founders of the Southern Presbyterian Church when it split from its northern brethren in 1861. Thereafter he moved the family to Augusta, Georgia. Thus, Wilson’s childhood was spent in the Civil War and Reconstruction South. Only in 1875, as Reconstruction was winding down, did he move North to attend the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University). Although his higher education and scholarly and political career took place in the North, 230

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most notably New Jersey, Wilson was nonetheless the first southerner to be elected president since Reconstruction (Lyndon Baines Johnson would later be the first southerner elected from a southern state).14 And Wilson did not hide this fact. While his New Jersey career—­academic and political—­cleared obstacles an entirely southern upbringing might have created, he openly identified with his native region. Napoleon Bonaparte is supposed to have said, “To understand the man you have to know what was happening in the world when he was twenty.” So, while Wilson accepted the Union’s victory—­as with Clemenceau, Lincoln was one of his heroes—­he also supported the Redeemed South. One of his longstanding friends at Johns Hopkins was Thomas Dixon, author of Lost Cause literature such as the virulently racist novel The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905), which became the basis for D. W. Griffith’s movie Birth of a Nation (1915), which, in turn, resulted in the reestablishment of the Ku Klux Klan. Whether Wilson, who enjoyed a private viewing of the film, referred to it as “writing history with lightning” remains unproven, he was probably in sympathy with its views nonetheless.15 Juxtaposed against his being the statesman of his age was the fact that Wilson was the Jim Crow president. He did not create that repressive system, of course, but his illustrious career ran parallel to Jim Crow’s strange one. It began early. As a professor his five-­volume A History of the American People (1902) adhered to the Lost Cause version of events. The Civil War was about states’ rights, slavery was defended, and Reconstruction condemned as “the intolerable burden of governments sustained by the votes of ignorant negroes,” which “the white men of the South were aroused by the mere instinct of self-­preservation to rid themselves, by fair means or foul,” thus recasting the Ku Klux Klan as heroes.16 As president of Princeton he opposed the admission of Black students. Although in his 1912 presidential campaign he promised “absolute fair dealing” with respect to African Americans, Wilson reneged on that almost immediately.17 He oversaw the unprecedented segregation of the federal government, fired fifteen out of seventeen Black supervisors previously appointed to federal jobs and replaced them with whites, and in federal positions throughout the country had Black employees either segregated or dismissed.18 Given African Americans had gained access to these positions during Reconstruction, Wilson was reversing that aspect of it. Black support231

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ers such as William Monroe Trotter came to rue their campaigning for him. Upon gaining a meeting with the president to object to the segregation of the civil service and the increasing Jim Crow legislation, which ran contrary to his campaign promises, Trotter and his delegation were ejected from the White House.19 Wilson claimed that segregation generally, and Jim Crow legislation particularly, benefited African Americans. While he did denounce the practice of lynching, the rate of which was roughly sixty a year during his presidency, by speaking against it publicly in July 1918, Wilson failed to support proposed federal antilynching legislation, such as the Dyer bill. He claimed the federal government had no authority to interfere in the matter unless requested to by the state in question—­a very states’ rights argument. In the words of activist Kelly Miller, lynching was for Wilson “a regrettable social malady to be treated with cautious and calculated neglect.” 20 Put another way, the first southern president from the post-­Reconstruction South supported Redeeming not only his region but also the United States as a whole. Clemenceau and Wilson each represent, in their own way, many of the themes described in this work and place the American Civil War within the context of the wider world as well as its lasting consequences. Both men also, as fierce proponents of La République and American Progressivism respectively, demonstrate the strengths and limitations of nineteenth-­century international liberalism. Nationalism, imperialism, racism, socialism, and various conservative and reactionary movements all contended both against and in collaboration with it, but in key respects it emerged as the dominant ideology. Taken as a whole, the generation of men—­and they were all men—­who led the world into war in 1914 came of age in the American Civil War era. Contrary to what is sometimes claimed, they were no more nationalist or belligerent—­ indeed, they were probably less so—­than older generations. And they were undoubtedly far more cosmopolitan. The world they inhabited was far more interconnected on almost every level than it had been at any time previously. They were comparatively more liberal, too, having witnessed a massive expansion of the franchise across the globe and the apparently unstoppable spread of political liberalization—­even the tsar had had to make some concessions to this fact in 1905 following Russia’s defeat at the hands of Japan. With respect to imperialism, it is virtually inconceivable that previous generations would 232

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have condemned King Leopold II of Belgium’s activities in the Congo in the manner of the 1904 Casement Report.21 In the end, however, just as representative government could not prevent the Civil War, the spread of liberalism, democracy, and cosmopolitanism did not prevent the First World War. With respect to the twenty-­first century, the American Civil War remains a case study in the meaning and limitations of the nation-­state and nationalism, something still pertinent to the present. Four of the nations examined herein—­the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, and the United States of America—­are all regarded by most as liberal democratic nation-­states. Yet some respected historians argue that the United Kingdom, with its combination of nations, is not in fact a nation-­state at all, but rather an imperial construct; as one writer has put it, “The so-­called United Kingdom is not, and never has been, a nation-­state.” 22 Although most would regard Canada as a nation-­state, legitimate questions have been raised with respect to whether the province of Quebec, with its National Assembly, is actually a nation unto itself. As for the rest of Canada, given the perennial inability to agree on what constitutes the Canadian identity, historians have questioned also whether it can be considered a nation-­state.23 Indeed, both the United Kingdom and Canada have had referendums held recently by component parts—­Scotland in 2014 and Quebec in 1980 and 1995—­based on independence (or secession). Then there is Germany, where the experiences of the twentieth century have created a determination to submerge or reconfigure its national identity into a wider European one via the European Union, pithily described as a European Germany instead of a German Europe. The United States, too, faces challenges. Complaints about the erosion of a shared national identity versus the insistence that that same national identity is based on racist or otherwise exclusionary criteria are commonplace. Questions about the United States becoming a minority-­majority nation and de facto bilingualism with respect to Spanish are all fundamentally concerns about national identity and national cohesion.24 Further, while this study was being completed, the events of January 6, 2021, took place. A mob of supporters of President Donald Trump stormed the Capitol intending to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election by disrupting the joint session of Congress assembled to count electoral votes that would formalize the victory of President-­elect Joe Biden. Trump’s supporters, apparently encouraged by 233

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the soon-­to-­be former president himself, claimed that the election had been “stolen” by widespread voter fraud—­a charge most independent observers have denied. Although in the end, only one person was killed—­a rioter shot dead by a police officer—­the consequences could have been far worse. A week afterward, the House of Representatives impeached Trump for the second time—­an unprecedented event in U.S. history. The prosecutions of the rioters themselves remain ongoing at the time of publication. In an ironic twist, as much as the rebel army during the Civil War tried to reach Washington, it was during this assault on U.S. republicanism that the Confederate flag made its way into the U.S. Capitol. Predictably, the incident, a culmination of the entire Trump presidency, was viewed by many as an example of the deepening—­and worsening—­ political and cultural divisions within the United States. Consequently, it provoked several publications, perhaps the most important of which is a comparative study by Barbara F. Walter of recent civil conflicts and how they might apply to the situation in the United States.25 Walter identifies the various markers of a country heading to civil war and warns that many apply to the United States in the 2020s. Although noting a new American civil war would not look anything like the first, she continually links the two in her analysis. Walter’s work, while considered alarmist by some, has nonetheless received overwhelmingly respectful reviews. Apparently, our imagined communities, to use Benedict Anderson’s phrase, are still decidedly unfinished and to some extent inchoate inventions, not just with respect to the United States but across the globe. And while the situation in the twenty-­first century is one the peoples of the nineteenth century would see very differently from us, it is nonetheless one that they would have few difficulties understanding.

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Introduction 1. “The European Situation,” New York Herald, Oct. 4, 1867, 6. 2. The global shift has been identified by historians who, dissatisfied with the nation-­state framework, point to the interconnected nature of the world and argue that histories should be comparative and transnational. See Maxine Berg, “Global History: Approaches and New Directions,” in Writing the History of the Global: Challenges for the Twenty-­First Century, ed. Maxine Berg (London: British Academy Scholarship Online, 2013). Similarly, some historians argue that around the Age of Revolutions (c1770s–­c1820), the cohesiveness of the Atlantic World gave way to global trends of migration and trade. See Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); and the essays by Thomas Bender, Jorge Cañizares-­Esguerra, and Erik R. Seeman in The Atlantic in Global History, 1500–­2000, ed. Jorge Cañizares-­Esguerra and Erik R. Seeman (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, 2007). Thus, the global shift refers to people, goods, and ideas traveling around the world and not being restricted to a regional framework. In the nineteenth century we can observe a shift to an interconnected world in which people thought in global terms, political leaders considered global problems, and migrants recognized they could move anywhere. See Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt: Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2009), 13. 3. See Enrico Dal Lago, “Writing the US Civil War Era into Nineteenth-­Century World History,” Journal of the Civil War Era 11 (June 2021): 255–­7 1. 4. Carl N. Degler, One among Many: The Civil War in Comparative Perspective (Gettysburg, PA: Gettysburg College, 1990), 8. 5. Degler, One among Many, 7–­8, 15, 24, 26–­27. 6. Dal Lago, “Writing the US Civil War Era into Nineteenth-­Century World History,” 258. 7. Enrico Dal Lago, Agrarian Elites: American Slaveholders and Southern Italian Landowners, 1815–­1861 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005); Dal Lago, William Lloyd Garrison and Giuseppe Mazzini: Abolition, Democracy, and Radical Reform (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013); Dal Lago, The Age of Lincoln and Cavour Comparative Perspectives on 19th-­ Century American and Italian Nation-­Building (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Dal Lago, Civil War and Agrarian Unrest: The Confederate South and Southern Italy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

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8. Ian Tyrell, Transnational Nation: United States History in Global Perspective since 1789 (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 3. Another work of note is Thomas Bender, A Nation among Nations: America’s Place in World History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006). 9. See, for example, Jewel L. Spangler and Frank Towers, eds. Remaking North American Sovereignty: State Transformation in the 1860s (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020). This collection examines various aspects, events, and personalities in Canada, Mexico, and the United States. 10. Niels Eichhorn, Liberty and Slavery: European Separatists, Southern Secession, and the American Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2019); Andre M. Fleche, The Revolution of 1861: The American Civil War and the Age of Nationalist Conflict (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Paul Quigley, Shifting Grounds: Nationalism and the American South, 1848–­1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Such works are distinct from immigration studies, in which the focus is on a specific community and its influence on the country, such as the many works on Irish or German Americans or Forty-­Eighter studies. 11. One exception to this is Gregory P. Downs, The Second American Revolution: The Civil War–­ Era Struggle over Cuba and the Rebirth of the American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019). 12. This is, for example, an issue with Ann L. Tucker, Newest Born of Nations: European Nationalist Movements and the Making of the Confederacy (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020). Tucker presents the work as a transnational study but relies solely on how southern newspapers reported and represented European events—­in many cases they manipulated their coverage to fit the domestic southern agenda. In addition, many diplomatic histories fall into this category when the studies are only focused on one set of bilateral interactions—­usually that of the United States—­ and ignore the larger picture. 13. See Downs, Second American Revolution; and Eichhorn, Liberty and Slavery. 14. See, for example, Don H. Doyle, ed., American Civil Wars: The United States, Latin America, Europe, and the Crisis of the 1860s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017); Doyle, ed., Secession as an International Phenomenon: From America’s Civil War to Contemporary Separatist Movements (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010); Doyle, The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War (New York: Basic Books, 2017); Aaron C. Sheehan-­Dean, Reckoning with Rebellion: War and Sovereignty in the Nineteenth Century (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2020); and Tucker, Newest Born of Nations. For Ian Tyrell’s critique, see “American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History,” American Historical Review 96:4 (Oct. 1991): 1031–­55. 15. Benjamin Schwarz, “The Diversity Myth: America’s Leading Export,” Atlantic Monthly (May 1995), 57. Schwarz is warning against this view. 16. One recent example of this is Doyle, Cause of All Nations. While not as overt, a similar problem bedevils Louise L. Stevenson, Lincoln in the Atlantic World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Most of the chapters take an exceptionalist approach in David T. Gleeson and Simon Lewis, eds., The Civil War as Global Conflict: Transnational Meanings of the American Civil War (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2014). The same is true for Richard Carwardine and Jay Sexton, eds., The Global Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 17. Ian Tyrrell, “What Is American Exceptionalism?,” Ian Tyrrell (blog), https://iantyrrell.wordpress .com/papers-­and-­comments/ (accessed Aug. 26, 2002).

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18. Peter J. Parish, “Gladstone and America,” in Gladstone, ed. Peter J. Jagger (London: Hambledon, 1998): 86. 19. The issue of global political responses to the American Civil War is discussed in chapter three. 20. Raymond Grew, “The Case for Comparing Histories,” American Historical Review 85:4 (Oct. 1980): 763. 21. Broad works of comparative history range from David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007) to Linda Colley, The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World (New York: Liveright, 2021). 22. Grew, “Case for Comparing Histories,” 765. 23. Philippa Levine, “Is Comparative History Possible?,” History and Theory 53:3 (Oct. 2014): 332. 24. Levine, “Is Comparative History Possible?,” 332. 25. Levine, “Is Comparative History Possible?,” 335–­47. 26. David Thelen, “The Nation and Beyond: Transnational Perspectives on United States History,” Journal of American History 86:3 (December 1999): 967. 27. Michael McGerr, “The Price of the ‘New Transnational History,’” American Historical Review 96:4 (Oct. 1991): 1056. 28. Maurice Mandelbaum, “Some Forms and Uses of Comparative History,” American Studies International 18:2 (Winter 1980): 20–­21. 29. Mandelbaum, “Some Forms and Uses of Comparative History,” 22–­28, 30. 30. Carl N. Degler, “Comparative History: An Essay Review,” Journal of Southern History 34:3 (Aug. 1968): 425–­28. 31. Marcus Gräser, “World History in a Nation-­State: The Transnational Disposition in Historical Writing in the United States,” Journal of American History 95:4 (Mar. 2009): 1038. 32. Degler, One among Many, 13. 33. Steven Hahn, A Nation without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830–­1910 (New York: Viking, 2016), 4–­5. 34. Rachel A. Shelden, “The Politics of Continuity and Change in the Long Civil War Era,” Civil War History 65 (Dec. 2019): 319–­41. 35. Generally referred to as the “Franco-­Prussian War” in the English-­speaking world, the authors have chosen the more accurate title of “Franco-­German War,” which is the name used in both France and Germany. After all, the conflict pitted France against the North German Confederation and the three south German principalities, not simply Prussia—­an important point, as this work will make clear. In its own fashion, calling the Franco-­German War the Franco-­Prussian War is as limiting as it would be calling the American Civil War the “United States–­South Carolina War.” 1. Nations and Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century Epigraphs: Parliamentary debates were not transcribed in the mid-­seventeenth century. Thus, what Cromwell said has been pieced together from three contemporaneous sources, some of which were based on hearsay rather than eyewitness accounts. Although it possibly derives from an earlier source, the complete speech apparently first appeared in the Annual Register (1767), 212–­13. The Annual Register notes: “The following piece is said to have been found lately among some papers

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that formerly belonged to Oliver Cromwell; and is supposed to be a copy of the very words which he spoke to the members of the long parliament, when he turned them out of the house. It is communicated by a person, who signs his name T. Ireton, and says the paper is marked by the following words; spoken by O.C. when he put an end to the long parliament.” Ireton could have been related to Cromwell’s son-­in-­law, Henry Ireton, who died in Ireland in 1651 and whose papers were held by his son in the Inns of Court until they disappeared in the early eighteenth century. In an email exchange with one of the authors, Dr. John Morrill, general editor of the five-­volume collection of Cromwell’s writings and speeches, noted that while he and his team included the speech above, they were “very non-­committal about how genuine it was” and that “it was very, very borderline for inclusion.” The author would like to thank Professor Morrill, Dr. Grant Tapsell, and Dr. Robert Saunders for their assistance in this matter. As for Lincoln, many of his recorded utterances are of questionable authenticity as well. See Don E. Fehrenbacher, Virginia Fehrenbacher, eds., The Recollected Works of Abraham Lincoln (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), xlvii–­xlviii. 1. That said, historian Garry Wills recently unfavorably compared Oliver Cromwell to George Washington. He celebrates Washington’s voluntarily giving up power in comparison to Cromwell’s example, but his analysis ignores the massive changes in English and British political history—­this directly affected America—­between the mid-­seventeenth and late eighteenth century such as, for example, the Glorious Revolution and the development of the office of prime minister. See Wills, Certain Trumpets: The Call of Leaders (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994). 2. Quoted in Charles Firth, The Parallel between the English and American Civil Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910), 2. 3. Firth, Parallel between the English and American Civil Wars, 31. Isaac Foot tracked down Lincoln and Cromwell using the exact same phrase to describe their respective peoples: the president while addressing the border states in July 1862, the Lord Protector when addressing the first Protectorate Parliament in January 1655. Isaac Foot, Oliver Cromwell and Abraham Lincoln: A Comparison (London: Royal Society of Literature, 1944), 28. 4. Foot, Oliver Cromwell and Abraham Lincoln, 25–­26. 5. Foot, Oliver Cromwell and Abraham Lincoln, 35. Cromwell’s is the first sentence; Lincoln’s the second. 6. Milton’s poem is Sonnet 16: “Cromwell, our chief of men, who through a cloud.” Whitman’s is “O Captain! My Captain!” 7. Foot, Oliver Cromwell and Abraham Lincoln, 36–­37. 8. For a recent discussion about this, see Mark E. Neely Jr., The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 9. On Cromwell see Martyn Bennett, Oliver Cromwell (London: Routledge, 2006); J. C. Davis, Oliver Cromwell (London: Edward Arnold, 2001); and John Morrill, ed., Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (London: Longman 1990). Also useful is Christopher Hill, God’s Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1970). 10. Foot, Oliver Cromwell and Abraham Lincoln, 29. Some scholars argue that Lincoln’s views on African Americans significantly evolved over time, but the evidence remains inconclusive. See, for example, Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York: W. W.

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Norton, 2010). See also Lerone Bennett Jr., Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream (Chicago: Johnson, 2000). 11. See, for example, John Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution (London: Longman, 1994); and Hahn, Nation without Borders. 12. There is no shortage of works on nations and nationalism. Useful studies include John Armstrong, Nations before Nationalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982); Paul R. Brass, Ethnicity and Nationalism: Theory and Comparison (London: SAGE, 1991); John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994 [1982]); Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1983); Philip Gorski, “The Mosaic Moment: An Early Modernist Critique of Modernist Theories of Nationalism,” American Journal of Sociology 105:5 (2000): 1428–­68; Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992 [1990]); Elie Kedourie, Nationalism (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1993 [1960]); K. R. Minogue, Nationalism (London: Batsford, 1969); Hugh Seton-­Watson, Nations and States: An Enquiry into the Origins of Nations and the Politics of Nationalism (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1977); Anthony D. Smith, The Antiquity of Nations (London: Polity, 2004); Joseph R. Strayer, J. On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970); Etienne Balibar, Immanuel Wallerstein, eds. Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1991). This excludes a vast corpus of works on specific national identities, some of which are cited later in this chapter. 13. With respect to the last, R. R. Davies points out that not only was the term “people” (gens, etc.,) common in medieval discourse, but that it was interchangeably used with the term “nation” (natio). See Philip S. Gorski, “Pre-­modern Nationalism, an Oxymoron?: The Evidence from England,” in The SAGE Handbook of Nations and Nationalism, ed. Gerard Delanty and Krishan Kumar (London: SAGE, 2006): 143–­56, 147. 14. Steve Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). 15. Gorski continues: “In true nationalism, they imply, loyalty to the nation is universal and supreme, and the ideology of the nation is pure and unadulterated. This is probably a fair description of what radical nationalists aspire to, but it is not a fair test for the existence of nationalism. It makes the dreams of nationalist ideologues into the criteria for the reality of nationalist politics.” Gorski, “Pre-­modern Nationalism: An Oxymoron?,” 154. 16. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 17. See, for example, Robert Cooper, The Postmodern State and the World Order, 2nd ed. (London: Demos, Foreign Policy Centre, 2000). 18. See, for example, Peter J. Parish, “An Exception to Most of the Rules: What Made American Nationalism Different in the Mid-­Nineteenth Century?,” Prologue 27 (Fall 1995): 219–­29. 19. Erich Angermann, “Challenges of Ambiguity: Doing Comparative History,” Fourth Annual Lecture, German Historical Institute, Washington, DC, Oct. 25, 1990, quoted in Degler, One among Many, 14. 20. Degler, One among Many, 14. 21. See, for example, Eichhorn, Liberty and Slavery.

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22. George P. Fletcher, Our Secret Constitution: How Lincoln Redefined American Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 12. 23. Schwartz, “Diversity Myth.” George Frederickson notes that this system was maintained by an ethnic hierarchy among white Americans, with those of British descent at the top. See Fredrickson, Diverse Nations: Explorations in the History of Racial and Ethnic Pluralism (New York: Routledge, 2015), chap. 1. 24. Randolph S. Bourne, “Transnational America,” Atlantic Monthly (July 1916): 86–­97. 25. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation, trans. R. F. Jones and G. H. Turnbull (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922), 136–­38, 143–­45. 26. Giuseppe Mazzini, “General Instructions for the Members of Young Italy,” in Selected Writings, ed. Nagendranath Gangulee (London: L. Drummond, 1945), 129–­31. 27. Gary Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992). 28. S. B. Vardy, “Louis Kossuth and the Slavery Question in America,” East European Quarterly 39:4 (2005): 449–­64. Lincoln’s admiration for Kossuth is discussed in Stevenson, Lincoln in the Atlantic World, chap. 3. Lincoln was certainly aware of this speech. 29. See James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 859. 30. This is the argument of Robert E. Bonner, Colors and Blood: Flag Passions of the Confederate South (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), chap. 6. 31. Anthony Marx reminds of us this in Faith in Nation: Exclusionary Origins of Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 32. For a discussion of this phenomenon, see Sam W. Haynes, Unfinished Revolution: The Early American Republic in a British World (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010). 33. D. P. Crook, Diplomacy during the American Civil War (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1975), 189. 34. On the Confederacy’s diplomatic ambitions, see Charles M. Hubbard, The Burden of Confederate Diplomacy (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1998); and Niels Eichhorn, “North Atlantic Trade in the Mid-­Nineteenth Century: A Case for Peace during the American Civil War,” Civil War History 61 (June 2015): 138–­72. See also Frank L. Owsley, King Cotton Diplomacy: Foreign Relations of the Confederate States of America, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959). 35. This consequence is emphasized in David P. Crook, The North, the South, and the Powers, 1861–­1865 (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1974). For a more recent examination in greater depth, see Marc-­William Palen, The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade: The Anglo-­American Struggle over Empire and Globalisation, 1846–­1896 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). For a comparative examination of the economic development of the United States, see Stefan Link and Noam Maggor, “The United States as a Developing Nation: Revisiting the Peculiarities of American History,” Past & Present 246 (Feb. 2020): 269–­306. 36. Certain immigrant groups have become “others” as well at various times in American history, including the Catholic Irish and the Chinese. Mexicans, too, have served as others. Yet African Americans and Native Americans have been more consistently “othered” than anyone else. 37. Quoted in James Taylor Carson, “‘The Obituary of Nations’: Ethnic Cleansing, Memory, and the Origins of the Old South,” Southern Cultures 14:4 (2008): 7.

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38. A discussion of this controversy may be found in Phillip W. Magness and Sebastian N. Page, Colonization after Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011). For a harsher view of Lincoln on this and other racial issues, see Bennett, Forced into Glory. 39. See, for example, Marc Egnal, Clash of Extremes: The Economic Origins of the Civil War (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009). Egnal posits that the rise of the economy of the Great Lakes replaced the old North–­South model with a North–­West one—­as went the economic decoupling, so, too, the political. This also meant a much stronger Union consisting of the northern and western states versus the South. 40. Eugene Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation (New York: Pantheon Books, 1969), 234. 41. See Drew Gilpin Faust, The Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988). See also Gary Gallagher, The Confederate War: How Nationalism, Will, and Strategy Could Not Stave Off Defeat (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Lesley J. Gordon and John C. Inscoe, eds., Inside the Confederate Nation: Essays in Honor of Emory M. Thomas (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005); and Emory M. Thomas, The Confederate Nation (New York: Harper and Row, 1979). 42. Anne Sarah Rubin, A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861–­1868 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). 43. One sees a perhaps unwitting demonstration of this in Christopher Wilson, “We Legitimize the ‘So-­Called’ Confederacy with Our Vocabulary, and That’s a Problem,” Smithsonian Magazine (Sept. 2017), https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-­institution/we-­legitimize-­so-­called-­confed eracy-­vocabulary-­thats-­problem-­180964830/. 44. For a sample of this literature, see David Herbert Donald, ed., Why the North Won the Civil War (New York: Collier, 1962); Gabor S. Boritt, ed., Why the Confederacy Lost (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); and William W. Freehling, The South vs. the South: How Anti-­Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). The reasons for the South’s defeat are also considered in the studies of Confederate nationalism cited in note 41 above. See also Victoria E. Bynum, The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); and George C. Rable, The Confederate Republic: A Revolution against Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). 45. Laszlo Deme, The Radical Left in the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 (Boulder, CO: East European Quarterly, 1976), 31. 46. Much of the information on Kossuth and Hungary gleaned from Istvan Deak, Lawful Revolution: Louis Kossuth and the Hungarians 1848–­1849 (London: Phoenix, 2001). 47. See Hugh Kearny, The British Isles: A History of Four Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). See also Keith Robbins, Nineteenth Century Britain: Integration and Diversity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). 48. This is essentially the argument in Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). See also Margot Finn, “An Elect Nation?: Nation, State, and Class in Modern British History,” Journal of British Studies 28:2 (1989): 181–­91. Roy Porter’s The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment (New York: Norton, 2000) is less triumphant than the title suggests and raises interesting points. For a broad comparative study

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comparing the creation of the national identities of England, France, Russia, Germany, and the United States, see Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 49. This is the view of Gerald Newman in his review essay, “Nationalism Revisited,” Journal of British Studies 35:1 (1996): 118–­27. Other works include Jeremy Black, English Nationalism: A Short History (London: Hurst, 2018); Roy Porter, ed., Myths of the English (Oxford: Polity, 1992); and Geoffrey Elton, The English (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). This chapter’s abbreviated discussion of British nationalism excludes the complication that from 1714 to 1837, the British union included the German state of Hanover. 50. See, for example, the collection of essays in C. H. E. Philpin, ed., Nationalism and Popular Protest in Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 51. H. A. Vossler, With Napoleon in Russia, 1812, trans. Walter Wallich (London: Folio Society, 1969), 124. 52. There is no dearth of scholarship regarding Waterloo, with some 80,000 books published to date. Recent studies include Gareth Glover, Waterloo: Myth and Reality (Barnsley: Pen and Sword Books, 2014); and David Hamilton-­Williams, Waterloo: New Perspectives: The Great Battle Reappraised (London: Arms and Armour, 1993). See also Jasper Heinzen, “A Negotiated Truce: The Battle of Waterloo in European Memory since the Second World War,” History and Memory 26:1 (2014): 39–­74. 53. On Massachusetts governor Caleb Strong’s peace efforts, see Brian Arthur, How Britain Won the War of 1812: The Royal Navy’s Blockades of the United States, 1812–­1815 (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2011), 190. 54. Otto P. Pflanze, Bismarck and the Development of Germany, vol. 1, The Period of Unification, 1815–­1871 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 73–­77. 55. As an example, it was in response to this conflict that George Tomkyns Chesney wrote The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1871), imagining a German invasion of Britain. By contrast, the United States is barely noted in the novella. 56. Quoted in Gordon A. Craig, Germany, 1866–­1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 366. 57. An examination of anti-­Americanism as a foundation of the Canadian national identity is J. L. Granatstein, Yankee Go Home?: Canadians and Anti-­Americanism (Toronto: Harper Collins, 1996). 58. Martin Seymour Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-­edged Sword (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 91. 59. On Canadian Confederation, see Donald Creighton, The Road to Confederation: The Emergence of Canada, 1863–­1867 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965); Ged Martin, Britain and the Origins of Canadian Confederation, 1837–­1867 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 1995); and Christopher Moore, 1867: How the Fathers Made a Deal (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2011). 60. See Phillip Buckner, “‘British North America and a Continent in Dissolution’: The American Civil War in the Making of Canadian Confederation,” Journal of the Civil War Era 7:4 (2017): 512–­40. See also Andrew Smith, “Confederation as a Hemispheric Anomaly,” in Spangler and Towers, Remaking North American Sovereignty, 36–­60. 61. Paul Romney, Getting It Wrong: How Canadians Forgot Their Past and Imperilled Confederation (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1999). 62. The standard work on Canada and the American Civil War remains Robin Winks, Canada

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and the United States: The Civil War Years, 4th ed. (Montreal: McGill-­Queen’s Press, 1998). See also Adam Mayers, Dixie and the Dominion: Canada, the Confederacy, and the War for the Union (Toronto: Dundurn Group, 2003). 63. Despite the basis of New Zealand’s constitution being the Durham Report, written in response to the 1837 rebellions in Upper and Lower Canada, and that the constitution was a precedent for the BNA Act, historians have provided relatively little comparative analysis. One partial exception is Phillippe Lagassé, “The Crown’s Powers of Command-­in-­Chief: Interpreting Section 15 of Canada’s Constitution Act, 1867,” Review of Constitutional Studies 18:2 (2013): 189–­220. 64. Romney, Getting It Wrong, 159. 65. This explains the unsound foundation of James M. McPherson’s comparison between the Confederacy and Quebec in Is Blood Thicker Than Water?: Crises of Nationalism in the Modern World (New York: Vintage Books, 1998). The American Civil War scholar misunderstands the very different national, linguistic, and cultural experiences between the history of the U.S. Constitution’s ratification and the creation of the BNA Act. 66. Hendrik Kraay, Days of National Festivity in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil, 1823–­1889 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), 1, 4. 67. Roderick J. Barman, Brazil: The Forging of a Nation, 1789–­1852 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 1–­7, 230, 235. 68. Wilma Peres Costa, “The Paraguayan War and Brazilian National Identity,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia Latin American History, June 28, 2017, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439 .013.286 (accessed July 22, 2020). 2. Secession, Independence, and the Limitations of Nation-­States 1. Geoffrey Elton, Reform and Renewal: Thomas Cromwell and the Common Weal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973). 2. R. E. Mitchell, “Definition of Patres and Plebs: An End to the Struggle of the Order,” in Social Struggles in Archaic Rome: New Perspectives on the Conflict of the Order, ed. Kurt A. Raaflaub and Tim Cornell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 153. 3. See Orlando Patterson, “Slavery and Slave Revolts: A Sociohistorical Analysis of the First Maroon War, 1665–­1740,” in Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, ed. Richard Price (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1973), 246–­92. 4. Eliga H. Gould, “Revolution and Counter-­Revolution,” in The British Atlantic World, 1500–­ 1800, 2nd ed., ed. David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 196–­213. 5. See, for example, Gerald Horne, The Counter-­Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America (New York: New York University Press, 2014). 6. Michael P. Costeloe, Response to Revolution: Imperial Spain and the Spanish American Revolutions, 1810–­1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); John Lynch, The Spanish American Revolution, 1808–­1826 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973). 7. Armitage, Declaration of Independence. 8. Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 39.

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9. Dubois, Avengers of the New World, 60–­7 1. 10. Dubois, Avengers of the New World, 130, 171–­77. 11. Elizabeth Maddock Dillon and Michael Drexler, The Haitian Revolution and the Early United States: Histories, Textualities, Geographies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 7–­13. 12. “Acta de los Representantes de las Provincias Unidas de Venezuela,” in Las Declaraciones de Independencia: Los Textos Fundamentales de las Independencias Americanas, ed. Alfredo Ávila, Jordana Dym, and Erika Pani (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2013), 521–­26. 13. “Acta de Independencia de Chile,” in Las Declaraciones de Independencia, 535–­36. 14. “Acta de Independencia del Imperio Mexicano,” in Las Declaraciones de Independencia, 547–­ 48; “Acta de la Jura de la Independencia del Perú,” ibid., 537–­38. 15. On New England secessionism, see Thomas J. DiLorenzo, “Yankee Confederates: New England Secession Movements prior to the War between the States,” in Secession, State, and Liberty, ed. David Gordon (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1998), 135, 137; James M. Banner Jr., “A Shadow of Secession?: The Hartford Convention, 1814,” History Today (Sept. 1988): 24–­30; and Richard Buel Jr., America on the Brink: How the Political Struggle over the War of 1812 almost Destroyed the Young Republic (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 16. William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 144–­61. 17. “South Carolina Exposition and Protest,” in Calhoun, Papers of John C. Calhoun, vol. 10, ed. Clyde N. Wilson and W. Edwin Hemphill (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1977), 442–­534. 18. “South Carolina Ordinance of Nullification,” in State Documents on Federal Relations: The States and the United States, ed. Herman Vandenburg Ames (Philadelphia: Department of History, University of Pennsylvania, 1911), 169–­72. 19. William W. Freehling, Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Crisis in South Carolina 1816–­ 1836 (New York: Harper and Row, 1966); Richard E. Ellis, The Union at Risk: Jacksonian Democracy, States’ Rights, and the Nullification Crisis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 20. At the same time as the Texas independence struggle, the Brazilian province of Rio Grande do Sul suffered the Guerra dos Farrapos (1835–­45). The exact origins of this understudied conflict are still unclear but relate to economic and financial differences. The fighting was inconclusive for a long time until peace talks brought the struggle to an end. 21. “Declaration of Independence,” in The Laws of Texas, 1822–­1897, ed. Hans Peter Mareus Neilsen Gammel and Cadwell Walton Raines (Clark, NJ: Lawbook Exchange, 2004), 1063–­66. 22. Sam W. Haynes, Contested Empire: Rethinking the Texas Revolution (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2015). 23. David Brewer, The Greek War of Independence: The Struggle for Freedom from Ottoman Oppression and the Birth of the Modern Greek Nation (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 2001); Douglas Dakin, The Greek Struggle for Independence, 1821–­1833 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). 24. John M. Merriman, 1830 in France (New York: New Viewpoints, 1975). 25. Robert Demoulin, La Révolution de 1830 (Brussels, Belg.: La Renaissance du Livre, 1950). 26. For works on the Rebellion of 1798 and Theobald Wolfe Tone, see Marianne Elliott, Wolfe Tone, Prophet of Irish Independence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989); Jim Smyth, The

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Men of No Property: Irish Radicals and Popular Politics in the Late Eighteenth Century (New York: St. Martin’s, 1992); and Kevin Whelan, The Tree of Liberty: Radicalism, Catholicism, and the Construction of Irish Identity, 1760–­1830 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996). 27. Fergus O’Ferrall, Daniel O’Connell (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1981). 28. All material for the Polish uprising drawn from R. F. Leslie, Polish Politics and the Revolution of November 1830 (London: Athlone, 1956). 29. On the 1837 Rebellions, see Phillip A. Buckner, Transition to Responsible Government: British Policy in British North America, 1815–­1850 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1986), chaps. 5–­7; Elinor Kyte Senior, Redcoats and Patriotes: The Rebellions in Lower Canada, 1837–­38 (Ottawa: Canadian War Museum Historical Publication, 1985); and Allan Greer, “1837–­38: Rebellion Reconsidered,” Canadian Historical Review 76:1 (1995): 1–­18. 30. Dieter Dowe et al., Europe in 1848: Revolution and Reform, trans. David Higgins (New York: Berghahn Books, 2001); Alex Körner, ed., 1848, a European Revolution?: International Ideas and National Memories of 1848 (Houndsmills, UK: Macmillan, 2000); Jonathan Sperber, The European Revolutions, 1848–­1851 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Guy Thomson, ed., The European Revolutions of 1848 and the Americas (London: Institute of Latin American Studies, 2002). 31. Aidan Hegarty, John Mitchel: A Cause Too Many (Belfast: Camlane, 2005), 26–­27. 32. Robert Sloan, William Smith O’Brien and the Young Ireland Rebellion of 1848 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2000), 161; Hegarty, John Mitchel, 42–­43; James Quinn, John Mitchel (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2008), 13–­14. 33. Thomas Francis Meagher, “Sword Speech,” July 28, 1846, in Speeches on the Legislative Independence of Ireland (New York: P. M. Haverty, 1885), 81–­90. 34. Mary E. Daly, The Famine in Ireland (Dundalk, Ire.: Dundalgan Press for the Dublin Historical Association, 1986), Christine Kinealy, This Great Calamity: The Irish Famine, 1845–­1852 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1994); Colm Tóibín, The Irish Famine (London: Profile Books, 1999); Cecil Woodham-­Smith, The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845–­1849 (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1991 [1962]). 35. Sloan, William Smith O’Brien, 222–­23. 36. Sloan, William Smith O’Brien, 246–­47. 37. Sloan, William Smith O’Brien, 250. 38. Hans Kohn, Nationalism and Liberty: The Swiss Example (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1956), 101–­2; Degler, One among Many, 23–­25. 39. Deák, Lawful Revolution, 1; Deme, Radical Left in the Hungarian Revolution, 1. 40. Deák, Lawful Revolution, 72. 41. Deák, Lawful Revolution, 76. 42. Deák, Lawful Revolution, 79. 43. Deák, Lawful Revolution, 260. 44. For more on the influence of the Declaration of Independence, see Armitage, Declaration of Independence. 45. Henry De Puy, Kossuth and His Generals with a Brief History of Hungary (Buffalo, NY: Phinney, 1852), 203–­4. 46. De Puy, Kossuth and His Generals, 206. 47. De Puy, Kossuth and His Generals, 207. 48. Deák, Lawful Revolution, 187.

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49. Deák, Lawful Revolution, 284–­85. 50. Deák, Lawful Revolution, 324–­25. 51. De Puy, Kossuth and His Generals, 285–­88. 52. Oliver Auge and Burkhard Büsing, eds., Der Vertrag von Ripen 1460 und die Anfänge der politischen Partizipation in Schleswig-­Holstein, im Reich und in Nordeuropa (Ostfildern, Ger.: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 2012). 53. Rudolph M. Schleiden, Erinnerungen eines Schleswig-­Holsteiners (Wiesbaden, Ger.: Verlag von J. F. Bergmann, 1890), 242, 249–­50; Wynn to Palmerston, Jan. 13, 15, 18, 20, 21, FO 22/162, The National Archives, Kew Gardens, UK. 54. Schleiden, Erinnerungen, 268; Provisional Government, “Proclamation,” Mar. 24, 1848, in Aktenstücke zur neuesten Schleswig-­Holsteinischen Geschichte, vol. 2, ed. Rudolph M. Schleiden (Leipzig, Ger.: Verlag von Wilhelm Engelmann, 1852), 1–­2. 55. Jens Ahlers, ed., Aufbruch und Bürgerkrieg: Schleswig-­Holstein, 1848–­1851 (Kiel, Ger.: Schleswig-­Holsteinische Landesbibliothek, 2012); Alexa Geisthövel, Eigentümlichkeit und Macht: Deutscher Nationalism, 1830–­1851: Der Fall Schleswig-­Holstein (Stuttgart, Ger.: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2003); Gerd Stolz, Die Schleswig-­Holsteinische Erhebung: Die Nationale Auseinandersetzung in und um Schleswig-­Holstein von 1848/51 (Husum, Ger.: Idstedt-­Stiftung, 1996). 56. Saul David, The Indian Mutiny, 1857 (London: Viking, 2002); Christopher Hibbert, The Great Mutiny: India, 1857 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978). 57. William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857 (London: Bloomsbury, 2006). 58. Michael Adas, “Twentieth Century Approaches to the Indian Mutiny of 1857–­58,” Journal of Asian History 5 (1971): 1–­19. 59. Benjamin Disraeli, July 27, 1857, Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 3rd ser., vol. 147 (1857), cols. 442. 60. Charles Ball, History of the Indian Mutiny (London: London Printing, 1858), 402. 61. Avery Craven, The Growth of Southern Nationalism, 1848–­1861 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1953), chap. 4; Elizabeth R. Varon, Disunion!: The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789–­1859 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 223–­31. 62. Quigley, Shifting Grounds. 63. Quigley, Shifting Grounds, 28. 64. A good but problematic example for the ethnic origin theory is Grady McWhiney, Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1988). 65. Quigley, Shifting Grounds, 43–­44. 66. Quigley, Shifting Grounds, 50. 67. Edmond S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003). 68. Quigley, Shifting Grounds, 53. 69. Quigley, Shifting Grounds, 56. 70. Quigley, Shifting Grounds, 58. 71. Quigley, Shifting Grounds, 64. 72. Quigley, Shifting Grounds, 77. 73. Quigley, Shifting Grounds, 65.

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74. Quigley, Shifting Grounds, 70. 75. Robert E. May, Slavery, Race, and Conquest in the Tropics: Lincoln, Douglas, and the Future of Latin America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Robert E. May, The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 1854–­1861 (Baton Rough: Louisiana State University Press, 1973). 76. Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), xvi–­xxxviii. 77. A good overview of the 1850s issues is David Morris Potter’s The Impending Crisis, 1848–­1861, completed and edited by Don E. Fehrenbacher (New York: Harper and Row, 1976). 78. Steven A. Channing, Crisis of Fear: Secession in South Carolina (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970), 284–­87. 79. “South Carolina’s Ordinance of Secession,” in Ordinances of Secession and Other Documents, 1860–­1861, ed. David Franklin Houston (New York: A. Lovell, 1896), 3–­9. 3. Transforming Liberalism and Representative Government 1. This is a recurring theme in Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments (London: Vintage, 2004). 2. Steve Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). A contrary view to Pincus’s landmark work is J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1660–­1832: Religion, Ideology, and Politics during the Ancien Régime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Clark argues that Britain was still a premodern state until the 1832 Reform Act. 3. Helena Rosenblatt, “A Liberal History,” History Today (Aug. 2019): 78. Rosenblatt’s arguments are developed much further in The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-­First Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018). 4. Rosenblatt, “Liberal History,” 80. 5. Daniel B. Klein, “The Origins of the ‘Liberalism,’” Atlantic Monthly (Feb. 2014), https://www .theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/02/the-­origin-­of-­liberalism/283780/. 6. Frederic Chapin Lane, Venice: Maritime Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). Lane does not claim that Venice was a liberal democracy but points to the division of powers within the city-­state as an early working model of representative governance. 7. Clive H. Church and Randolph C. Head, A Concise History of Switzerland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), chap. 5. 8. Rosenblatt, “Liberal History,” 78–­79. 9. For example, the French reactionary Joseph de Maistre, writing in 1797, denied that the American War of Independence was a political revolution. The revolution in France, however, was something very different. See Maistre, Considerations on France, trans. Richard A. Lebrun (Montreal: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 1974), 108–­9. 10. Dicey quoted in Hugh Tulloch, James Bryce’s American Commonwealth: The Anglo-­American Background (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 1988), 48. 11. For a discussion on nineteenth-­century British usage of the term “democracy,” see Duncan A. Campbell, Unlikely Allies: Britain, America, and the Victorian Origins of the Special Relationship (London: Continuum, 2007), chap. 4. 12. For a discussion of the use of the term “democracy” in the United States during this period,

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see Robert A. Dahl, How Democratic is the American Constitution? (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001). 13. This contrasts with the narrow and limited definitions suggested in Niels Eichhorn, “Democracy: The Civil War and the Transnational Struggle for Political Reform,” American Nineteenth Century History 20 (2019): 293–­313. 14. This case was recently made in Van Gosse, The First Reconstruction: Black Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021). He points out that some northern states during the period of Jacksonian Democracy went in the opposite direction and disenfranchised African American voters. This argument is also made in David A. Bateman, Disenfranchising Democracy: Constructing the Electorate in the United States, the United Kingdom, and France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Bateman raises the important point that the creation of nation-­states brought about the reenvisioning of the political nation, which meant at times disenfranchising people. Unfortunately, he also simplistically dismisses Napoleon III’s empire as democratic authoritarianism, underestimating the popular mandate underpinning it. Further, Bateman’s claim that Catholic Emancipation and the Reform Act of 1832 should be seen as having an anti-­Irish purpose, including disenfranchisement, is not supported by the evidence. 15. For example, when Joseph Swetnam wrote his frankly misogynistic tract The Arraignment of Women in 1615, a significant number of women published pamphlets in response, disputing his arguments. Swetnam, The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward, and Unconstant Women (London, 1615), Early English Books Online, http://name.umdl.umich.edu/A13240.0001.001 (accessed July 4, 2020). One rebuttal, written by Rachel Speght in 1617, went so far as to declare that the Creator made Eve not from Adam’s foot to be his “inferiour” but from his side “to be his equall.” (10). Speght, A Mouzell for Melastomus (London: Nicholas Okes, 1617), 10, https://pages.uoregon.edu/dluebke /WesternCiv102/SpeghtMouzell1617.htm (accessed July 4, 2002). As this was early modern Europe, Scripture underpinned arguments for social and political authority, but it is notable that even in the early seventeenth century, women were demanding equality—­of one form or another—­in print. Further, there are earlier examples than this from across Europe. See Antonia Fraser, The Weaker Vessel: Woman’s Lot in Seventeenth Century England (London: Methuen, 1984). 16. On Gouges and her influence, see Joan Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); and Marie Josephine Diamond, “The Revolutionary Rhetoric of Olympe de Gouges,” Feminist Issues 14:1 (Spring 1994): 13. Duncan A. Campbell remains indebted to his student Jennifer Rosas, who discusses early feminism in a transatlantic context in “Transatlantic Revolutions: The French Revolution’s Impact on the Early Republic and Women” (MA thesis, National University, 2017). 17. Isabelle Bour, “A New Wollstonecraft: The Reception of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman and of The Wrongs of Women in Revolutionary France,” Journal for Eighteenth-­Century Studies 36:4 (2013): 575–­87. See also Lisa L. Moore, Joanna Brooks, and Caroline Wigginton, Transatlantic Feminisms in the Age of Revolutions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 18. On Murray, see Sheila Skemp, First Lady of Letters: Judith Sargent Murray and the Struggle for Female Independence (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). 19. Jeremy Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 3 (1843), Liberty Fund, 1144, https://oll .libertyfund.org/titles/bentham-­the-­works-­of-­jeremy-­bentham-­vol-­3 (accessed July 7, 2020). The comment appears in a footnote in the section on women.

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20. Margaret McFadden, “Anna Doyle Wheeler (1785–­1848): Philosopher, Socialist, Feminist,” Hypatia 4:1 (1989): 91–­101. See also James Jose, “Feminist Political Theory without Apology: Anna Doyle Wheeler, William Thompson, and the Appeal of One Half the Human Race, Women,” Hypatia 34:4 (2019): 827–­51. 21. For a brief introduction to Seneca Falls, see Sarah McMillen, Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Another work that should be consulted, however, is Lisa Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848–­1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014). 22. The British response to the Frémont’ controversy is discussed in Duncan A. Campbell, English Public Opinion and the American Civil War (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2003), 24–­25. 23. The meeting is recounted in David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 315. 24. Pamela Herr, Jessie Benton Fremont: A Biography (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 339. 25. For a sampling of the literature on this topic, see Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber, eds., Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Clinton and Silber, eds., Battle Scars: Gender and Sexuality in the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Judith Ann Giesberg, Army at Home: Women and the Civil War on the Northern Home Front (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); and Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). 26. See Miles Taylor, “Empire and Parliamentary Reform: The 1832 Reform Act Revisited,” in Rethinking the Age of Reform: Britain, 1780–­1850, ed. Arthur Burns and Joanna Innes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 295–­312. On women, see Derek Heater, Citizenship in Britain: A History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 107. 27. The starting point for any serious discussion of the 1867 Reform Act is Robert Saunders, Democracy and the Vote in British Politics, 1848–­1867: The Making of the Second Reform Act (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2011). See also Margot Finn, After Chartism: Class and Nation in English Radical Politics, 1848–­1874 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 28. Robert Blackburn, “Laying the Foundations of the Modern Voting System: The Representation of the People Act 1918,” Parliamentary History 30:1 (2011): 33–­52. 29. Elections Canada. A History of the Vote in Canada (Ottawa: Office of the Chief Electoral Officer of Canada, 2007), chaps. 1–­2. 30. Australian Electoral Commission, “Australian Voting History in Action,” last modified Jan. 31, 2011, https://www.aec.gov.au/About_AEC/25/theme1-­voting-­history.htm (accessed June 30, 2020). 31. John E. Martin, “Political Participation and Electoral Change in Nineteenth-­Century New Zealand,” Political Science 57:1 (2005): 39–­58. 32. Hans-­Hermann Hoppe, Democracy—­the God That Failed: The Economics and Politics of Monarchy, Democracy, and Natural Order (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2001), chaps. 2–­4. Hoppe reminds us that the age at which a man could vote varied widely—­in Denmark and in France at various times, the age was thirty, whereas in Britain it was twenty-­one. Nonetheless, these ages are considerably below the nineteenth-­century male life expectancy, meaning a man could reasonably assume that he could one day vote. It is worth noting, too, that this issue of age and political

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responsibility was common—­the Constitution requires that the president of the United States be at least thirty-­five years old. 33. An introduction to the story of the infamous Tammany Hall is Oliver E. Allen, The Tiger: The Rise and Fall of Tammany Hall (Reading, MA: Addison-­Wesley, 1993). 34. See Terry Golway, Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (New York: Liveright, 2014), 55. 35. L. E. Fredman, The Australian Ballot: The Story of an American Reform (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1968), ix, 8, chap. 1. 36. Terry Newman, “Tasmania and the Secret Ballot,” Australian Journal of Politics and History 49:1 (2003): 93–­101; Fredman, Australian Ballot, chap. 1. Portions of some American states had made varying uses of the secret ballot earlier, but so, too, had some English counties. Our modern version is nonetheless owed to the Australians. 37. This was one of the issues pertaining to British radicals’ views of the American Civil War—­ that both sides had a wider suffrage than the United Kingdom. This was another reason why the British did not view the conflict as a test of democracy or a question of an expanded suffrage. Many Confederate soldiers, however, did not meet the residence requirements and were practically disenfranchised during their service. See Ben H. Severance, A War State All Over: Alabama Politics and the Confederate Cause (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2020). 38. Helena Rosenblatt, for example, incorrectly assumes European and North American liberals were opposed to Napoleon III from the beginning but fails to note how he modernized France. Rosenblatt, Lost History of Liberalism, 157–­68. 39. See Frank Trentmann, Free Trade Nation: Commerce, Consumption, and Civil Society in Modern Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 350. 40. For a reconsideration of Louis Napoleon, see Alain Plessis, The Rise and Fall of the Second Empire, 1852–­1871 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). For an older examination of French historians’ engagement with this controversial figure, see Stuart L. Campbell, The Second Empire Revisited: A Study in French Historiography (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1978). 41. The interview between Napoleon III and the two MPs is recounted in Campbell, English Public Opinion, 168–­69. 42. For a discussion of this, see Rosenblatt, Lost History of Liberalism, 188–­92. 43. See Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), chap. 6. 44. See Marc Holland, Bourgeois Liberty and the Politics of Fear: From Absolutism to Neo-­ Conservatism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), chap. 6. 45. The late-­nineteenth-­century British-­American mythology of Anglo-­Saxonism is discussed in Campbell, Unlikely Allies, 217–­19. See also Srdjan Vucetic, The Anglosphere: A Genealogy of a Racialized Identity in International Relations (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), chap. 2. 46. An interesting near-­contemporary article on this is Clara Eve Schieber, “The Transformation of American Sentiment towards Germany, 1870–­1914,” Journal of International Relations 12:1 (July 1921): 50–­74. With respect to the widespread Anglo-­American Germanophilia in popular culture, there were exceptions, of course. See, for example, Chesney, Battle of Dorking. See also Erskine Childers, The Riddle of the Sands: A Record of the Secret Service (London: Smith, Elder, 1903); and

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Saki (H. H. Munro), When William Came: A Story of London under the Hohenzollerns (London: John Lane, 1914) That said, such war fantasies were more a twentieth-­century genre and only proliferated when Anglo-­German relations began to decline. They culminated with John Buchan, The Thirty-­Nine Steps (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1915). By contrast, American fiction of this sort usually imagined a future British-­American war. See, for example, Samuel Rockwell Reed, The War of 1886: Between the United States and Great Britain (Cincinnati: R. Clarke, 1882); Samuel Barton, The Battle of Swash and the Capture of Canada (New York: Charles T. Dillingham, 1888); and Henry Grattan Donnelly, The Stricken Nation (New York: Chas. T. Baker, 1890). Robert W. Chambers’s short story “The Repairer of Reputations,” predicting a future German-­American war, is unusual to say the least. Chambers, “The Repairer of Reputations,” in The King in Yellow (New York: F. Tennyson Neely, 1895). The United States, meantime, was neutral for most of the First World War—­not merely in a de jure fashion. 47. Quoted in Elizabeth Brett White, American Opinion of France from Lafayette to Poincaré (New York: Knopf, 1927), 179. 48. For a recent example of this attempt to Americanize world history through the mythology of American exceptionalism, see Doyle, Cause of All Nations. 49. The idea of British views of the conflict being determined by class and/or political persuasion is often referred to as the traditional interpretation, which was essentially completed with E. D. Adams, Great Britain and the American Civil War (New York: Longmans, Green, 1925). One of the most recent recitations of it is Brent E. Kinser, The American Civil War and the Shaping of British Democracy (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2011). See also Robert Saunders, review of ibid., American Historical Review 117:3 (June 2012): 930–­31. Other recent versions include Alfred Grant, The American Civil War and the British Press (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000); and R. J. M. Blackett, Divided Hearts: Britain and the American Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001). 50. Although Karl Marx claimed the working classes supported the Union while the upper classes supported the Confederacy, there is little evidence to back up his assertions. Royden Harrison, among other scholars of British working-­class history, points to the fact that radical working-­ class journals were not in fact pro-­Union, nor was pro-­Unionism common among British working-­ class leadership. See Harrison, “British Labour and the Confederacy,” International Review of Social History 2 (1957): 78–­105; Harrison, “British Labour and American Slavery,” Science and Society 25 (1961): 291–­319; and Harrison Before the Socialists: Studies in Labour and Politics, 1861–­1881 (1965; repr., with a new introduction, Aldershot, UK: Gregg Revivals, 1994). For the purposes of the American Civil War, the reprint edition of Before the Socialists requires consultation, as Harrison, in a new introduction, rebuts Marxist and American-­centric historians who have challenged his findings. Mary Ellison, meanwhile, has also found a lack of pro-­Union sentiment among Lancashire’s working class. Despite the criticism to which her work has been subjected, Ellison’s evidence has never been credibly challenged, let alone rebutted. Ellison, Support for Secession: Lancashire and the American Civil War (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1972). A recent retelling of the Marxist myth is Philip S. Foner, British Labor and the American Civil War (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1981). For criticism of both Foner’s methodology and commentary on Marx’s misrepresentations of British views of the war, see Campbell, English Public Opinion, 7–­8, 86–­87. A recent work that mistakenly treats Marx as a credible witness of British views of the war is Matteo Battistini, “Karl Marx and the Global History of the Civil War: The Slave Movement, Working-­Class Struggle, and the American

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State within the World Market,” International Labor and Working-­Class History 100 (Fall 2021): 158–­ 85. Although the article raises interesting points, regrettably, Battistini does not seriously engage with the extant scholarship on British views of the conflict, class based or otherwise. 51. A recent discussion of the influence these issues had on British perceptions of the United States may be found in Duncan A. Campbell, “Letting Someone Else Have Your Way: The Palmerston Ministry’s Foreign Policy and the American Civil War,” Journal of Liberal History 114 (Spring 2022): 6–­21. 52. See Campbell, English Public Opinion, chaps. 1–­2. See also D. P. Crook, “Portents of War: English Opinion of Secession,” Journal of American Studies 33 (1967): 163–­79; and Hubbard, Burden of Confederate Diplomacy. 53. Three crucial studies on this subject are D. P. Crook, American Democracy in English Politics: 1815–­1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965); Jon Roper, Democracy and Its Critics: Anglo-­ American Democratic Thought in the Nineteenth Century (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989); and Michael J. Turner, Liberty and Liberticide: The Role of America in Nineteenth-­Century British Radicalism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014). See also Ray Boston, British Chartists in America, 1839–­1900 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1971), esp. chap. 4. 54. See Richard Huzzey, Freedom Burning: Anti-­Slavery and Empire in Victorian Britain (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012); and Douglas A. Lorimer, “The Role of Anti-­Slavery Sentiment in English Reactions to the American Civil War,” Historical Journal 19 (1976): 405–­20. Mark Neil Bennett’s regional study of Yorkshire also finds that “racial differences continued to be interpreted through culturally differentialist rather than biologically essentialist terms throughout this period.” Bennett, “Race, Democracy, and the American Civil War in the County of Yorkshire” (PhD diss., Durham University, 2018), 272. 55. The membership numbers derive from Blackett, Divided Hearts, 99. Blackett’s division of the British population into pro-­Confederate and pro-­Union camps relies upon his concentrating almost entirely on each side’s partisans, to the exclusion of the wider society. Besides ignoring the diplomatic sphere entirely, despite the irrefutable evidence that this profoundly affected British views of the United States, Blackett simply assumes that pro-­southerners were conservative, while the pro-­ northerners were radical. This leads to his mislabeling individuals such as John Arthur Roebuck and William Schaw Lindsay as conservatives, which in American terms is akin to identifying Radical Republicans Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens as pro-­slavery Democrats. Although Blackett’s claims have been uncritically accepted by Americanists generally and Civil War historians particularly, specialists in British history have proven more skeptical. For example, as Richard Huzzey notes, “There was no direct pattern of support for North or South based on social class or political party but rather a wide variety of responses. Those who agreed on other political questions found themselves at odds over the rebellion.” Huzzey, Freedom Burning, 22. 56. The numbers of Britons attending meetings on the American Civil War is derived from a wide range of both primary and secondary sources. This calculation was first published over fifteen years ago and remains unchallenged. See Campbell, Unlikely Allies, 162–­63. For the numbers at Palmerston’s meeting, see Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper, Apr. 5, 1863. On Kossuth, see Zsuzsanna Lada, “The Invention of a Hero: Lajos Kossuth in England (1851),” European History Quarterly 43:1 (2013): 5–­26.

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57. Duncan A. Campbell points to the errors, factual and interpretive, of the traditional account in English Public Opinion. This was followed by an abbreviated analysis in his Unlikely Allies, chap. 6. See also Peter O’Connor, American Sectionalism in the British Mind, 1832–­1863 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017); Michael J. Turner, Stonewall Jackson, Beresford Hope, and the Meaning of the American Civil War in Britain (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020); and Robert O. Faith, “This Despotic and Arbitrary Power: British Diplomacy and Resistance in the Habeas Corpus Controversy of the American Civil War” (PhD diss., University of Akron, 2018). Although Hugh Dubrulle has abandoned his earlier faith in the traditional interpretation, he still overstates the extent of U.S. influence upon nineteenth-­century Britain in an otherwise useful study. Dubrulle, Ambivalent Nation: How Britain Imagined the American Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2018). Further information may be gleaned from Amanda Foreman, A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War (New York: Random House, 2011). Robert Saunders, meanwhile, demonstrates that, contrary to the claims of some historians, the American Civil War in fact had very little influence on the events leading to the 1867 Reform Act. Saunders, Democracy and the Vote in British Politics, 142–­58. 58. Cartier quoted in H. H. Herstein, L. J. Hughes, and R. C. Kirbyson, Challenge and Survival: A History of Canada (Scarborough, ON: Prentice Hall of Canada, 1970), 227. 59. How this myth was developed and sustained is discussed in Campbell, Unlikely Allies, 167–­ 70. For the nineteenth century generally, see ibid., 1–­9. 60. Reconstruction is discussed in more detail in chapter 10, but see Mark Wahlgren Summers, The Ordeal of the Reunion: A New History of Reconstruction (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–­1877 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988); and Michael W. Fitzgerald, Splendid Failure: Postwar Reconstruction in the American South (Chicago: Ivan Dee, 2007). 61. Michael Perman, The Road to Redemption: Southern Politics, 1869–­1879 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984); C. Vann Woodward, Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction (1951; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966); David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Edward J. Blum, Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865–­1898 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015 [2005]); Edward L Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 62. Technically, there were two Great Migrations, but some scholars insist they should count as one larger movement. See Alferdteen Harrison, ed., Black Exodus: The Great Migration from the American South (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991); James N. Gregory, The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); and Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York: Random House, 2010). 63. G. K. Chesterton, “The Book of Job,” in The Man Who Was Thursday, ed. Stephen Medcalf (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 172. 64. Churchill made these remarks in the House of Commons in 1947 but acknowledged that they were not original. See Richard Langworth, ed., Churchill by Himself: The Definitive Collection of Quotations (New York: Public Affairs, 2011), 574.

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4. Emancipation as a Transnational Phenomenon 1. Brazil’s enslaved population was marginally larger than that of the United States. Herbert B. Alexander, “Brazilian and United States Slavery Compared,” Journal of Negro History 7:4 (1922): 349–­64. 2. Foner, Fiery Trial. 3. For Russia, see Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1987). For Brazil, see Roberto Saba, American Mirror: The United States and Brazil in the Age of Emancipation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021). 4. Although some have claimed the Somerset decision abolished slavery within Great Britain, this is untrue. Scotland, with its own legal system, abolished slavery six years later when the Court of Sessions in Edinburgh ruled that it was incompatible with Scottish law. 5. Abraham Lincoln, “First Inaugural Address,” in Abraham Lincoln (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1909), 5. 6. Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men; William E. Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852–­1856 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Michael A. Morrison, Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny and the Coming of the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). 7. Glyndon G. Van Deusen, William Henry Seward: Lincoln’s Secretary of State, the Negotiator of the Alaska Purchase (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), chap. 9. 8. Donald, Lincoln, 166–­67. The question of Lincoln and colonization is discussed in depth in Magness and Page, Colonization after Emancipation. 9. Smith quoted in Barry R. Weingast, “Adam Smith’s Theory of the Persistence of Slavery and Its Abolition in Western Europe,” Stanford University, July 2015, 23–­24, https://www.researchgate. net/publication/280555359_Adam_Smith’s_Theory_of_the_Persistence_of_Slavery_and_Its_Abolition_in_Western_Europe (accessed Mar. 22, 2019). Weingast’s article is a very interesting discussion on Smith’s arguments with respect to slavery and emancipation. 10. Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York: Vintage Books, 1948), 132. 11. Steven M. Wise, Though the Heavens May Fall: The Landmark Trial That Led to the End of Human Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2005); Ruth Paley, “Imperial Politics and English Law: The Many Contexts of ‘Somerset,’” Law and History Review 24:3 (2006): 659–­64. 12. See Alfred W. Blumrosen and Ruth G. Blumrosen, Slave Nation: How Slavery United the Colonies and Sparked the American Revolution (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2006); and Horne, Counter-­Revolution of 1776. 13. Johnson made these remarks in his attack on the War of Independence, Taxation No Tyranny (1775). He was, by the standards of the day, hostile to racial discrimination, slavery especially. 14. James J. Gigantino, The Ragged Road to Abolition: Slavery and Freedom in New Jersey, 1775–­ 1865 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). 15. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom. 16. For two recent works on the Haitian Revolution, see David P. Geggus and Norman Fiering, eds., The World of the Haitian Revolution (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009); and David P. Geggus, ed., The Impact of the Haitian Revolution on the Atlantic World (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2011).

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17. Edward B. Rugemer, The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008), 43, 136. 18. Christopher Schmidt-­Nowara, Slavery, Freedom, and Abolition in Latin America and the Atlantic World (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2011), 105–­16. 19. Schwarz, “Diversity Myth,” 65. 20. Eric Burin, Slavery and the Peculiar Solution: A History of the American Colonization Society (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005). 21. Dal Lago, William Lloyd Garrison and Giuseppe Mazzini; Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1998). 22. For recent studies on Nat Turner, see David F. Allmendinger, Nat Turner and the Rising in Southampton County (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014); and Patrick H. Breen, The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 23. Seymour Drescher, The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 24. Moon-­Ho Jung, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). 25. Huzzey, Freedom Burning. 26. For Anglo-­American abolitionist efforts, see Betty Fladeland, Men and Brothers: Anglo-­ American Anti-­Slavery Co-­Operation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972); Douglas Charles Strange, British Unitarians against American Slavery, 1833–­1865 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984); and Clare Taylor, ed., British and American Abolitionists: An Episode in Anglo-­American Understanding (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1974). 27. Leslie Bethell, The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade: Britain, Brazil, and the Slave Trade Question (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 28. See Sarah A. Batterson, “‘An Ill-­Judged Piece of Business’: The Failure of Slave Trade Suppression in a Slaveholding Republic” (PhD diss., University of New Hampshire, 2013), 173. 29. For a discussion of this crisis, see Richard D. Fulton, “The London Times and the Anglo-­ American Boarding Dispute of 1858,” Nineteenth Century Contexts 17 (1993): 133–­44. For a discussion of Anglo-­American disputes over the slave trade generally, see Bernard Semmel, Liberalism and Naval Strategy: Ideology, Interest and Sea Power during the Pax Britannica (London: Allen and Unwin, 1986). For a wider Anglo-­American diplomatic context, see Campbell, “Letting Someone Else Have Your Way,” 6–­21. 30. Hegarty, John Mitchel, 94. 31. “The South,” Hinds County Gazette (Raymond, MS), Oct. 14, 1857. 32. Quinn, John Mitchel, 57–­58, 64. 33. William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion: Secessionists Triumphant (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), chap. 12. 34. Peter Blanchard, Slavery and Abolition in Early Republican Peru (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Books, 1992), 1, 14, 19, 29. 35. Blanchard, Slavery and Abolition in Early Republican Peru, 29, 27, 31, 38, 40, 46. 36. Blanchard, Slavery and Abolition in Early Republican Peru, 182, 51. 37. Blanchard, Slavery and Abolition in Early Republican Peru, 55, 65–­67.

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38. Blanchard, Slavery and Abolition in Early Republican Peru, 68; Margaret M. R. Kellow, “Conflicting Imperatives: Black and White American Abolitionists Debate Slave Redemption,” in Buying Freedom: The Ethics and Economics of Slave Redemption, ed. Anthony Appiah and Martin Bunzl (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). 39. Blanchard, Slavery and Abolition in Early Republican Peru, 73–­74, 96, and chap. 5. 40. Blanchard, Slavery and Abolition in Early Republican Peru, 113–­17. 41. Blanchard, Slavery and Abolition in Early Republican Peru, 153. 42. Blanchard, Slavery and Abolition in Early Republican Peru, 154–­55. 43. Blanchard, Slavery and Abolition in Early Republican Peru, 156. 44. Blanchard, Slavery and Abolition in Early Republican Peru, 190–­92. 45. Blanchard, Slavery and Abolition in Early Republican Peru, 200. 46. Blanchard, Slavery and Abolition in Early Republican Peru, 206. 47. Blanchard, Slavery and Abolition in Early Republican Peru, 207. 48. David Moon, The Abolition of Serfdom in Russia, 1762–­1907 (Harlow, UK: Longman, 2001), 3. 49. Moon, Abolition of Serfdom in Russia, chap. 2. 50. Moon, Abolition of Serfdom in Russia, chap. 5. 51. Moon, Abolition of Serfdom in Russia, chap. 8. 52. For comparative studies on the abolition of serfdom and slavery, see Enrico Dal Lago, American Slavery, Atlantic Slavery, and Beyond: The U.S. “Peculiar Institution” in International Perspective (London: Routledge, 2016); and Kolchin, Unfree Labor. 53. Edward B. Rugemer, “Why Civil War?: The Politics of Slavery in Comparative Perspective,” in Gleeson and Lewis, Civil War as Global Conflict, 15. 54. Thomas Benjamin, The Atlantic World: Europeans, Africans, Indians, and Their Shared History, 1400–­1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 646. 55. Benjamin, Atlantic World, 646. 56. Benjamin, Atlantic World, 646–­47. 57. Arthur F. Corwin, Spain and the Abolition of Slavery in Cuba, 1817–­1886 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967), 154. 58. Benjamin, Atlantic World, 647. 59. Benjamin, Atlantic World, 647. 60. Benjamin, Atlantic World, 647–­48. 61. Benjamin, Atlantic World, 648. 62. Rebecca J. Scott, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2005). 63. Benjamin, Atlantic World, 649–­50. 64. For works on Brazilian Emancipation, see Robert E. Conrad, The Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 1850–­1888 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972); Carl N. Degler, Neither Black Nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1971); Dale T. Graden, From Slavery to Freedom in Brazil: Bahia, 1835–­1900 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006); and Richard Graham, The Abolition of Slavery in Brazil and the Destruction of Brazilian Slavery (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1974). 65. Benjamin, Atlantic World, 650. 66. Benjamin, Atlantic World, 650.

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67. Benjamin, Atlantic World, 651. 68. Benjamin, Atlantic World, 651. 69. Benjamin, Atlantic World, 651. 70. Benjamin, Atlantic World, 653. 71. Benjamin, Atlantic World, 654. 5. Three Modernizing Wars Epigraph: Lisa M. Brady, “The Wilderness of War: Nature and Strategy in the American Civil War,” Environmental History 10:3 (July 2005): 437. The unnamed surgeon, in an article in the Natchez (MS) Weekly Courier of December 2, 1864, refers to Sherman’s campaigns of that year. 1. Gervase Phillips, “Was the American Civil War the First Modern War?,” History Today (Dec. 2006): 28–­33. Williamson Murray and Wayne Wei-­siang Hsieh’s A Savage War: How the Civil War Changed the Face of War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), reasserts the claim that the conflict was the first modern war. Unfortunately, as with most such studies, no meaningful comparison is made with contemporary wars. The Crimean War, for example, is referenced only once, while the Franco-­German War is similarly referred to only in passing in this six-­hundred-­page book. Rachel Chrastil, meanwhile, argues that the Franco-­German War was the link between the Napoleonic Wars and World Wars in Bismarck’s War: The Franco-­Prussian War and the Making of Modern Europe (London: Allen Land, 2023). 2. Peter Paret, “The Genesis of On War,” in Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. and ed. Michael Howard and Peter Paret. (London: Folio Society, 2011), xxv–­xlix, xxxii. 3. See, for example, Archer Jones, “Jomini and the Strategy of the American Civil War: A Reinterpretation,” Military Affairs 34:4 (Dec. 1970): 127–­31; and Carl Reardon, With a Sword in One Hand and Jomini in the Other: The Problem of Military Thought in the Civil War North (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). 4. Niels Eichhorn, “A ‘Century of Peace’ That Was Not: War in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Military History 84 (Oct. 2020): 1051–­77. 5. Historian Robert B. Edgerton states, “The butcher’s bill for the Crimean War of 1853–­1856 will never be known exactly, but it probably amounted to over 1 million deaths.” Edgerton, Death or Glory: The Legacy of the Crimean War (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1999). Andrew Lambert, meantime, believes Russia alone lost 1 million men, with Britain losing 25,000 and France 100,000. Lambert, “The Crimean War,” British Broadcasting Corporation, last modified Mar. 29, 2011, http://www.bbc .co.uk/history/british/victorians/crimea_01.shtml (accessed July 30, 2020). See also Lambert, The Crimean War: British Grand Strategy against Russia, 1853–­56 (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011). Against this, historian Iuliia Aleksandrovna Naumova argues that Russia’s medical service and officials generally were far more competent than Western scholars have acknowledged. She instead calculates that more than 400,000 Russians treated by the medical staff perished. While this would not account for all Russian deaths, it would place the death total below 500,000. This, however, would still be well above either the Union or Confederate tolls in the Civil War. The information taken from Naumova’s study, which has not been translated into English, derives from Mara Kozelsky, “The Crimean War,” Kritika 13:4 (Fall 2012): 907. Orlando Figes, meanwhile, notes that while the numbers of Russians killed have been estimated at between 400,000 and 600,000 men, the “Medi-

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cal Department of the Ministry of War later published a figure of 450,015 deaths in the army for the four years between 1853 and 1856. This is probably the most accurate estimate.” Figes, The Crimean War: A History (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010), 488–­89. Figes agrees with Candan Badem that the Ottoman Empire lost 120,000 men. Badem, The Ottoman Crimean War, 1853–­1856 (Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 2010), 21. If we take the following (lowest) estimates for the combatants—­450,000 for Russia, 120,000 for the Ottoman Empire, 100,000 for France, 20,000 for Britain, and 2,000 for Sardinia—­the total is 692,000 troops. Thus, the estimated numbers of men killed would range between 692,000 at the low end and 1,000,000 at the high end, with a midpoint of 846,000. 6. J. David Hacker, “A Census-­Based Count of the Civil War Dead,” Civil War History 57:4 (Dec. 2011): 307–­48. Hacker estimates the numbers ran between 650,000–­850,000 and chose the midpoint. 7. This number is derived from Michael Howard, The Franco-­Prussian War: The German Invasion of France 1870–­1871 (London: Routledge, 2015), 453; Christine G. Krüger, “German Suffering in the Franco–­German War, 1870/71,” German History 29:3 (Sept. 2011): 406; and Frédérick Nolte, L’Europe Militaire et Diplomatique au Dix-­Neuvième Siècle, 1815–­1884: Guerres d’Agrandissement, 1820–­1878 (Paris: E. Plon, Nourrit, 1884), 527. 8. Casualty numbers from the Battle of Waterloo vary; this number is derived from Alessandro Barbero, The Battle: A New History of Waterloo, trans. John Cullen (New York: Walker, 2005), 419–­20. The Gettysburg figure is derived from McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 664. While some scholars put the number of casualties of Waterloo lower, at around 55,000, this still exceeds the number at Gettysburg. 9. Information derived from David Patrick Geggus, Slavery, War, and Revolution: The British Occupation of Saint Domingue, 1793–­1798 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). 10. There is a wealth of information on Nightingale. A good introduction is Mark Bostridge, Florence Nightingale: The Woman and Her Legend (London: Viking, 2008). 11. As with Nightingale, Barton, Dix, and Bickerdyke also have their biographers. See Elizabeth Brown Pryor, Clara Barton: Professional Angel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987); Barbara Witteman, Dorothea Dix: Social Reformer. (Mankato, MN: Bridgestone Books, 2003); and Karen Osborne, Mother Bickerdyke, Civil War Mother to the Boys (Milwaukee: Blue and Grey Chap Books, 1990). For Mary Seacole, see Jane Robinson, Mary Seacole: The Charismatic Black Nurse Who Became a Heroine of the Crimea (London: Constable, 2004). There is a need for further work on African American nurses in the Civil War. Susie King Taylor’s 1902 memoir is one of the few autobiographies of an African American Civil War nurse. See Taylor, Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33rd United States Colored Troops Late 1st S.C. Volunteers (1902; rprt, New York, M. Wiener, 1988). 12. Harold S. Wilson, Confederate Industry Manufacturers and Quartermasters in the Civil War (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), vii. See also Michael S. Frawley, Industrial Development and Manufacturing in the Antebellum Gulf South: A Reevaluation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2019). 13. A good introduction to this subject is Richard Lester, Confederate Finance and Purchasing in Great Britain (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1975). 14. Merritt Roe Smith, Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology: The Challenge of Change (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 281n38.

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15. Brian Holden Reid, The Civil War and the Wars of the Nineteenth Century (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), 26–­28. 16. Geoffrey Wawro, The Franco-­Prussian War: The German Conquest of France in 1870–­1871 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 51–­53. 17. William T. Sherman, The Memoirs of William T. Sherman: By Himself, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton, 1875), 2:396. Sherman was referring to the Battle of Sedan during the Franco-­German War, September 1, 1870—­a decisive German victory. 18. Estimates on German horse usage appear in “German Horse Cavalry and Transport,” Intelligence Bulletin (Mar. 1946), Lone Sentry, http://www.lonesentry.com/articles/germanhorse/index .html (accessed Mar. 5, 2019). See also Oliver Marks, “The WWII German Army Was 80% Horse Drawn: Business Lessons from History,” ZDNet, Dec. 6, 2008, https://www.zdnet.com/article/the -­wwii-­german-­army-­was-­80-­horse-­drawn-­business-­lessons-­from-­history/ (accessed Mar. 5, 2019). 19. Angus James Johnson II, Virginia Railroads in the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961), 1. 20. See Brian Cooke, The Grand Crimean Central Railway: The Story of the Railway Built by the British at Balaklava during the Crimean War of 1854–­56 (Knutsford, UK: Cavalier House, 1997). 21. Reid, Civil War and the Wars of the Nineteenth Century, 26–­31. 22. Wawro, Franco-­Prussian War, 11. 23. John E. Clark, Railroads in the Civil War: The Impact of Management on Victory and Defeat (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008). 24. Roy Meredith and Arthur Meredith, Mr. Lincoln’s Military Railroads: A Pictorial History of the United States Civil War Railroads (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 227. 25. George Edgar Turner, Victory Rode the Rails: The Strategic Place of the Railroads in the Civil War (Indianapolis: Bobbs-­Merrill, 1953). 26. Niels Eichhorn, “Lessons from the Crimean War: The Augusta Arsenal,” Journal of the Civil War Era’s Muster (blog), Jan. 22, 2019, https://www.journalofthecivilwarera.org/2019/01/lessons-­ from-­the-­crimean-­war-­the-­augusta-­arsenal/; Richard Delafield, Report on the Art of War in Europe in 1854, 1855, and 1856 (Washington, DC: G. W. Bowman, 1860), xiii–­xiv. Also see George B. McClellan, Report of Captain George B. McClellan One of the Officers Sent to the Seat of War in Europe in 1855 and 1856 (Washington, DC: A. O. P. Nicholson, 1857); and Alfred Mordecai, Military Commission to Europe, in 1855 and 1856 (Washington, DC: George W. Bowman, 1860). 27. Gordon A. Blaker, “From Powder to Projectile: The Production of Ammunition in Augusta,” in Never for Want of Powder: The Confederate Powder Works in Augusta, Georgia, ed. C. L. Bragg et al. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007), 132–­56. 28. Sean H. Vanatta and Dan Du, “Civil War Industry and Manufacturing,” New Georgia Encyclopedia, June 18, 2010, last modified Aug. 24, 2020, https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles /history-­archaeology/civil-­war-­industry-­and-­manufacturing/ (accessed July 4, 2021). 29. Wilson, Confederate Industry, xvi–­xvii. 30. Peter Ward Fay, The Opium War, 1840–­1842 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 261–­62. 31. Fay, Opium War, 272–­75. 32. On ironclads and the Crimean War, see Lambert, Crimean War, 271–­76; Lawrence Sondhaus, Naval Warfare, 1815–­1914 (New York: Routledge, 2001), 61–­66.

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33. See C. I. Hamilton, Anglo-­French Naval Rivalry, 1840–­1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 34. Howard J. Fuller, Clad in Iron: The American Civil War and the Challenge of British Naval Power (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008). 35. James M. McPherson, War on the Waters: The Union and Confederate Navies, 1861–­1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 97. 36. McPherson, War on the Waters, 98–­99. 37. McPherson, War on the Waters, 100–­105. 38. Howard J. Fuller, “‘This Country Now Occupies the Vantage Ground’: Union Monitors vs the British Navy,” in Battle of Hampton Roads: New Perspectives on the USS Monitor and CSS Virginia, ed. Harold Holzer and Tim Mulligan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 128. 39. Frank J. Merli, Great Britain and the Confederate Navy, 1861–­1865 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970), 14–­17. See also Merli, The Alabama, British Neutrality, and the American Civil War, ed. David M. Fahey (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004). These remain the authoritative accounts of Confederate shipbuilding in Britain. 40. Merli, Great Britain and the Confederate Navy, 182. 41. Lynn M. Case and Warren F. Spencer, The United States and France: Civil War Diplomacy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970), 466–­80. 42. Robert L. Scheina, Latin America’s Wars (Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 2003), 333–­40. 43. Gabriele Esposito and Giuseppe Rava, Armies of the War of the Pacific, 1879–­83: Chile, Peru, and Bolivia (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 7–­8; Sondhaus, Naval Warfare, 99; Daniel E. Sutherland, “James McNeill Whistler in Chile: Portrait of the Artist as Arms Dealer,” American Nineteenth Century History 9 (Jan. 2008): 61–­73. 44. Mary Bellis, “Submarines,” ThoughtCo, last modified Apr. 8, 2017, https://www.thoughtco .com/submarines-­history-­1992416 (accessed Mar. 4, 2019). 45. McPherson, War on the Waters, 179. 46. Bellis, “Submarines.” 47. McPherson, War on the Waters, 2–­8. 48. Leslie Reade, “Bombs over Venice,” History Today 8:6 (1958): 421–­25. Russell Naughton argues that the bombs helped damage Venetian morale. See Naughton, “Remote Piloted Aerial Vehicles: An Anthology,” Hargrave, last modified Feb. 2, 2003, https://www.ctie.monash.edu/hargrave /rpav_home.html (accessed Mar. 1, 2019). 49. See Naughton, “Remote Piloted Aerial Vehicles.” 50. On American Civil War balloons, see Mary Hoehling, Thaddeus Lowe: America’s One-­Man Air Corps (New York: Julian Messner, 1958); Charles M. Evans, The War of the Aeronauts: A History of Ballooning during the Civil War (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2002); and Stephen Poleskie, The Balloonist: The Story of T. S. C. Lowe—­Inventor, Scientist, Magician, and Father of the U.S. Air Force (Savannah, GA: Frederic C. Beil, 2007). 6. Mediation and Intervention in Theory and Practice 1. Palmerston to Russell, Oct. 8, 1862, Russell Papers, PR030/22/14D, The National Archives, Kew Gardens, UK. For arguments related to British intervention, see Crook, The North, the South,

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and the Powers; Niels Eichhorn, “The Intervention Crisis of 1862: A British Diplomatic Dilemma?,” American Nineteenth Century History 15 (Nov. 2014): 287–­310; Howard Jones, Union in Peril: The Crisis over British Intervention in the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); Phillip E. Myers, Caution and Cooperation: The American Civil War in British-­American Relations (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2008); and Duncan A. Campbell, “Palmerston and the American Civil War,” in Palmerston Studies, 2 vols., eds. David Brown and Miles Taylor (Southampton, UK: University of Southampton, 2007), 2:144–­67. 2. Norman B. Ferris, Desperate Diplomacy: William H. Seward’s Foreign Policy, 1861 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1975); Howard Jones, Blue and Gray Diplomacy: A History of Union and Confederate Foreign Relations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 45. 3. The humanitarian argument is most strongly advanced by Jones, Union in Peril. Phillip E. Myers persuasively argues against any chance of intervention, humanitarian or otherwise, by pointing to the fact that Great Britain and the United States followed a modus vivendi established by previous administrations to deal with the Canadian-­American frontier as well as both nations’ interests in Latin America. Myers, Caution and Cooperation. 4. The most reliable study of the Trent Affair is Gordon H. Warren, Fountain of Discontent: The Trent Affair and Freedom of the Seas (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1981). But see also Norman Ferris, The Trent Affair: A Diplomatic Crisis (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1977). 5. Emer de Vattel, The Law of Nations; or, Principles of the Law of Nature (London: G. G. And J. Robinson, 1797), 276. 6. Vattel, Law of Nations, 327. 7. Richard Clemens Lothar Metternich-­Winneburg, Memoirs of Prince Metternich, 1773–­1835, trans. Robina Napier, vol. 4 (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1880), 344. 8. Paul W. Schroeder, Metternich’s Diplomacy at Its Zenith, 1820–­1823 Austria and the Congresses of Troppau, Laibach, and Verona (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1962), 85–­87. 9. Sherston Baker, First Steps in International Law: Prepared for the Use of Students (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1899), 40. 10. Baker, First Steps in International Law, 165. 11. Baker, First Steps in International Law, 38. 12. Baker, First Steps in International Law, 39. 13. There is a need for a full-­scale comparative study of Crimean War and American Civil War diplomacy, given the influence the former had upon the latter, especially with respect to the thinking of British, French, American, and Russian statesmen. Indeed, such a work would be far preferable to yet another study of Anglo-­American relations during the Civil War repeating the same, long-­ debunked myths. See William F. Liebler, “The United States and the Crimean War, 1853–­1856” (PhD diss., University of Massachusetts Amherst, 1972), 85–­88. See also Alan Dowty, The Limits of American Isolation: The United States and the Crimean War (New York: New York University Press, 1971). 14. Baker, First Steps in International Law, 180. 15. Baker, First Steps in International Law, 40. 16. Baker, First Steps in International Law, 181. 17. Thomas J. Lawrence, The Principles of International Law (Boston, MA: D. C. Heath, 1913), 125. 18. Jonathan R. Dull, A Diplomatic History of the American Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985).

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19. Russell H. Bartley, Imperial Russia and the Struggle for Latin American Independence: 1808–­ 1828 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978); William S. Robertson, France and Latin-­American Independence (New York: Octagon Books, 1967). 20. Tim Chapman, Congress of Vienna, 1814–­1815 (London: Routledge, 1998); Paul W. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–­1848 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996); Brian E. Vick, The Congress of Vienna: Power and Politics after Napoleon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). 21. Schroeder, Transformation of European Politics, chap. 13. Most historians, including Schroeder, argue that the Congress of Vienna system, the Concert of Power/Europe, was dead by 1823, when the policy of holding congresses to settle international situations failed to yield a unified European monarchical antirevolutionary force. 22. Charles K. Webster, The Foreign Policy of Castlereagh, 1815–­1822 (London: G. Bell, 1963). 23. Brewer, Greek War of Independence; Dakin, Greek Struggle for Independence; Wolf Seidl, Bayern in Griechenland: Die Geburt des griechischen Nationalstaats und die Regierung König Ottos (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1981). 24. Brewer, Greek War of Independence, chap. 31; Dakin, Greek Struggle for Independence, 226–­30. 25. Mark Lawrence, Spain’s First Carlist War, 1833–­40 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 26. Paul Siebertz, D. Miguel e a sua Época: A Verdadeira História da Guerra Civil (Algueirão-­ Mem Martins, Port.: Associação Cultural Tudo Instaurar em Cristo, 1986). 27. Paul Calore, The Texas Revolution and the U.S.-­Mexican War: A Concise History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014); Timothy J. Henderson, A Glorious Defeat: Mexico and Its War with the United States (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007). 28. John Lynch, Argentine Caudillo: Juan Manuel De Rosas (Lanham, MD: SR Books, 2006); Bill Marshall, The French Atlantic: Travels in Culture and History (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009), 265–­68. 29. Fay, Opium War. 30. Douglas Hurd, The Arrow War: An Anglo-­Chinese Confusion, 1856–­1860 (London: Collins, 1967). 31. This discussion will not involve the Spanish intervention in the Dominican Republic. That was largely a domestic invitation to take over and annex the former colony, feeding into the Spanish desire to recreate the old colonial empire and regain great-­power status within Europe. 32. Richard N. Sinkin, The Mexican Reform, 1855–­1876: A Study in Liberal Nation-­Building (Austin, TX: Institute of Latin American Studies, 1979). 33. H. Montgomery Hyde, Mexican Empire: The History of Maximilian and Carlota of Mexico (London: Macmillan, 1946), 5–­6. 34. Deák, Lawful Revolution, 302. 35. Deák, Lawful Revolution, 285–­91; Alan J. P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848–­ 1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), 30–­33. 36. Gunnar Alexandersson, International Straits of the World: The Baltic Straits (The Hague, Neth.: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982); Taylor, Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 12–­13. Taylor would disagree with the notion that the Baltic was of geostrategic importance for British interests, viewing this as an outdated assumption originating in the previous century.

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37. Kenneth Bourne, The Foreign Policy of Victorian England: 1830–­1902 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), 67–­68; John A. S. Grenville, Europe Reshaped, 1848–­1878 (London: Fontana, 1976), 23; Taylor, Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 12–­19. 38. Figes, Crimean War, 405–­8. 39. Bourne, Foreign Policy of Victorian England, 96–­102. 40. Bourne, Foreign Policy of Victorian England, 106–­7. 41. Bourne, Foreign Policy of Victorian England, 107–­9. 42. Alexis Heraclides and Ada Dialla, introduction to part 1 of Humanitarian Intervention in the Long Nineteenth Century: Setting the Precedent (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016). 43. John Bew, “‘From an Umpire to a Competitor’: Castlereagh, Canning, and the Issue of International Intervention in the Wake of the Napoleonic Wars,” in Humanitarian Intervention: A History, eds. Brendan Simms and D. J. B. Trim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 117–­19. 44. John Stuart Mill, “A Few Words on Non-­Intervention,” Fraser’s Magazine (1859). 45. Mill, “A Few Words on Non-­Intervention.” 46. For a recent scholarly discussion of the subject, see Jones, Blue and Gray Diplomacy; and Myers, Caution and Cooperation. 47. For the U.S. Supreme Court’s Decision, see Jones, Union in Peril, 43–­44. 48. Hunter to Mason, Sept. 23, 1861, in The Messages and Papers of Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy: Including Diplomatic Correspondence 1861–­1865, ed. James D. Richardson (Nashville, TN: United States Publishing, 1905), 91. 49. Seward to Adams, Apr. 10, 1861, in Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States; Transmitted to Congress with the Annual Message of the President [Foreign Relations of the United States; hereafter cited as FRUS] (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1861), 79. 50. Seward to Adams, May 21, 1861, in FRUS (1861), 89. 51. Alexander McLeod, a former member of the Canadian militia, boasted while drunk in New York about having participated in the burning of a rebel boat in American waters during the 1837 rebellions. This action having resulted in the death of a U.S. citizen, he was promptly arrested. The British government demanded McLeod’s release on the grounds that if the former militiaman was guilty, he had been acting under orders of his government, from which redress must be sought. The U.S. government in fact agreed with the British, but Seward, then governor of New York, insisted that McLeod be tried for murder in the state courts. This dangerous situation was resolved by sheer luck. It turned out McLeod had exaggerated his involvement and, in fact, had nothing to do with burning the vessel; he provided an alibi and was released. Edward Collins Jr. and Martin A. Rogoff, “The Caroline Incident of 1837, the McLeod Affair of 1840–­1841, and the Development of International Law,” American Review of Canadian Studies 20 (Spring 1990): 81–­107; Van Deusen, William Henry Seward, 292–­94; Wilbur D. Jones, The American Problem in British Diplomacy, 1841–­ 1861 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1974), 149. 52. This habitual equation of the Confederacy and Ireland made by pro-­northern Britons (and, as it happened, by Irish nationalists) has been overlooked in the scholarship of Anglo-­American relations of this period to the point of willful blindness. See Campbell, English Public Opinion, 99–­100. 53. One of the earliest studies by a noncontemporary was Ephraim D. Adams, Great Britain and the American Civil War (New York: Longmans, Green, 1925). Adams points to a wide variety of reasons for possible British involvement but leaves politicians like George Cornewall Lewis uninvolved.

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The more global-­narrative-­minded David P. Crook presents a much more detailed and nuanced understanding of the events in the fall of 1862 in The North, the South, and the Powers. More recent attention has come from Jones, Union in Peril; Jones, Abraham Lincoln and a New Birth of Freedom: The Union and Slavery in the Diplomacy of the Civil War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002); and Myers, Caution and Cooperation. Some additional observations are made in Campbell, “Letting Someone Else Have Your Way,” 6–­21. 54. See Eichhorn, “Intervention Crisis of 1862,” 287–­310. Robert George McGregor, meantime, argues that historians have erroneously ignored Palmerston’s hostility toward slavery as a reason for his opposition to intervention in the American Civil War. See McGregor, “Lord Palmerston and British Anti-­Slavery, 1830–­1865” (PhD diss., University of Southampton, 2019), 86–­90. 7. The American Civil War and the Evangelical Century Epigraph: Richmond (VA) Religious Herald, Mar. 9, 1865, quoted in Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the American Civil War, by Harry S. Stout (New York: Viking, 2006), 407. This chapter was reviewed in draft form by Ryan Jordan, who provided several further sources and many helpful suggestions with respect to its arguments. 1. William Lloyd Garrison to Rev. Samuel J. May, July 17, 1845, in The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, ed. Walter M. Merrill, vol. 3 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1973), 303; Liberator, May 6, 1842. 2. Henry Ward Beecher, War and Emancipation: A Thanksgiving Day Sermon (Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson and Brothers, 1861), 5. 3. See Stephen R. Haynes, Noah’s Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 4. See Bertram Wyatt-­Brown, Yankee Saints and Southern Sinners (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990). 5. Illinois Gazette, Aug. 15, 1846; Tazewell Whig, Aug. 22, 1846. Lincoln further added: “I do not think I could myself, be brought to support a man for office, whom I knew to be an open enemy of, and scoffer at, religion. Leaving the higher matter of eternal consequences, between him and his Maker, I still do not think any man has the right thus to insult the feelings, and injure the morals, of the community in which he may live.” This, of course, left a lot of ambiguity as to his own personal beliefs. 6. “Abraham Lincoln Second Inaugural Address,” Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the United States, bartleby, 1989, https://www.bartleby.com/lit-­hub/inaugural-­addresses-­of-­the-­presid ents-­of-­the-­united-­states/abraham-­lincoln-­second-­inaugural-­address/ (accessed July 19, 2023). 7. All of Lincoln’s biographers address this issue, but see also Mark A. Noll, “The Puzzling Faith of Abraham Lincoln,” Christian History 11:1 (1992): 11–­15; Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Stout, Upon the Altar of the Nation; and Lewis Perry, “Scripture and Slaughter: The Civil War as a Theological and Moral Crisis,” Modern Intellectual History 6:1 (2009): 207–­21. 8. See James H. Moorhead, American Apocalypse: Yankee Protestants and the Civil War, 1860–­1869 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978); and Randall M. Miller, Harry S. Stout, and Charles Reagan Wilson, eds., Religion and the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 9. For a comparison of “providential nations,” see Anthony D. Smith, Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

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10. For the United States as a providential nation, see Nicholas Guyatt, Providence and the Invention of the United States, 1607–­1876 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). As with many such studies, Guyatt assumes that this belief is unique to the United States. For an introduction to British ideas of being a providential nation, see Stuart Brown, Providence and Empire, 1815–­ 1914 (London: Routledge, 2008). 11. Quoted in E. Hodder, The Life and Work of the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, vol. 2 (London: Cassell, 1887), 505. As John Wolffe demonstrates, however, Palmerston’s religious views are as much as puzzle as Lincoln’s. Wolffe, “Palmerston and the Church,” in Brown and Taylor, Palmerston Studies, 1:19–­38. 12. Wolffe, “Palmerston and the Church,” 1:22. 13. Wolffe, “Palmerston and the Church,” 1:25. 14. Quoted in Eric Evans, The Shaping of Modern Britain Identity, Industry, and Empire, 1780–­ 1914 (London: Taylor and Francis, 2014), 334. 15. Frances Trollope, The Domestic Manners of the Americans, vol. 1 (London: Whittaker, Treacher, 1832), 229–­50. 16. Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Whitney R. Cross, The Burned-­Over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800–­1850 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1950); Steven K. Green, Inventing a Christian America: The Myth of the Religious Founding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 17. Bret E. Carroll, Spiritualism in Antebellum America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). 18. Ruth Brandon, The Spiritualists: The Passion for the Occult in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983). 19. See Kenneth J. Winkle, Abraham and Mary Lincoln (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2011), 101. 20. John G. Nicolay to Jesse W. Weik, Nov. 25, 1894, quoted in Jesse W. Weik, The Real Lincoln: A Portrait, ed. Michael Burlingame (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 370. 21. See Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-­Century America, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001). 22. Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind from the Great Awakening to the Revolution (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1966). 23. A good starting point on this controversial topic is John Fea, Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?: A Historical Introduction (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2011). 24. See Noah Feldman, Divided by God: America’s Church-­State Problem—­and What We Should Do about It (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005), chap. 2. 25. See, for example, Ryan P. Jordan, Church, State, and Race: The Discourse of American Religious Liberty, 1750–­1900 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2012). 26. Thomas R. Hietala, Manifest Design: American Exceptionalism and Empire (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003); Frederick Merk, Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History: A Reinterpretation (New York: Knopf, 1963); Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansionism and the Empire of Right (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995). 27. Harold Wilson, The Relevance of British Socialism (London: Weindenfeld and Nicolson,

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1964), 1. Wilson, a Labour prime minister, noted that “Methodism” should have been replaced with “Nonconformism.” 28. See William E. Van Vugt, Britain to America: Mid-­Nineteenth Immigration to the United States (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 77. On British Methodists and the Civil War, see Campbell, English Public Opinion, 40, 60, 75, 85, 91, 181, 214. 29. See Jonathan Strom, Hartmut Lehmann, and James Van Horn Melton, eds., Pietism in Germany and North America, 1680–­1820 (London: Routledge, 2009), 1–­51. 30. Robert H. Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); John R. McKivigan, The War against Proslavery Religion: Abolitionism and the Northern Churches, 1830–­1865 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984); Ronald G. Walters, American Reformers: 1815–­1860 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1997). See also Ryan P. Jordan, Slavery and the Meetinghouse: The Quakers and the Abolitionist Dilemma, 1820–­65 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007). 31. The First World War also witnessed the German expression Gott strafe England, calling for divine punishment to fall upon Britain for declaring war on Germany. The question of enlisting God on one’s own side thus continued long after the American Civil War. See Richard Millington and Roger Smith, “‘A Few Bars of the Hymn of Hate’: The Reception of Ernst Lissauer’s ‘Haßgesang gegen England’ in German and English,” Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature 41:2 (2017): 1–­20. 32. Miller, Stout, and Wilson, Religion and the American Civil War; George C. Rable, God’s Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Sean A. Scott, A Visitation of God: Northern Civilians Interpret the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Timothy L. Wesley, The Politics of Faith during the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013). 33. Stout, Upon the Altar of the Nation, xvii. 34. Maurice Agulhon, The Republican Experiment, 1848–­1852 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 188–­91. 35. On the empress’s involvement in French policy toward Italy and Mexico, see Frédéric Loliée, The Life of an Empress, trans. Bryan O’Donnell (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1908), 220–­38. A more modern biography is Desmond Stewart, Eugénie: The Empress and Her Empire (Stroud, UK: Sutton, 2004). 36. James F. McMillan, Napoleon III (London: Longman, 1991), 38–­40. There was, as Quentin Deluermoz points out, questions about how France could fight and destroy a republican government considering its own republican, liberal heritage. See Deluermoz, Le Crépuscule des Révolutions: 1848–­1871 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2012), 81. 37. Quoted in Georges Lacour-­Gayet, Bismarck, trans. Herbert M. Capes (London: Melrose, 1919), 20. Lacour-­Gayet, a French historian writing in the aftermath of the First World War, was not an admirer of the Iron Chancellor, as one might expect. Nonetheless, he took Bismarck’s religious beliefs seriously. 38. Lacour-­Gayet, Bismarck, 88. 39. Erich Eyck, Bismarck and the German Empire (1950; repr., New York: W. W. Norton, 1968), 202–­10. 40. John Pollard, Catholicism in Modern Italy: Religion, Society, and Politics since 1861 (London: Routledge, 2008).

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41. William B. Kurtz, Excommunicated from the Union: How the Civil War Created a Separate Catholic America (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 109. 42. Kurtz, Excommunicated from the Union, 138. 43. For works on the Sonderbundskrieg, see Erwin Bucher, Die Geschichte des Sonderbundskrieges (Zurich: Verlag Berichthaus, 1966); Hilmar Gernet and Martin Merki, eds., Luzerns Heiliger Krieg: Eine Historische Reportage zum Sonderbundskrieg 1847 und den Gefechten auf Luzerner Boden (Hitzkirch, Switz.: Comenius, 1997); and Joachim Remak, Bruderzwist nicht Brudermord: Der Schweizer Sonderbundskrieg von 1847 (Zurich: Orell Füssli Verlag, 1997). 44. Bucher, Die Geschichte des Sonderbundskrieges, 518, 520–­28. 45. Figes, Crimean War, 1–­22; Norman Rich, Why the Crimean War?: A Cautionary Tale (Han­ over, NH: University Press of New England, 1985), 18–­22. 46. For other works on the Crimean War, see John S. Curtiss, Russia’s Crimean War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1979); and David M. Goldfrank, The Origins of the Crimean War (London: Longman, 1994). 47. Caesar E. Farah, The Politics of Interventionism in Ottoman Lebanon, 1830–­1861 (London: Centre for Lebanese Studies, 2000), chaps. 18–­22; Leila T. Fawaz, An Occasion for War: Civil Conflict in Lebanon and Damascus in 1860 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 48. K. Theodore Hoppen, The Mid-­Victorian Generation, 1846–­1886 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), chap. 12. 49. Fay, Opium War. 50. Stephen R. Platt, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), 13–­24; Thomas H. Reilly, The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom: Rebellion and the Blashemy of Empire (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004); Jen Yu-­Wen, The Taiping Revolutionary Movement (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973), chap. 2. 51. Jen, Taiping Revolutionary Movement, 10–­70. 52. Caleb Carr, The Devil Soldier: The American Soldier of Fortune Who Became God in China (New York: Random House, 1992); Jen, Taiping Revolutionary Movement. 53. August Hasler, Wie Der Papst Unfehlbar Wurde: Macht und Ohnmacht eines Dogmas (Munich: Piper, 1979). 8. Realpolitik beyond Otto von Bismarck Epigraph: “Excerpt from Bismarck’s ‘Blood and Iron’ Speech (1862),” German History in Documents and Images, https://germanhistorydocs.ghi-­dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=250&language= english (accessed July 20, 2023). 1. Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli, The Prince, ed. Quentin Skinner and Russell Price (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 54–­55. 2. Schroeder, Metternich’s Diplomacy at Its Zenith. 3. Alan B. Spitzer, “The Good Napoleon III,” French Historical Studies 2 (Spring 1962): 308–­29. 4. McMillan, Napoleon III, 29–­34. Also see Agulhon, Republican Experiment; Roger Price, 1848 in France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975); and William Fortescue, France and 1848: The End of Monarchy (London: Routledge, 2005).

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5. McMillan, Napoleon III, 36. 6. McMillan, Napoleon III, 46–­51. 7. McMillan, Napoleon III, 93–­97. 8. Bernstorff to Goltz, Mar. 26, 1863; Werther to Bismarck, Mar. 3, 1863; Usedom to Wilhelm I, Mar. 27, 1863, in Die auswärtige Politik Preussens 1858–­1871: diplomatische Aktenstücke, ed. Winfried Baumgart, Christian Friese, Rudolf Ibbeken, and Herbert Michaelis, vol. 3 (1932; repr., Oldenburg, Ger.: Verlag Gerhard Stalling, 2008), 355, 423, 427, 433. 9. Pflanze, Bismarck and the Development of Germany, 195–­96. 10. McMillan, Napoleon III, 38–­41; Ivan Scott, The Roman Question and the Powers, 1848–­1865 (Dordrecht, Neth.: Springer Netherlands, 1969), pt. 1. 11. McMillan, Napoleon III, 80–­93. 12. Denis Mack Smith, Cavour (New York: Knopf, 1985), 203. 13. Denis Mack Smith, Cavour and Garibaldi, 1860: A Study in Political Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954). 14. Alfonso Scirocco, Garibaldi: Citizen of the World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), chap. 20. 15. Antony Shugaar, “Italy’s Own Lost Cause,” New York Times, May 2, 2012. 16. William Seward to George Marsh, Oct. 8, 1862, FRUS (1862), 577. 17. Denis Mack Smith, Victor Emanuel, Cavour, and the Risorgimento (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 56. 18. Mack Smith, Victor Emanuel, Cavour, and the Risorgimento, 56–­58. 19. Mack Smith, Victor Emanuel, Cavour, and the Risorgimento, 58. 20. Mack Smith, Victor Emanuel, Cavour, and the Risorgimento, 58–­60. 21. Mack Smith, Victor Emanuel, Cavour, and the Risorgimento, 60–­61. 22. Mack Smith, Victor Emanuel, Cavour, and the Risorgimento, 66. 23. Mack Smith, Victor Emanuel, Cavour, and the Risorgimento, 75. 24. Eyck, Bismarck and the German Empire, 20–­30; Pflanze, Bismarck and the Development of Germany, 62–­66. 25. Eyck, Bismarck and the German Empire, 61. 26. Pflanze, Bismarck and the Development of Germany, 194. 27. Eyck, Bismarck and the German Empire, 60–­62. 28. Pflanze, Bismarck and the Development of Germany, 193. 29. Pflanze, Bismarck and the Development of Germany, 196. 30. Eyck, Bismarck and the German Empire, 62–­63. 31. Eyck, Bismarck and the German Empire, 91. See also Charles Grant Robertson, Bismarck (New York: Henry Holt, 1919), 185. 32. Eyck, Bismarck and the German Empire, 128. 33. For works on Bismarck’s unification of Germany, see William Carr, The Origins of the Wars of German Unification (New York: Routledge, 2013); Eyck, Bismarck and the German Empire, chap. 2; and Pflanze, Bismarck and the Development of Germany, bks. 3, 4. 34. Eyck, Bismarck and the German Empire, 100–­101. 35. Eyck, Bismarck and the German Empire, 110–­11. 36. Eyck, Bismarck and the German Empire, 139–­41.

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37. Ulysses S. Grant, The Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, 2 vols. (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1885), 1:53. 38. Brian McGinty, The Body of John Merryman: Abraham Lincoln and the Suspension of Habeas Corpus (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Jonathan W. White, Abraham Lincoln and Treason in the Civil War: The Trials of John Merryman (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011). 39. Abraham Lincoln, The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler et al., 9 vols. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953–­55), 5:436–­37. 40. Donald, Lincoln, 380. 41. This number is derived from Neely, Fate of Liberty, 233. 42. Neely, Fate of Liberty, chap. 1. 43. David W. Bulla, “Abraham Lincoln and Press Suppression Reconsidered,” American Journalism 26:4 (2009): 11–­33. 44. Bulla, “Abraham Lincoln and Press Suppression Reconsidered,” 11–­33. 45. Dennis K. Boman, Lincoln and Citizens’ Rights in Civil War Missouri: Balancing Security and Freedom (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011), 93–­94. 46. Emil Preetorius et al. to James Taussig, May 16, 1863, ser. 1, General Correspondence, 1833–­ 1916, Abraham Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 47. Lincoln, Collected Works, 6:148. 48. Frank L. Klement, The Limits of Dissent: Clement L. Vallandigham and the Civil War (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1970); Thomas C. Mackey, Opposing Lincoln: Clement L. Vallandigham. Presidential Power. and the Legal Battle over Dissent in Wartime (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2020). 49. Donald, Lincoln, 441. 50. Spectator, June 6, 1863, 2083. 51. Spectator, Sept. 20, 1862, 1043. 52. David Herbert Donald, “Died of Democracy,” in Why the North Won, 81–­92. Mark Neely Jr. has since challenged Donald’s thesis. See Neely, Southern Rights: Political Prisoners and the Myth of Confederate Constitutionalism (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999). For other counterarguments to Donald, see Bynum, Long Shadow of the Civil War; and Severance, War State All Over. 53. An interesting collection of responses in both the North and the South to the proclamation may be found in Robert J. Zorick, “Study of the Union and the Confederate reactions to the Emancipation Proclamation” (MA thesis, University of Montana, 1964). 54. Spectator, Oct. 11, 1862, 1125. 9. Imperial Frontiers and Indigenous Peoples 1. Sumner’s response is discussed in Richard A. Ek, “Charles Sumner’s Address at Cooper Union,” Southern Speech Journal 32:3 (1967): 169–­79. See also Charles Sumner, Our Foreign Relations: Showing Present Perils from England and France. . . . Speech of Hon. Charles Sumner, before the Citizens of New York, at the Cooper Institute, Sept. 10, 1863 (New York: Young Men’s Republican Union, 1863).

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2. One of the authors detected echoes of both Scott and Cooper when he read Hadji Murat for the first time in his twenties. Recently, Christian Gum has demonstrated the influence of Cooper upon Tolstoy in “Heirs to the Frontier: James Fenimore Cooper’s Influence on Leo Tolstoy,” Inquiry Journal (Spring 2018), University of New Hampshire, https://www.unh.edu/inquiryjournal /spring-­2018/heirs-­frontier-­james-­fenimore-­cooper’s-­influence-­leo-­tolstoy (accessed July 31, 2020). Two useful works are S. Layton, Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy (New York; Cambridge University Press, 1994); and W. Thorp, “Cooper beyond America,” New York History 35:4 (1954): 522–­39. Scott’s influence on Cooper is discussed in Benjamin Lease, Anglo-­American Encounters: England and the Rise of American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 38–­46. Cooper’s debt was such that some of his contemporary American critics dismissed him as an inferior version of Scott (whose novels were popular in the United States at the time). 3. Among the many critics of Frederick J. Turner and his frontier thesis are Patricia N. Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987); and Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991). 4. Frederick J. Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt, 1921), 3–­4. 5. Walter Nugent, “The Frontier in the United States,” in Frontier in Comparative Perspectives: The United States and Brazil, eds. Janaina Amado, Walter Nugent, and Warren Dean (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center, 1990), 6–­7. 6. An interesting comparison between U.S. and Canadian engagement with the Indigenous peoples is Ryan Hall, “Negotiating Sovereignty: U.S. and Canadian Colonialisms on the Northwest Plains, 1855–­1877,” in Spangler and Towers, Remaking North American Sovereignty: State Transformation in the 1860s, 132–­52. 7. See, for example, Paul Kramer and John Plotz, “Pairing Empires: Britain and the United States, 1857–­1947,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 2:1 (2001), doi:10.1353/cch.2001.0008. See also Paul Kramer, “Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-­Saxons: Race and Rule between the British and United States Empires, 1880–­1910,” Journal of American History 88 (2002): 1315–­53; and Linda Colley, “The Significance of the Frontier in British History,” in More Adventures with Britannia: Personalities, Politics and Culture in Britain, ed. Roger Louis, 13–­29 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998). Colley’s echoing of Turner’s title is deliberate. 8. See Tulloch, James Bryce’s American Commonwealth, 47. 9. John O’Sullivan, “Annexation,” United States Magazine and Democratic Review 17:1 (July–­ Aug. 1845): 5–­10. 10. George Stanley, Toil and Trouble: Military Expeditions to Red River (Toronto: Dundurn, 1989). 11. Donald Creighton, Canada’s First Century: 1867–­1967 (Toronto: Macmillan, 1970), 54. 12. Bob Beal and Rod Macleod, Prairie Fire: The 1885 North-­West Rebellion (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1984); Thomas Flanagan, Riel and the Rebellion: 1885 Reconsidered (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000). 13. See George Parkin, Makers of Canada: Sir John A. Macdonald (Toronto: Morang, 1908), 244. Whether Macdonald said this is questionable. One should recall that the Canadian prime minister appointed a medical commission to investigate Riel’s sanity, suggesting at a minimum a belief in due process of law.

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14. There is no end of works on Riel, both friendly and hostile. A good starting point with respect to his legacy is Albert Barz, The False Traitor: Louis Riel in Canadian Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003). See also Jennifer Reid, Louis Riel and the Creation of Modern Canada: Mythic Discourse and the Postcolonial State (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008). On John Brown, see David S. Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights (New York: Vintage Books, 2006). For a very different comparison, see Benjamin H. Johnson, “Reconstructing North America: The Borderlands of Juan Cortina and Louis Riel in an Age of National Consolidation,” in Spangler and Towers, Remaking North American Sovereignty, 199–­219. 15. Two good studies on Russian expansion toward the Amur Valley are John L. Evans, Russian Expansion on the Amur, 1848–­1860: The Push to the Pacific (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1999); and S. C. M. Paine, Imperial Rivals: China, Russia, and Their Disputed Frontier (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1996). 16. Mark Bassin, Imperial Visions: Nationalist Imagination and Geographical Expansion in the Russian Far East, 1840–­1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 163–­64. 17. Perry McD. Collins, A Voyage down the Amoor: With a Land Journey through Siberia, and Incidental Notices of Manchooria, Kamschatka, and Japan (New York: D. Appleton, 1860), 165. 18. Bassin, Imperial Visions, 155, 159. 19. Bassin, Imperial Visions, 170. 20. Alexander Herzen, My Past and Thoughts: The Memoirs of Alexander Herzen, trans. Constance Garnett, ed. Dwight Macdonald (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 189. 21. Bassin, Imperial Visions, 146–­47. 22. Bassin, Imperial Visions, 148. 23. Bassin, Imperial Visions, 238–­39. 24. Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia (New York: Kodansha International, 1994), 4. 25. Hugo Stumm, The Russian Campaign against Khiva in 1873 (Kolkata, India: Foreign Department Press, 1876), 67. 26. Whether Sheridan actually said this is disputed; certainly it is attributed to him rather than contemporaneously quoted. See Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (New York: Henry Holt, 1970), 170–­72. Theodore Roosevelt did later state during a January 1886 speech in New York, “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every 10 are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.” It may be that a simplified version of this quote was transposed back onto Sheridan, who died in 1888. Laurence M. Hauptman, “Governor Theodore Roosevelt and the Indians of New York State,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 119:1 (1975): 1–­7. 27. Statistics of the Foreign and Domestic Commerce of the United States (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1864), 190–­91. 28. Susan L. Johnson, Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 77, 150–­51, 240–­43, 278. 29. Elliott West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998), xv, pt. 2. 30. Martin H. Hall, Sibley’s New Mexico Campaign (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1960), 85.

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31. Evans M. Marix, The Boer War: South Africa, 1899–­1902 (Oxford: Osprey Military, 1999), 4–­6. 32. See C. N. Connolly, “Miners’ Rights,” Labor History 35 (Nov. 1978): 35–­47. While there are other articles on the riots, Connolly usefully discusses them from a global comparative perspective. 33. See Scott Zesch, The Chinatown War: Chinese Los Angeles and the Massacre of 1871 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 34. Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). 35. Thomas W. Dunlay, “Ambiguity and Misunderstanding: The Struggle between the U.S. Army and the Indians for the Great Plains,” in They Made Us Many Promises: The American Indian Experience, 1524 to the Present, ed. Philip Weeks (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 2002), 108. 36. For works on the Dakota War, see Paul N. Beck, Columns of Vengeance: Soldiers, Sioux, and the Punitive Expeditions, 1863–­1864 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013); Paul N. Beck, Soldier, Settler, and Sioux: Fort Ridgely and the Minnesota River Valley, 1853–­1867 (Sioux Falls, SD: Center for Western Studies, 2000); Scott W. Berg, 38 Nooses: Lincoln, Little Crow, and the Beginning of the Frontier’s End (New York: Pantheon Books, 2012); and John R. Legg, “Unforgetting the Dakota 38: Settler Colonialism, Indigenous Resurgence, and the Competing Narratives of the U.S.–­Dakota War, 1862–­2012” (MA thesis, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 2020). 37. Pope quoted in David Nichols, Lincoln and the Indians: Civil War Policy and Politics (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1978), 87. 38. Niels Eichhorn and John R. Legg, “Crossing Borders as Refugees: A Comparison of Dakota and Poles,” Journal of the Civil War Era Muster (blog), July 26, 2022, https://www.journalofthecivil warera.org/2022/07/crossing-­borders-­as-­refugees-­a-­comparison-­of-­dakota-­and-­poles/. 39. Guy E. Gibbon, The Sioux: The Dakota and Lakota Nations (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), chap. 5. 40. See James O. Gump, The Dust Rose like Smoke: The Subjugation of the Zulu and the Sioux (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994). 41. On parallels between American and British imperialism, see Robin Winks, “American Imperialism in Comparative Perspective,” in The Comparative Approach to American History, ed. C. Vann Woodward (New York: Basic Books, 1968). On the Zulu War, see Saul David, Zulu: The Heroism and Tragedy of the Zulu War of 1879 (London: Penguin, 2005). 42. For a long-­term study of “Indian hating,” see Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-­Hating and Empire Building (New York: Meridian Book, 1980). 43. Norman Etherington, The Great Treks: The Transformation of Southern Africa, 1815–­1854 (Harlow, UK: Pearson, 2001); Hermann Giliomee, “Processes in Development of the Southern African Frontier,” in The Frontier in History: North America and Southern Africa Compared, ed. Howard Lamar and Leonard Thompson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 92. 44. Stan Hoig, The Sand Creek Massacre (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961); West, Contested Plains, 299–­307. 45. United States, Congress, Report of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War at the Second Session, Thirty-­Eighth Congress (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1865), v–­vi. 46. The best introduction to the Jamaican events remains Bernard Semmel, The Governor Eyre Controversy (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1962). See also Gad Heuman, “The Killing Time”: The Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994).

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47. George Rauch, Conflict in the Southern Cone: The Argentine Military and the Boundary Dispute with Chile, 1870–­1902 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999), chaps. 2–­3. 48. César Bustos-­Videla, “The 1879 Conquest of the Argentine ‘Desert’ and Its Religious Aspects,” Americas 21 (July 1964): 36–­57; Alfred Hasbrouck, “The Conquest of the Desert,” Hispanic American Historical Review 15 (May 1935): 195–­228; Richard O. Perry, “Warfare on the Pampas in the 1870s,” Military Affairs 36 (Apr. 1972): 52–­58; Richard O. Perry, “Argentina and Chile: The Struggle for Patagonia, 1843–­1881,” Americas 36 (Jan. 1980): 347–­63; Kenneth M. Roth, Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 45. 49. Matt K. Matsuda, Pacific Worlds: A History of Seas, Peoples, and Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 169. 50. Matsuda, Pacific Worlds, 169. 51. Matsuda, Pacific Worlds, 170. 52. Ben Wilson, Heyday: The 1850s and the Dawn of the Global Age (New York: Basic Books, 2016), 113–­15. 53. James Belich, The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1986); Matthew Wright, Two Peoples, One Land: The New Zealand Wars (Auckland: Reed, 2006). 54. Wilson, Heyday, 93. 55. Richard F. Burton, The City of the Saints; and Across the Rocky Mountains to California (New York: Harper, 1862), 64, 176. 56. Burton, City of the Saints, 148. 57. Burton, City of the Saints, 276. 58. Wilson, Heyday, 94. 59. On French involvement in Indochina, see Milton Osborne, The French Presence in Cochinchina and Cambodia: Rule and Response, 1859–­1905 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969); and Mark McLeod, The Vietnamese Response to French Intervention, 1862–­1874 (New York: Praeger 1991). 60. Very few studies of Civil War diplomacy are aware of France’s global concerns which impacted upon its approach to both Mexico and the United States in this period. An exception is Myers, Caution and Cooperation. 61. Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: Viking, 1983). Despite its age, Karnow’s study remains useful here because of its discussion of France’s earlier involvement in Vietnam and how this influenced the U.S. approach. 10. Reconstruction(s) Epigraph: Spencer B. King, Georgia Voices: A Documentary History to 1872 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1966), 331. 1. Foner, Reconstruction, chap. 5. 2. Foner, Reconstruction, chaps. 6–­7. 3. Willie Lee Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999); Kevin Dougherty, The Port Royal Experiment: A Case Study in Development (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014).

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4. Blanchard, Slavery and Abolition in Early Republican Peru, 213–­15. 5. Stephen V. Ash, A Massacre in Memphis: The Race Riot That Shook the Nation One Year after the Civil War (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2014). 6. John Patrick Daly, The War after the War: A New History of Reconstruction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2022); Douglas R. Egerton, The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013). 7. LeeAnna Keith, The Colfax Massacre: The Untold Story of Black Power, White Terror, and the Death of Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Allen W. Trelease, White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999). 8. Gérard Chaliand and Arnaud Blin, eds., The History of Terrorism: From Antiquity to ISIS (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016), pt. 2; Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Gerhard Hirsch­ feld, eds., Social Protest, Violence, and Terror in Nineteenth-­and Twentieth-­Century Europe (New York: St. Martin’s, 1982). 9. Charles J. Esdaile, Fighting Napoleon: Guerrillas, Bandits, and Adventurers in Spain, 1808–­1814 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004). 10. Brian Jenkins, The Fenian Problem: Insurgency and Terrorism in a Liberal State, 1858–­1874 (Montreal: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 2014), 118–­27. 11. Jenkins, Fenian Problem, 149–­63. 12. Jonathan Gantt, Irish Terrorism in the Atlantic Community, 1865–­1922 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 13. Brian Jenkins, Fenians and Anglo-­American Relations during Reconstruction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969); Hereward Senior, The Last Invasion of Canada: The Fenian Raids, 1866–­1870 (Toronto: Dundurn, 1991). 14. Jaime Suchlicki, Mexico: From Montezuma to NAFTA and Beyond (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2000), 84, 87. 15. Annegret Eller, We Dream Together: Dominican Independence, Haiti, and the Fight for Caribbean Freedom (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). 16. Alistair Horne, The Terrible Year: The Paris Commune, 1871 (London: Orion, 2004); John M. Merriman, Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune (New York: Basic Books, 2014). 17. Edward Hyams, Pierre-­Joseph Proudhon: His Revolutionary Life, Mind, and Works (London: Murray, 1979). 18. James M. Leier, Bakunin: The Creative Passion (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2006), 286–­87. 19. Eric Foner, Nothing but Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007). 20. Carolyn Fick, “Emancipation in Haiti: From Plantation Labour to Peasant Proprietorship,” Slavery and Abolition 21 (2000): 19–­21. 21. Fick, “Emancipation in Haiti,” 33–­35. 22. Huzzey, Freedom Burning, 77–­79. 23. Jung, Coolies and Cane. 24. See Heuman, “Killing Time”; and Semmel, Governor Eyre Controversy.

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25. See Dan T. Carter, “The Anatomy of Fear: The Christmas Day Insurrection Scare of 1865,” Journal of Southern History 42:3 (Aug. 1976): 345–­64. 26. Edward B. Rugemer, “The Morant Bay Rebellion and Radical Reconstruction,” in United States Reconstruction across the Americas, ed. William A. Link (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2019), 105. 27. Stephen V. Ash, The Black Experience in the Civil War South (Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, 2013); Amy Murrell Taylor, Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018). 28. Jay R. Mandle, Not Slave, Not Free: The African American Economic Experience Since the Civil War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992). 29. Blanchard, Slavery and Abolition in Early Republican Peru, 14. 30. Blanchard, Slavery and Abolition in Early Republican Peru, 212. 31. Eric Foner, Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction (New York: Vintage Books, 2006). 32. Ayers, Promise of the New South; Paul A. Cimbala and Barton C. Shaw, eds., Making a New South: Race, Leadership, and Community After the Civil War (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007); William A. Link, Atlanta, Cradle of the New South: Race and Remembering in the Civil War’s Aftermath (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). 33. Clifford L. Staten, The History of Cuba (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 34–­35, 45–­46. 34. Robert M. Levine and John J. Crocitti, eds., The Brazil Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 123. 35. David A. Bateman argues that imperial states dealt with concerns over racial differences and amalgamation by either moving people (Indigenous) or regulating sexual relationships (Indigenous and racially different people). He claims that this links the “intimate and imperial dimensions of state-­building.” Bateman, “Transatlantic Anxieties: Democracy and Diversity in Nineteenth-­ Century Discourse,” Studies in American Political Development 33 (Oct. 2019): 139–­77. Unfortunately, the transnational perspective he suggests is unpersuasive, as he ignores the significantly different character of the Latin American nation-­state and Casta system by only quoting Simon Bolivar. For a sense of how complex an issue this was in Latin American society, see Joanne Rappaport, The Disappearing Mestizo: Configuring Difference in the Colonial New Kingdom of Granada (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). Similarly, at a time when the French Empire barely existed, to paraphrase Tocqueville, it seems counterintuitive to talk about French imperial policies. 36. Pekka Hämäläinen, “Reconstructing the Great Plains: The Long Struggle for Sovereignty and Dominance in the Heart of the Continent,” Journal of Civil War History 6 (Dec. 2016): 481. Also see Elliott West, “Reconstructing Race,” Western Historical Quarterly 3 (Spring 2003): 6–­26. 37. Hämäläinen, “Reconstructing the Great Plains,” 481–­509. 38. Steven Hahn, “Slave Emancipation, Indian Peoples, and the Projects of a New American Nation-­State,” Journal of the Civil War Era 3 (Sept. 2013): 312. 39. Hahn, “Slave Emancipation,” 313. 40. Hahn, “Slave Emancipation,” 320–­21. 41. Hahn, “Slave Emancipation,” 322. 42. All material on Reconstruction in Indian Territory is drawn from Alaina E. Roberts, I’ve

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Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021); and Fay A. Yarbrough, Choctaw Confederates: The American Civil War in Indian Country (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 2021). 43. Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Knopf, 2015), 288. 44. Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 292. 45. Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 293. 46. Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 297. 47. Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 298–­99, 303. 48. Degler, One among Many, 24–­25. 49. The literature on Reconstruction in a global context is expanding, as demonstrated by recent volumes such as David Prior, ed., Reconstruction in a Globalizing World (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018); Prior, ed., Reconstruction and Empire: The Legacies of Abolition and Union Victory for an Imperial Age (New York: Fordham University Press, 2022); and Prior, Between Freedom and Progress: The Lost World of Reconstruction Politics (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2019). Gregory P. Downs illustrates that the revolutionary changes brought by the Civil War reshaped politics in Cuba and Spain. Downs, The Second American Revolution: The Civil War–­Era Struggle over Cuba and the Rebirth of the American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 2019). Evan C. Rothera has embraced the more problematic methodology of viewing the 1860s crises in the United States, Mexico, and Argentina as a struggle between the forces of democracy/republicanism and imperialism/conservativism. Rothera, Civil Wars and Reconstructions in the Americas: The United States Mexico and Argentina 1860–­1880 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press 2022). 50. James M. Beeby, “Red Shirt Violence, Election Fraud, and the Demise of the Populist Party in North Carolina’s Third Congressional District, 1900,” North Carolina Historical Review 85:1 (2008): 1–­28; William Arthur Sheppard, Red Shirts Remembered: Southern Brigadiers of the Reconstruction Period (Atlanta: Ruralist, 1940); Alfred B. Williams, Hampton and His Red Shirts: South Carolina’s Deliverance in 1876 (Charleston, SC: Walker, Evans, and Cogswell, 1935). 11. Remembrance and Reconciliation? Epigraph: Levi P. Morton, “Address,” in Dedication of the Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park, ed. H. V. Boynton (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1896). 1. Scioto (OH) Gazette, Feb. 20, 1891, quoted in Administrative History of Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park, by John C. Paige and Jerome A. Greene (Denver, CO: National Park Service, 1983). 2. Caroline E. Janney, “‘I Yield to No Man an Iota of My Convictions’: Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park and the Limits of Reconciliation,” Journal of the Civil War Era 2 (Sept. 2012): 394–­420. 3. Paul Cimbala, Veterans North and South (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-­CLIO, 2015); Karen L. Cox, Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004); M. Keith Harris, Across the Bloody Chasm: The Culture of Commemoration among Civil War Veterans (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014).

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4. Harris, Across the Bloody Chasm, 1. 5. Canadians and Britons saw the war as an attempt by the Americans to annex British North America while the United Kingdom was conveniently and apparently losing the life-­or-­death struggle with Napoleon Bonaparte. This remains the dominant view in Canadian historiography. The British perspective has recently made a reappearance. See Duncan A. Campbell, “The Bicentennial of the War of 1812: Reconsidering the ‘Forgotten Conflict,’” American Nineteenth Century History 16:1 (Mar. 2015): 1–­10. 6. Jubal A. Early, “Speech to the Southern Historical Society,” Aug. 14, 1873, in The Confederate and Neo-­Confederate Reader: The “Great Truth” about the “Lost Cause,” ed. James W. Loewen and Edward Sebesta (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010), 268–­69. On the Lost Cause generally, see Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865–­1913 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). 7. Stephen D. Lee, “The Negro Problem,” 1899, in Loewen and Sebesta, Confederate and Neo-­ Confederate Reader, 287. 8. Mildred Rutherford, “The War Was Not a Civil War,” Jan. 1923, in Loewen and Sebesta, Confederate and Neo-­Confederate Reader, 320–­21. 9. Turner, Stonewall Jackson, Beresford Hope, and the Meaning of the American Civil War in Britain. 10. Michael Doheny, The Felon’s Track; or, History of the Attempted Outbreak in Ireland, Embracing the Leading Events in the Irish Struggle from the Year 1843 to the Close of 1848 (Dublin: M. H. Gill and Son, 1951). 11. Charles Gavan Duffy, Young Ireland: A Fragment of Irish History, 1840–­1850 (New York: Appleton, 1881), 234–­38. 12. John Mitchel, The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps) (Glasgow: Cameron and Ferguson, 1876), 324–­25. 13. On this subject, see Joseph M. Hernon Jr., Celts, Catholics, & Copperheads: Ireland Views the American Civil War (Columbus: Ohio State University Press. 1968.) 14. Heinrich von Sybel, Die Begründung des Deutschen Reiches durch Wilhelm I (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1889); Heinrich von Treitschke, Deutsche Geschichte im 19. Jahrhundert (Leipzig, Ger.: Hirzel, 1890). 15. On the Schleswig-­Holstein War, see Michael Embree, Bismarck’s First War: The Campaign of Schleswig and Jutland, 1864 (Solihull, UK: Helion, 2005). 16. Werner Frölich, Geschichte Schleswig-­Holsteins: Von der ältesten Zeit bis zum Wiener Frieden (Flensburg, Ger.: Verlag der Humwaldschen Buchhandlung, 1896). 17. Karl Jansen, Schleswig-­Holsteins Befreiung, ed. Karl Samwer (Weisbaden, Ger.: J. F. Bergmann, 1897). 18. Rudolph M. Schleiden, Jugenderinnerungen eines Schleswig-­Holsteiners (Wiesbaden, Ger.: Verlag von J. F. Bergmann, 1886); Schleiden, Erinnerungen; Schleiden, Schleswig-­Holsteins erste Erhebung (Wiesbaden, Ger.: Verlag von J. F. Bergmann, 1891); Schleiden, Schleswig-­Holstein im zweiten Kriegsjahre, 1849–­1850 (Wiesbaden, Ger.: Verlag von J. F. Bergmann, 1894). 19. Bálint Varga, The Monumental Nation: Magyar Nationalism and Symbolic Politics in Fin-­de-­ Siècle Hungary (New York: Berghahn, 2016), 22. 20. Simon John, “Statues, Politics, and the Past,” History Today 69:9 (Sept. 2019), https://www .historytoday.com/archive/behind-­times/statues-­politics-­and-­past.

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21. Varga, Monumental Nation, 22–­23. 22. Varga, Monumental Nation, 23. 23. Annika Poloczek, Die Walhalla: Entstehungs und Baugeschichte, architektonische Gestaltung (Munich: GRIN Verlag, 2007), 2. 24. Hans A. Pohlsander, National Monuments and Nationalism in 19th Century Germany (Bern, Switz.: Peter Lang, 2008), 217–­19. 25. Richard E. Frankel, Bismarck’s Shadow: The Cult of Leadership and the Transformation of the German Right, 1898–­1945 (New York: Berg, 2005). 26. Mary Withall, Villages of Northern Argyll (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2004), 105. The monument’s inscription reads: “To the memory of Lord Nelson this stone was erected by the Furnace Workman 1805.” 27. See Luke Reynolds, “Who Owned Waterloo?: Wellington’s Veterans and the Battle for Relevance.” (PhD diss., City University of New York, 2019). 28. W. S. W. Vaux, “On English and Foreign Waterloo Medals,” Numismatic Chronicle and Journal 9 (1869): 108–­17. 29. Timothy Fitzpatrick, “Waterloo in Myth and Memory: The Battles of Waterloo, 1815–­1915” (MA thesis, Florida State University, 2013); Kevin Pryor, “The Mobilization of Memory: The Battle of Waterloo in German and British Memory, 1815–­1915” (MA thesis, Southern Illinois University, 2010). 30. Michael Hunkin, “Crimean War Veterans,” The Iron Room: Archives and Collections @ the Library of Birmingham (blog), Nov. 12, 2012, https://theironroom.wordpress.com/2012/11/12/crimean -­war-­veterans/ (accessed Apr. 5, 2017). 31. Diane Oldman, “The Lace-­maker’s Son: Henry Passmore, a True Servant of the People,” Crimean War Veterans in Western Australia, https://crimeanwar-­veteranswa.com/stories/the-­lace -­makers-­son/ (accessed Apr. 5, 2017). 32. This recording of Florence Nightingale may be heard on the British Library’s website, https://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/onlineex/voiceshist/flonight/index.html (accessed Aug. 11, 2020). 33. Figes, Crimean War, 471–­74. 34. Figes, Crimean War, 467–­68. 35. Figes, Crimean War, 486. On the Mexican remembrance of the 1846–­48 war with the United States, see Michael Van Wagenen, Remembering the Forgotten War: The Enduring Legacies of the U.S./ Mexican War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012). 36. Figes, Crimean War, 484–­92. 37. Aaron J. Cohen, War Monuments, Public Patriotism, and Bereavement in Russia, 1905–­2015 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020), 12. 38. Theodor Schieder, Das Deutsche Kaiserreich von 1871 als Nationalstaat (Wiesbaden, Ger.: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 1961), 76. 39. Schieder, Das Deutsche Kaiserreich, 127. 40. Schieder, Das Deutsche Kaiserreich, 128. 41. Der Veteran, Sept. 10, 1876. 42. Helmut W. Smith, “When the Sonderweg Debate Left Us,” German Studies Review 31 (May 2008): 225–­40. 43. Massimo Baioni and Martin Thom, “Anniversaries and the Public Uses of the Risorgimento in Twentieth-­Century Italy,” Journal of Modern European History 9 (2011): 398.

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44. Baioni and Thom, “Anniversaries and the Public Uses of the Risorgimento,” 399–­400. 45. Baioni and Thom, “Anniversaries and the Public Uses of the Risorgimento,” 400–­401. 46. Carlos M. Notari, Héroes del Silencio: Les Veteranos de la Guerra del Pacífico (Santiago de Chile: Centro de Estudios Bicentenario, 2009), 30. 47. Notari, Héroes del Silencio, 41. 48. Notari, Héroes del Silencio, 22, 49, 50. 49. “El Monumento,” Monumento a Prat de Valparaíso (blog), July 19, 2010, http://monumento aprat.blogspot.com/2010/07/la-­tradicion.html. 50. Van Wagenen, Remembering the Forgotten War, 48–­51, 184, 224. 51. Claudia Agostoni, Monuments of Progress: Modernization and Public Health in Mexico City, 1876–­1910 (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2003), 78–­79. 52. Agostoni, Monuments of Progress, 80–­81. 53. There is a wealth of good studies on the Second Anglo-­Boer War, including Denis Judd and Keith Surridge, The Boer War: A History (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013); and Thomas Pakenham, The Boer War (New York: Random House, 1979). Just as the African Americans’ part in the Civil War is increasingly being recognized, so, too, is that of the Africans in each Boer war. See, for example, Peter Warwick, Black People and the South African War, 1899–­1902 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 54. See Stephen Koss, The Pro-­Boers: The Anatomy of an Anti-­War Movement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973); and Arthur Davey, The British Pro-­Boers, 1877–­1902 (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 1978). 55. Most of the general studies mentioned previously comment on this, but see also Albert Grundlingh, “Collaboration in Boer Society” in The South African War: The Anglo-­Boer War, 1899–­ 1902, ed. Peter Warwick (Harlow, UK: Longman, 1980), 258–­78. 56. Rayne Kruger, Goodbye Dolly Gray: The Story of the Boer War (London: Cassel, 1959). Kruger’s remains an important work, not the least because of this observation: “The Boers said the war was for liberty. The British said it was for equality. The majority of the inhabitants, who were not white at all, gained neither liberty nor equality.” Ibid., 507. 57. As the authors can no more do justice to Smuts than they can to Lincoln in this book, see Antony Lentin, General Smuts South Africa (London: Haus, 2010); and Kenneth Ingham, Jan Christian Smuts: Conscience of a South African (New York: St. Martin’s, 1986). 58. Peter Donaldson, Remembering the South African War: Britain and the Memory of the Anglo-­ Boer War, from 1899 to the Present (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013). 59. See John Boje and Fransjohan Pretorius, “Kent gij dat volk: The Anglo-­Boer War and Afrikaner Identity in Postmodern Perspective,” Historia 56:2 (2011): 59–­72; Eric P. Louw, The Rise, Fall, and Legacy of Apartheid (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2004); Dean Allen, “Beating Them at Their Own Game: Rugby, the Anglo-­Boer War, and Afrikaner Nationalism, 1899–­1948,” International Journal of the History of Sport 20:3 (2003): 37–­57; and Saul Dubow, “Afrikaner Nationalism, Apartheid, and the Conceptualization of ‘Race,’” Journal of African History 33:2 (1992): 209–­37. 60. See C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955). Southern segregation and Apartheid have proven fertile topics for comparative historians. Some recent works include John W. Cell, “End Games of Segregation and Apartheid: South Africa and the American South,” in Comparative Perspectives on South Africa, ed. Ran Greenstein

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(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), 217–­42; and Denis Binder, “Some Rough Historical Parallels between South Africa and the United States,” Journal of Comparative Urban Law and Policy 1:1 (2017): 212–­28. 61. Arthur J. May, The Habsburg Monarchy, 1867–­1914 (1951; repr., New York: Norton Library, 1968), 267. 62. May, Habsburg Monarchy, 346–­47; Donald E. Collins, The Death and Resurrection of Jefferson Davis (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005). Conclusion 1. Captain Leonard Allen Payne was born in and was a resident of Mbabane, Swaziland, when war broke out. Percy Frank Charles “Swazi” Howe, meanwhile, was born in the African country. Christopher Shores, Norman Franks, and Russell Guest, Above the Trenches: A Complete Record of the Fighter Aces and Units of the British Empire Air Forces, 1915–­1920 (London: Grub Street, 1996). A less trivial example would be the surprise German lieutenant Ernst Jünger experienced encountering Indian troops on the western front, as recounted in his memoir, In Stahlgewittern (1920). See Jünger, Storm of Steel, trans. Michael Hoffman (London: Penguin, 2003), 141–­55. 2. Vladimir Dedijer, The Road to Sarajevo (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966), 341. 3. Dedijer, Road to Sarajevo. 4. Much of the information on Clemenceau and his relationships with Americans and Britons is gleaned from Robert Karry Hanks, “Culture versus Diplomacy: Clemenceau and Anglo-­American Relations during the First World War” (PhD diss. University of Toronto, 2002), 46–­50, 52–­53. 5. See Hanks, “Culture versus Diplomacy,” 55–­80. On Clemenceau’s relationship with Lloyd George at Versailles, see Kenneth O. Morgan, “Lloyd George and Clemenceau: Prima Donnas in Partnership,” in Britain, France, and the Entente Cordiale since 1904, ed. Antoine Capet (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 28–­40. 6. Dreyfusards supported Jewish French captain Alfred Dreyfus, who was falsely accused and convicted by the French military of espionage for Germany in the 1890s. The case, a miscarriage of justice driven by antisemitism, divided France. 7. Margaret MacMillan, Peacemakers: The Paris Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War (London: John Murray, 2001), 64. Lloyd George, meanwhile, upon being asked how he had done at the conference, allegedly replied, “Not badly, considering I was seated between Jesus Christ [Wilson] and Napoleon [Clemenceau].” 8. Hanks, “Culture versus Diplomacy,” 405. 9. MacMillan, Peacemakers, 10. 10. A good study of British-­American-­German diplomacy during the war is Justin Quinn Olmstead, The United States’ Entry into the First World War: The Role of British and German Diplomacy (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2018). 11. Cited in Robert E. Quirk, An Affair of Honor: Woodrow Wilson and the Invasion of Veracruz (New York: W. W. Norton, 1962), 2. 12. MacMillan, Peacemakers, 37–­40. 13. MacMillan, Peacemakers, 3. 14. Wilson is not short of biographers. For a good introduction, synthesizing recent scholarship,

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see Louis Auchincloss, Woodrow Wilson (New York: Penguin, 2000). Two other recent biographies are John Milton Cooper Jr., Woodrow Wilson: A Biography (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2009); and A. Scott Berg, Wilson (London: Simon and Schuster, 2013). 15. The antecedents of this quote are explored in Mark E. Benbow, “Birth of a Quotation: Woodrow Wilson and ‘Like Writing History with Lightning,’” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 9:4 (Oct. 2010): 509–­33. If Wilson said anything like this at all, he more probably said the film could “teach history by lightning.” 16. Thomas Woodrow Wilson, A History of the American People, 5 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1902), 5:58. For the defense of slavery, see ibid., 4:194–­98. 17. See Oswald Garrison Villard, “The President and the Segregation at Washington,” North American Review, 198 (December 1913), 800–­807. 18. See Eric Steven Yellin, Racism in the Nation’s Service: Government Workers and the Color Line in Woodrow Wilson’s America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 81–­175. 19. Dick Lehr, “The Racist Legacy of Woodrow Wilson,” Atlantic Monthly (Nov. 27, 2015), https:// www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/wilson-­legacy-­racism/417549/. 20. Miller quoted in William F. Pinar, “The N.A.A.C.P. and the Struggle for Anti-­lynching Legislation,” in Counterpoints 163 (2001): 695. See also C. Waldrep “Lynching ‘Exceptionalism’: The NAACP, Woodrow Wilson, and Keeping Lynching American,” in Globalizing Lynching History, ed. Manfred Berg and Simon Wendt (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 35–­51. 21. The report’s author, Sir Roger Casement, born in 1864, would die on the gallows at London’s Pentonville Prison on August 3, 1916, after being found guilty of high treason. As an Irish nationalist, he had attempted, with German assistance, to provide weapons for the Easter Uprising in 1916. His story also ties into many of the themes of this book. 22. From Hugo Young, review of, The Isles: A History, by Norman Davies, London Review of Books 22:1 (2000). 23. See, for example, Reid, Louis Riel and the Creation of Modern Canada, chaps. 2–­3. The question of whether a Canadian national identity existed seemed to be a pressing topic when one of the authors lived there in the late 1980s and early 1990s. 24. Two works on this subject, one from a conservative position, the other from a liberal perspective, are Samuel Huntington, Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004); and Arthur Schlesinger, The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society, rev. and enlarged ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998). 25. Barbara F. Walter, How Civil Wars Start and How to End Them (New York: Penguin Random House, 2022). See also Stephen Marche, The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2022); and Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2022).

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Archives Abraham Lincoln Papers. Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Russell Papers. The National Archives, Kew Gardens, Richmond, UK.

Newspapers The Anti-­Slavery Reporter (London) Hinds County Gazette (Raymond, MS) Illinois Gazette (Shawnee) Intelligence Bulletin (Washington DC) New York Herald Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper (London) Spectator (London) Tazewell Whig (Tremont, IL) Der Veteran

Published Primary Sources Ames, Herman Vandenburg. State Documents on Federal Relations: The States and the United States. Philadelphia: Department of History, University of Pennsylvania, 1911. Ávila, Alfredo, Jordana Dym, and Erika Pani, eds. Las Declaraciones de Independencia: Los Textos Fundamentales de las Independencias Americanas. Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2013. Baker, Sherston. First Steps in International Law: Prepared for the Use of Students. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1899.

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326

INDEX Note: For simplicity’s sake, subjects are grouped under their most commonly used names. For example, although from 1861–65 the territory to the north of the United States was British North America, it is indexed under “Canada”; titled persons are often indexed under their titles; and peoples are indexed under their nations.

Aberdeen Act, 1845, 93 Abolitionism/Abolitionists, 10, 20, 41, 80, 82, 86, 88, 146; in Brazil, 102–4, 200; in Great Britain, 86, 92–93, 196–97; in Haiti, 90, 196; in Latin America, 94; in Peru, 95, 97–99; in Spain, 101; in United States, 89, 91, 197 Adams, Abigail, 69 Adams, John, 24 African Americans, 20, 22–24, 26, 57, 68, 82–83, 85, 89, 91, 100, 190–93, 198–200, 202, 231–32 Alabama, CSS, 30 Alcott, Louisa May, 78–79, 82 Alexander II, 78, 99 America. See United States of America American Revolution. See American War of Independence American War of Independence, 16, 22, 26, 30, 38, 56, 60, 81, 88, 119, 135, 144, 176, 185 Amur Valley, 179–80, 189 Anglo-Boer wars, 110, 182, 220–22, 227 Antietam, Battle of, 84, 123, 162 Argentina, 128, 186 Arrow War. See Opium Wars Australia, 47, 73, 81, 180, 182, 187–88, 215, 221

Austrian Empire: Catholicism, 149; Congress of Troppau, 124; Crimean War, 131–33, 161; German unification, 28; Hungary, 24–25, 49–50, 130–31, 133; Italy, 75; Naples, 126; Napoleon’s grand plan, 160–61; right to vote, 73; Schleswig-Holstein, 52, 165–66, 211; Venice, 120; World War I, 224–26 Bahadur Shah II, 54 Baker, Sir Sherston, 124–26 Bakunin, Mikhail Alexandrovich, 195 Ball, Charles, 54 Baltimore, MD, 113, 168 Baptist War, 196 Barton, Clara, 107–8 Bates, Edward, 168 Batthyány, Lajos, 49 Beecher, Henry Ward, 138–39 Belgium, 43, 47, 52, 73, 127, 134, 149 Bentham, Jeremy, 70 Bickerdyke, Mary Ann, 107–8 Bill of Rights (American), 74 Bill of Rights (English), 64, 74 Bill of Rights (French), 74

327

I ndex

Bismarck, Otto von, 81, 156, 172–73, 224; democracy, 75; domestic policies, 77, 170; Franco-German War, 29, 82; German unification, 2, 28–29, 78; Kulturkampf, 148–49, 151; realpolitik, 28, 157, 164–67; remembrance, 211, 214; unconstitutional actions, 11 Blücher, Gebhard Leberecht von, 27 Boers, 182, 185, 220–22, 227 Boer War. See Anglo-Boer wars Bonaparte, Napoleon, 6, 27, 39, 79, 86, 90, 106, 119, 125, 136, 216, 224, 231 Booth, Catherine, 143 Booth, William, 143 Bourne, Randolph, 19 Brazil, 33, 90, 93–95, 100, 102–4, 128, 200 Bright, John, 75–76, 79, 142 Britain, 6, 75, 80, 133, 136, 150, 227; and Brazil, 33; and Canada, 30–31; Chartism, 47; and China, 129, 131–32; cotton, 202–3; feminism, 69; Fenians, 194; free trade, 76; and India, 54, 176; industry, 22; and Ireland, 209, 212; and Jamaica, 37; and Latin America, 128; liberalism, 66–67, 78–79, 88; nation, 25–26; navy, 114–15, 117; nursing, 108; religion, 141, 143, 145; and Russia, 127, 162; slavery, 86; slave trade, 93; and South Africa, 184–86, 221–22; and United States, 27, 30, 45, 57, 71, 122–23, 125–26, 134–35, 167, 171, 189, 208; voting rights, 70, 72–74, 77, 80–81, 94 British East India Company, 2, 53–54, 114, 129 British Empire, 37–38, 86, 92, 127, 196, 210, 221 British North America. See Canada Brown, John, 59, 178–79 Browning, Orville Hickman, 171 Brownson, Orestes, 150 Bryce, James, 78, 176 Bulloch, James Dunwoody, 117–18 Bull Run (Manassas), First Battle of, 111, 155 Bull Run (Manassas), Second Battle of, 123, 183 Bülow, Heinrich von, 106 Burke, Edmund, 69 Burton, Richard Francis, 188

328

Cairnes, J. E., 81 Calhoun, John C., 41, 55–56 California, 182, 188–89 Cambridge, University of, 141 Canada, 2, 30–32, 40, 44–45, 47, 52, 71, 73, 79, 81, 126, 147, 171, 176–78, 221, 233 Canadian Confederation, 30–32, 73, 81, 177, 194 Carlyle, Thomas, 213 Cartier, George-Étienne, 81 Castilla, Ramón, 84, 98–99 Catholicism, 11, 16, 24, 26, 37, 64, 86, 96, 144, 155–56, 218; in Canada, 45, 177–78; in France, 147–48, 161; in Ireland, 43–44, 46, 142, 153, 209; Kulturkampf, 77, 149; in Mexico, 129–30; in Switzerland, 48; in United States, 150–52 Cavaignac, Louis-Eugène, 159 Cavour, Camillo Benso di, 157, 161–63, 165, 167, 173 Céspedes, Carlos Manuel de, 101 Chamberlain, Joseph, 78 Charles I, 63 Charles II, 63 Charles Albert, King of Sardinia, 149, Chartism, 47, 67, 110 Chesterton, G. K., 83 Chickamauga, Battle of, 111, 205 Chile, 40, 118, 182, 187, 218–19 China, 2, 6, 53–54, 114, 129, 154–56, 179–80, 182, 192, 197 Chivington, John, 185–86 Christian VIII, 51 Churchill, Winston, 83 Civil War, American, 83, 121, 155, 158, 210, 222; ballooning, 119–21; and Canada, 30–31, 81, 177; Carl Degler on, 1–2; commemoration, 12, 205–6, 213–14, 218, 223; cotton, 199, 202–3; and Crimean War, 106–7, 216; and Cuba, 100–101, 171–72; diplomacy, 10, 45, 122–23, 134–37; emancipation, 84–86, 89, 104; and English Civil War, 13–14; and German unification, 29; Gone with the Wind, 208; and Great Britain, 79–80; Louisa May Alcott,

I ndex

78–79; military, 10, 105–6; Napoleon III, 75–76, 130, 189, 219–20; national identity, 18–19, 21–22, 26, 34; Native Americans, 11, 184–85, 188, 201; navy, 115, 117–19; nursing, 107–8; railroads, 110–11; reconstruction, 190; religion, 138, 144–47, 150; and Russia, 125; secession, 35; and South Africa, 220–21; southern national identity, 56; spiritualism, 143; and Switzerland, 48, 151–52, 203; transnational and comparative perspective, 2–6, 8; unification, 85; voting rights, 81–82; weapons technology, 109–10; western region, 175, 181–82; women’s rights, 71; and World War I, 225–27, 230–34 Civil War, English, 13–14, 16, 26, 63 Clarendon, Lord, 165 Clausewitz, Carl von, 106 Clay, Henry, 151 Clemenceau, Georges, 226–28, 232 Cleveland, Grover, 74 Cobden, Richard, 75–76, 79 Collins, Perry McDonough, 179–80 Colombia, 95 Commemoration, 9, 12, 20, 33–34, 78, 87, 205–6, 213–18, 220, 222, 230 Confederate States of America, 5, 155, 171, 197, 210, 219, 221, 234; Baltimore riot, 168; and Crimean War, 112; diplomacy, 79–80, 122, 134–36, 139; industry, 112–13; Jefferson Davis’s funeral, 222–23; Lost Cause, 206–7, 213–14; military, 111, 120–21, 169, 175; nation-state, 18, 23–24, 34; Native peoples, 174; navy, 115–16; New Mexico, 182, 185; politics, 172; Reconstruction, 191, 193; secession, 35, 146 Congo, Belgian, 68, 232–33 Conquista del Desierto, 186 Constant, Benjamin, 65 Cooper, James Fenimore, 175 Copperheads, 150, 221 Cowley, Lord, 134 Cox, Leander, 56 Crimean War, 10, 75, 79, 99–100, 105–7, 109–10,

112, 114, 120–21, 125, 131, 133, 135–36, 153, 161–63, 171, 189, 215–16, 225 Croatia, 49 Cromwell, Oliver, 13–16, 26, 28, 213 Cromwell, Thomas, 36 Cuba, 94–95, 100–102, 104, 129, 197, 199 Cudjoe, 37 Darwin, Charles, 145 Davis, Jefferson, 23, 25, 112, 151, 172, 222 Dead Souls (Gogol), 99 Declaration of Independence (American), 16, 20–21, 36, 38, 42, 50, 59, 64, 68, 87–88, 91 Degler, Carl, 1–3, 8, 12, 18, 28–29, 48, 151, 203 Delafield, Richard, 112 Democracy, 4–5, 21, 29, 56, 62, 67–68, 78, 83, 145, 157, 160, 164, 227–28, 233 Denmark, 51–52, 73, 82, 109, 118, 131, 165, 211 Descartes, René, 64 Dessalines, Jean-Jacques, 39 Dewey, John, 65 Dicey, A. V., 78 Dicey, Edward, 67 Diderot, Denis, 64 Dilke, Charles, 78, 227 Disraeli, Benjamin, 54 Dix, Dorothea, 107–8 Dixon, Thomas, 231 Doheny, Michael, 209 Dominican Republic, 194–95 Dom Pedro I, 33, 128 Dom Pedro II, 33, 102, 200 Dred Scott decision, 59 Dublin, Ireland, 43 Duffy, Charles Gavan, 209 Early, Jubal A., 207 Echenique, José Rufino, 97–98 Elías, Domingo, 97–98 Emancipation, 1, 3–4, 10–11, 20, 71, 84–86, 89–92, 94–103, 150, 172, 190, 192, 195–200, 203–4

329

I ndex

Emancipation Proclamation (Lincoln), 80, 84, 87, 136, 172 Emancipation Proclamation (Castilla), 84, 98 Engels, Friedrich, 78 England, 14–16, 26, 29, 32, 36, 58, 63, 85, 87–88, 107, 133, 141–42, 146, 226 English Civil War. See Civil War, English Enslavement/Enslaved, 86–87, 104, 204, 221; Caribbean, 38–40, 89, 100–102, 197; emancipation, 70, 84; Latin America, 32, 84, 95–98, 102–3, 198–200; United States, 10, 11, 15, 24, 57, 60, 82, 85, 89–92, 99, 191–93, 196, 201–2, 230 Eugénie de Montijo, 147–48, 156 Evangelism, 11, 85, 108, 139, 141–43, 145–47, 150, 155 Eyre, Edward, 186 Federalist Papers, 83 Federalists (U.S.), 40 Fenians, 193–194 Ferdinand, Franz, 224–25 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 19–20 Finland, 71 Flagg, Edmund, 120 Forrest, Nathan Bedford, 112 Fourier, Charles, 69 Fox, Maggie, 143 Fox, Katie, 143 France, 1, 5, 26, 88, 176, 225–27; Crimean War, 131–32, 152, 156; Franco-German War, 27, 29, 82, 217; and Greece, 127; and Haiti, 39, 90, 196; industrialization, 75, 111; and Italy, 148, 162–63; and Latin America, 128–30, 189; liberalism, 63, 65, 69, 76; Napoleonic Wars, 106, 126; navy, 114–15, 118; revolution, 43, 146, 159–61; slavery, 86; and United States, 77–78, 122–23, 136–37; women’s rights, 72 Franco-German War, 10, 27–28, 105, 107, 121, 166, 217, 225, 227 Franco-Prussian War. See Franco-German War

330

Franz Joseph I, 25, 78, 222 Frémont, Jessie, 70–71 Frémont, John, 70–71 French Indochina. See Vietnam French Revolution: of 1789, 5, 16, 39, 46, 65, 67, 69, 89–90, 99, 123–24, 126, 158, 227; of 1830, 42–43, 65; of 1848, 65, 76, 158–59 Frölich, Werner, 211–12 Frontier, 1, 8, 11, 175–76, 180–81, 183, 185–89, 216 Galileo, 64 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 58, 78, 162, 208, 218 Garrison, William Lloyd, 3, 91, 138, 146 Gentz, Friedrich von, 124 George III, 50, 88 Georgia, 22–24, 112, 190, 230 Germany, 2–3, 18, 26, 28–30, 71, 77–78, 81, 143, 145, 149, 156–57, 165–66, 211–12, 214, 217–18, 227–28, 230, 233 Gettysburg, Battle of, 107, 218 Gettysburg Address, 13, 20–21 Gladstone, William Ewart, 77, 142, 227 Glasgow, Scotland, 80 Gloire, Le (warship), 115 Glorious Revolution, 17, 63–64 Gogol, Nikolai, 99 Gone with the Wind (Mitchell), 208 Gorchakov, Aleksandr Mikhaylovic, 157 Gordon, John B., 190 Gorgas, Joshua, 112 Görgey, Artúr, 25, 50–51 Gouges, Olympe de, 69–70 Grant, Ulysses S., 29, 77, 82, 112, 151, 167, 226 Greece, 52, 124, 127, 134 Grotius, Hugo, 64 Guerra Carlista, 128 Guerra Civil Portuguesa, 128 Guerra de los Diez Años, 101, 195, 199 Guerra del Paraguay, 102, 189 Guerra de Reforma, 129, 220 Guerra Hispano-Sudamericana, 118, 218

I ndex

Habeas corpus: in Ireland, 47; in UK, 15, 87; in U.S., 168–71 Habsburgs, 24, 160–61 Hadji Murat (Tolstoy), 175 Haiti, 38–40, 90, 92, 97, 107, 195–97, 229, Halleck, Henry, 169 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 179 Haynau, Julius Jakob Freiherr von, 50 Henry, Patrick, 144 Henry VIII, 36, 43 Herndon, William, 139 Herzen, Alexander, 180 Hildebrand, Bruno, 65 Hobbes, Thomas, 62–64 Ho Chi Minh, 38, 229 Holbrooke, Richard, 228, 230 Holland, Josiah Gilbert, 139 Holyoake, George Jacob, 141 Hong Rengan, 154–55 Howe, Julia Ward, 138 Hugo, Victor, 75–76 Hume, David, 64 Hungary, 2, 9, 24–25, 45, 49–53, 56, 99, 130–31, 133, 193, 222–23, 226 Hunley, CSS, 119 Hunter, Robert, 134–35 Immigrants. See Migrants Imperialism, 6, 11–12, 30, 68, 141, 174, 206, 224, 232 India, 53–55, 180–81, 188–89, 192, 196, 200, 202, 215 Industrialization, 1, 23, 41, 65, 108, 113, 121, 218, 145 Ireland, 9, 52, 58; Catholic Emancipation, 46; Daniel O’Connell, 43–44; English views of, 14, 16; religion, 48; remembrance, 209–10; Revolution of 1848, 45, 47–49, 193; Theobald Wolfe Tone, 43; union with England, 26, 80, 150 Irish Republican Brotherhood. See Fenians

Isabella II, 101, 128 Isandlwana, Battle of, 184, 188 Italy: Italian Unification, 1, 3, 75, 147, 161–63; national identity, 18, 58; religious conflict, 149; remembrance, 218; Roman Republic, 148 Jackson, Andrew, 41, 68, 159 Jackson, Thomas J. “Stonewall,” 208 Jamaica, 37, 39, 186, 196–98 Jameson Raid, 182 Japan, 2, 6, 141, 182, 232 Jefferson, Thomas, 40, 56 Jesuit Order, 48, 149, 151, 203 Jim Crow, 82–83, 199, 202, 222, 231–32 Johns Hopkins University, 78, 229, 231 Johnson, Andrew, 82, 190–91 Johnson, Lyndon Baines, 203, 231 Johnson, Samuel, 88 Jomini, Antoine-Henri, Baron de, 106 Juárez, Benito, 129, 194–95, 220 Kansas, 58, 182 Kant, Immanuel, 64 “King Cotton,” 22, 79 Kingsley, Charles, 141 Knies, Karl, 65 Know-Nothings, 142, 150 Kossuth, Lajos, 58, 80, 208; Revolution of 1848, 21, 24–25, 49–51; death and remembrance, 222–23 Ku Klux Klan, 190, 192–95, 231 Kulturkampf, 11, 77, 148–49, 151, 156 Labouchere, Henry, 142 Lamon, Ward Hill, 139 Leatherstocking Tales series, 175 Lee, Robert E., 25 Lee, Stephen D., 207 Leopold II, 68, 233 Liberalism, 5, 23, 64–68, 76–79, 82–83, 156–58, 232–33

331

I ndex

Liberator (newspaper), 56, 91–92 Liberia, 86, 91 Lima, Peru, 95 Lincoln, Abraham, 5, 81, 147, 156, 228; and African Americans, 16, 20, 22, 85–86, 200; death, 111; Declaration of Independence, 16; election victory, 35; emancipation, 15, 70–71, 84–86, 98–99, 172; Fort Sumter, 29; Gettysburg Address, 13; and Native Americans, 16, 174, 183; physical looks, 14; popular government, 68; religion, 140–42, 148–49; slavery, 31; unconstitutional policies, 11, 15, 157, 163, 167–73; unification, 28, 78–79, 81; view on the United States, 21, 34 Lincoln, Mary Todd, 139, 143 Lindsay, William Schaw, 77 Lithuania, 132 Little Bighorn, Battle of, 183–84, 188–89 Lizarzaburu, José María, 97 Lloyd George, David, 225, 227–28 Locke, John, 62–66 London, England, 88, 125; Canadian Confederation Conference, 31; Chartism, 47; Clerkenwell Prison, 194; diplomacy, 127–29, 132, 134–36; and India, 54; and Ireland, 47, 209–10; and Kossuth, 80; monuments, 213–14; and Napoleon III, 159; newspapers in, 117, 171–72; Protocol of London, 131; Salvation Army, 143; World Anti-Slavery Convention, 70, 93 Longstreet, James, 221 Lost Cause, 24, 207–8, 223, 231 Louis-Philippe, 43, 159 Louverture, Toussaint, 39 Lowe, Thaddeus S. C., 120–21 Macaulay, Thomas Babbington, 80 Macdonald, John A., 32, 178–79 Machiavelli, Niccolò di Bernardo dei, 6, 64, 158 Mackenzie, William Lyon, 45 Madison, James, 40, 56 Magna Carta, 15

332

Manchester, England, 75 Mansfield, Earl of, 88 Māori, 11, 73, 187–89 March, George Perkins, 162 Marcy, William L., 125 Marcy-Elgin Treaty, 30 Maroons, 37–38, 85, 196 Marx, Karl, 78–79, 144–45, 195 Maryland, 85, 168, 183 Mason, James, 134–35 Maximilian Joseph Maria von Österreich, Ferdinand, 130, 220 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 3, 20, 148, 218 McDougall, William, 177 Meagher, Thomas Francis, 46–47 Mediation, 10, 122–28, 132, 136 Meiji Restoration, 2–3 Melincourt (Peacock), 72 Memory. See Commemoration Memphis Massacre, 192 Merrimack, USS. See Virginia, CSS Merryman, John, 168 Methodism, 143, 145 Métis, 177–79 Metternich, Fürst Clement von, 124, 158, 228 Mexican-American War, 129, 150, 160, 167, 177, 216, 219–20, Mexico: French intervention, 2, 75–77, 123, 129–30, 147–48, 161, 189, 194; Guerra de Reforma, 129; independence, 40; remembrance, 219–20; slavery, 90; Tejas (province), 42, 51, 73, 128; war with the United States, 31, 36, 55, 129, 145, 167, 177; World War I, 229 Migrants, 3, 19, 31–32, 40, 57, 103, 144, 146, 150, 182, 187, 199 Mill, John Stuart, 65, 81, 133, Milton, John, 14, 63 Minié, C. E., 109 Miramón y Tarelo, Miguel Gregorio de la Luz Atenógenes, 129–30 Mississippi, 112, 198 Mississippi Convention, 55

I ndex

Mississippi River, 180, 182 Missouri, 70, 111, 169–70 Missouri Compromise, 41 Mitchel, John, 46, 58, 94, 209–10 Mitchell, Margaret, 208–9 Moltke, Helmuth von, 29, 82 Monitor, USS, 115–17 Monroe, James, 91, 130 Monroe Doctrine, 130 Montesquieu, Baron de, 64 Morant Bay Rebellion, 80, 186, 197–98 Moret, Segismundo, 101 Morton, Levi P., 205 Mott, Lucretia, 70 Mount Lebanon Civil War, 153 Murray, Judith Sargent, 69–70 Napoleon. See Bonaparte, Napoleon Napoleon III, 141, 157, 164, 167, 172; assuming power, 75–76, 147, 159–60; challenges to order, 1; Crimean War, 152; and Germany, 27, 82, 132, 160; grand plan for Europe, 160–61; and Italy, 148, 161–62; and Lebanon, 153; liberalism, 76–77; and Mexico, 130, 189; World War I, 226–27 Napoleonic Wars, 6, 106 Nast, Thomas, 151 Nationalism, 10–11, 34, 45, 232–33; Bismarck, 157, 172; British, 26–27; in Canada, 179; Civil War, 9; Confederate, 23–24, 58; French Revolution, 46, 158; German, 212–13; Irish, 43–44, 47; in Latin America, 220; Napoleon III, 75, 172; religion, 140, 144; remembrance, 206, 156; Schleswig-Holstein, 210, 212; secession, 37; Second Great Awakening, 57; theory, 16–20; in United States, 56–57; World War I, 224, 228 Nations. See Nation-state Nation-state, 1, 3–4, 6–7, 9, 12, 36, 204, 223, 233; Canada, 30; Confederate States, 18, 23, 60, 210; Germany, 51, 166, 211, 213; Greece, 42; Hungary, 25, 49; Italy, 162, 172; Latin Amer-

ica, 220; Poland, 44; religion, 147, 149; theory, 16–17, 20, 37, 67 Native Americans/Native populations: Argentina, 186–87; “Greater Reconstruction,” 200– 201; Indian Territory, 201–2; Lakota-Zulu Comparison, 184–86; Peru, 98; United States, 11, 15–16, 22, 26, 38, 57, 68, 175–77, 181, 183, 188–89, 193, 194 Nelson, Robert, 45 Nemesis (steamer), 114 Netherlands, 43, 63, 215, 222 New England, 27, 40–41, 78 New Orleans, LA, 41, 89, 119, 222 New York, 3, 94, 143, 150–51, 168, 205 New York Herald (newspaper), 1 New Zealand, 32, 71, 73–74, 81, 187, 221 Nicolay, John G., 143 Nightingale, Florence, 107–8, 215 North Carolina, 24, 204 Norway, 71, 73 Nova Scotia, 28, 30, 73 Nullification Crisis, 41, 58 O’Brien, William Smith, 47 O’Connell, Daniel, 43, 46–47 O’Donnell, Leopoldo, 100–101 O’Higgins, Bernardo, 40 Ohio, 21, 113, 143, 170–71, 205 Opium Wars, 129, 179; First, 114, 154; Second, 54 O’Sullivan, John, 145, 176 Ottoman Empire, 42, 106, 127, 131, 152–53, 156, 162, 225 Oxford, University of, 63, 188 Paine, Thomas, 69 Palmerston, Lord, 80, 122, 136, 141–42, 147–49, 156, 157, 167 Papal States, 148, 151, 162 Paris, France, 77, 88, 125, 148, 159, 195, 213, 227–29 Paris Commune, 77, 195 Parliament, British, 14, 43, 47, 72, 92, 141

333

I ndex

Peacock, Thomas Love, 72 Perryville, Battle of, 111 Peru, 101, 104, 182; emancipation, 84, 97–98; remembrance, 218–19; slavery, 94–97, 192, 198; war with Spain, 118 Philadelphia, PA, 168 Phillips, Morgan, 145 Pickering, Thomas, 40 Piedmont-Sardinia, 153, 161–63 Pierce, Franklin, 125 Pius IX, 131, 151, 155, 161 Poland, 44, 52, 58, 71, 130, 160 Polk, James, 160, 167 Polk, Leonidas, 58 Pope, John, 183 Port Royal, 191 Portugal, 32, 128 Pretorius, Andries, 185 Prince Edward Island, 30, 73 Princip, Gavrilo, 224 Protestantism, 11, 26, 37, 43, 45, 48, 140, 142, 144, 147, 150–153, 156, 177–179 Prussia, 27–29, 52, 78–79, 99, 118, 132, 147, 157, 160–61, 164–66, 211–12, 213, 215 Quebec, 31–32, 178–79, 194, 233 Railroads, 110–13, 121, 220 Realpolitik, 11, 130, 157–58, 160–64, 166–67, 172 Reconstruction, 1, 9, 11, 16, 21, 23, 82, 182, 190–92, 197–204, 206, 221, 227, 230–32 Red River Rebellion, 177–78 Reform Act, 1832 (British), 70, 72 Reform Act, 1867 (British), 72, 74 Republicanism, 20, 66, 88, 90, 140, 145, 151, 159, 161, 227 Republican Party (U.S.), 35, 59, 85, 151, 191, 193, 197–98, 221 Retief, Piet, 185 Rhett, Robert Barnwell, 58 Richmond, VA, 24, 112, 120, 135, 138, 208 Riel, Louis, 177–79

334

Roberts, Frederick, 227–28 Robertson, William, 66 Roca, Julio Argentino, 186–87 Roebuck, John Arthur, 77 Roman Catholicism. See Catholicism Rome, Italy, 1, 36–37, 110, 147–49, 161–62 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 77 Roosevelt, Theodore, 226, 228 Roscher, Wilhelm, 65 Rosecrans, William S., 151 Ross, John, 174 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 64 Royal Navy (British), 76, 86, 93–94, 117, 119, 214 Russell, Lord John, 122, 134 Russia, 147; Amur Valley, 179–80, 189; and Central Asia, 181; Crimean War, 75, 79, 106, 131–33, 152–53, 156, 162, 216–17; exceptionalism, 5; and Greece, 127; and Hungary, 130; Napoleonic Wars, 27, 136; and Poland, 44, 58, 160, 165; serfdom, 3, 84, 88, 99–100; and United States, 4, 125, 134; voting rights, 71 Rutherford, Mildred, 207–8 Saint Domingue. See Haiti Santa Anna, Antonio de López de, 42, 128 Saskatchewan, 177 Schleiden, Rudolph Matthias, 212 Schleswig-Holstein, 28, 45, 51–53, 131–32, 165, 210–12 Schofield, John M., 170 Scotland, 16, 26, 32, 108, 141, 210, 233 Scott, Thomas, 177–78 Scott, Walter, 175 Scott, Winfield, 168 Seacole, Mary, 107–8 Sebastopol, 132, 216 Secession, 1, 2, 4, 9, 37, 38, 40, 52, 170, 190, 200, 208, 214, 230, 233; Belgium, 43; Canada, 44; Garrison’s ideas on, 91; Ireland, 136; New England, 27, 41, 48; South Carolina, 35, 41, 59–61; southern, 8, 23, 31, 34, 36, 55–56, 79–80, 168, 209, 221; Texas independence, 42

I ndex

Second Great Awakening, 57, 142 Secularization, 16, 220 Sedan, Battle of, 110, 217 Sedantag, 217 Seneca Falls Convention, 69–70 Serbia, 49, 224 Sevastopol Sketches (Tolstoy), 216 Seward, William Henry, 85, 122, 135, 162 Shaftesbury, Earl of, 141 Sheridan, Philip, 181 Sherman, William T., 23, 29, 105, 110, 112, 220 Shiloh, Battle of, 111, 123 Sicily, 45, 52, 124, 126, 162, 204 Sierra Leone, 86 Slavery. See Enslavement/Enslaved Slave trade, 33, 79, 86, 93–95, 97, 154 Smith, Adam, 86–87 Smith, Ian Douglas, 38 Smith, Joseph, 143 Smuts, Jan Christiaan, 221 Soldán, José Gregorio Paz, 96 Somerset decision, 85–88, 92, 146, 196 Sonderbundskrieg (Swiss Civil War), 2, 11, 48, 67, 151–52, 203 South Africa, 12, 182, 185, 221–22 South Carolina, 35, 41–42, 59–60, 192, 198 Spain, 8, 32, 37–38, 40, 90, 100–101, 104, 118–19, 124, 128–29 Spectator (newspaper), 171–72 Spinoza, Baruch, 64 Spiritualism, 143–44 Staël, Madame de, 65 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 70 Stokes, Ann, 107–8 Stumm, Hugo, 181 Suez Canal, 133 Sumner, Charles, 59, 198 Supreme Court, U.S., 59, 134, 168, 171 Swaziland, 224 Sweden, 131 Switzerland, 2, 48–49, 66, 73, 82, 88, 151, 203 Sybel, Heinrich Karl Ludolf von, 211

Syria, 153 Széchenyi, István, 49 Taiping Rebellion, 2, 107, 154–56 Tammany Hall, 74 Taney, Roger B., 151, 168–69 Tariffs, 22–23, 41, 43, 79, 151 Taylor, Susie King, 107–8 Taynuilt (village), 214 Tejas. See Texas Tennessee, 3, 111–13 Texas, 36, 42, 52, 73, 128, 176 Thompson, William, 70 Times, London, (newspaper), 117 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 67, 159 Tolstoy, Leo, 175, 216 Trafalgar, Battle of, 115, 214 Transnational history, 2–4, 6–8, 12 Treitschke, Heinrich Gotthard von, 211 Trent Affair, 30, 79, 123 Trollope, Frances, 143 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 175–76 Turner, Nat, 91 Two Sicilies. See Sicily Ultramontanism, 147 United Daughters of the Confederacy, 206–8 United Kingdom. See Britain United States of America: and Africa, 91; African Americans, 26; and Canada, 30–32, 40, 45, 81, 176–78, 183; comparative perspective, 3, 6, 8, 48, 98–104, 162, 186, 203, 209, 221, 223, 233–34; cotton, 202–3 diplomacy, 134–36, 167; education, 78; emancipation, 10, 15, 80, 84–85, 92, 172, 195, 198; exceptionalism, 4–5; Fenians, 194; frontier, 11, 174–75, 188, 200; habeas corpus, 168; and Haiti, 39, 90; independence, 20, 87–88, 176; industry, 108–9; labor rights, 76; liberalism, 79; Lost Cause, 208, 212; Manifest Destiny, 145–46, 175; memory, 12; Mexican War, 36, 128, 219; Mexico and the French Intervention, 130, 220; migrants, 47,

335

I ndex

United States of America (continued) 58, 146, 182, 187; national identity, 9, 18–22, 29, 32, 40–41, 57, 206, 209; Native populations, 26, 181, 183–84, 200–201; navy, 115, 118; railroads, 111; Reconstruction, 11, 190, 192, 199, 204, 232; religion, 11, 138–41, 143–44, 147, 150–51, 155–56; and Russia, 179–80; secession, 35, 42, 55, 57, 59–60; Second Great Awakening, 142; slave trade, 86, 93–96; unification, 2; veteran groups, 206, 216, 218; and Vietnam, 189; voting rights, 14, 29, 56, 67–68, 70–74, 82–83, 191, 197; War of 1812, 27, 125; war with Spain, 124; World War I, 226, 228–30 Uruguay, 128 Vallandigham, Clement, 170–71 Van Buren, Martin, 45 Vatican, 123, 151 Vattel, Emer de, 123–25 Venezuela, 40 Venice, Italy, 66, 120 Vermont, 89 Victoria, Queen, 216, 227 Vienna, Congress of, 44, 48, 126, 130–31, 157–61, 211, 228, 230 Vietnam, 38, 53, 189, 229 Virginia, 40, 57, 59, 89, 91, 97, 111, 113, 116, 144, 168, 208, 230 Virginia, CSS, 115–17 Vizcarrondo, Julio, 100 Vossler, H. A., 26–27 Wade, Banjamin F., 185 Wales, 16, 85

336

Ward, Frederick Townsend, 155 War of 1812, 27, 30, 41, 79, 93, 117, 125, 176, 207 War of Italian Unification, 2, 111, 132, 161, 218 War of the Rebellion. See Civil War, American Warrior, HMS, 115 Warsaw, Poland, 44 Washington, George, 24, 56, Waterloo, Battle of, 27, 107, 205 Webster, Daniel, 21 Weimar Republic, 78 Wellington, Duke of, 27 Wesley, John, 145 Westphalia, Treaty of, 123 Wheeler, Anna Doyle, 70 Whig Party (U.S.), 74 Whitman, Walt, 15 Wilberforce, William, 146 Wilde, Richard, 22 Wilhelm I, 29, 164 Wilhelm II, 225 Wilson, Thomas Woodrow, 68, 228–32 Windthorst, Ludwig Johann Ferdinand Gustav, 149 Wolfe Tone, Theobald, 43 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 70 World Anti-Slavery Convention, 70, 93 World War I, 107, 109, 146, 220–21, 224–26, 230, 233 World War II, 107, 110, 230 Württemberg, 26–27, 157 Zeppelin, Ferdinand von, 121 Zulus, 184, 189