The Civil War and Slavery Reconsidered

Negotiating the Peripheries

Laura R. Sandy, Marie S. Molloy, Laura R. Sandy, Marie S. Molloy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429601996
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

Following the suggestion of the historian Peter Parish, these essays probe "the edges" of slavery and the sectional conflict. The authors seek to recover forgotten stories, exceptional cases and contested identities to reveal the forces that shaped America, in the era of "the Long Civil War," c.1830-1877. Offering an unparalleled scope, from the internal politics of southern households to trans-Atlantic propaganda battles, these essays address the fluidity and negotiability of racial and gendered identities, of criminal and transgressive behaviors, of contingent, shifting loyalties and of the hopes of freedom that found expression in refugee camps, court rooms and literary works.

Part I
Negotiating Perceptions of Slavery, Civil War and the Confederacy

1 The Republic on Trial or Slavery Under Fire?

International Perspectives on the Nature of America's Civil War

Don H. Doyle

It has become commonplace to view America’s Civil War as a moral journey, in which Abraham Lincoln and the Union began with the pragmatic goal of preserving the Union and ascended to the morally inspired purpose of ending slavery. The present volume reconsiders the connections between slavery and the Civil War by examining subjects at the periphery of the wide stream of scholarship on these subjects. In the chapter that follows, readers view America’s war with itself from outside the boundaries of the nation. In the eyes of many foreigners, the American contest was something much more than one nation’s conflict over the right to secession or even the future of American slavery. They came to see it as a contest over fundamental republican ideals of human rights, equality, liberty and self-rule, principles that transcended place and time.

The Civil War is America’s defining crisis. It lies at the heart of the story Americans tell themselves about themselves: a young democracy, riven by sectional conflict over slavery, is plunged into a tragic war with itself. It was a “brother’s war” fought by American soldiers, on American soil, over issues that were peculiarly American, and a war with little impact on the world outside the nation. After four years of internecine war, the nation reunited, stronger than ever, as the usual narrative has it, and on its way to becoming a major industrial economy and world power.

For nearly a century after 1865, with rare exception, historians of the American Civil War served a narrative of national reconciliation. They argued that fanatical zealots inflamed fears and loathing on both sides, and blundering politicians seemed unable to compromise what ought to have been a manageable problem. By the 1960s a new generation, writing in the light of the civil rights movement, made slavery and race the central cause and meaning of the conflict. The Civil War became the prelude to the civil rights era, the reluctant first step in what Eric Foner called the “unfinished revolution.” Historians enriched our understanding of the war, broadening its social history to include the experience of common soldiers who fought the war, the lives of women at the home front and the hitherto unsung role of slaves and free blacks in the conflict. The history of the Civil War remained one of the most fertile fields of historical research during the next half century.

But it remained very much America’s war, a self-contained and often self-absorbed story of America’s troubled history with race. The historian David Potter, reflecting on this tendency in the late 1960s, complained that the American Civil War had inspired “some of our worst navel-gazing” and that most historians seemed perfectly content to view it as “a conflict all our own, as American as apple pie.”¹ There were fitful efforts to widen the scope of Civil War history, but except for a handful of diligent diplomatic historians, most historians took no interest in how America’s war with itself fit into the wider transnational historical narrative. Historians of Europe and Latin America took almost no interest in the subject.²

Historians sometimes appear drawn to new approaches to a well-tilled field of historical research for the sake of novelty alone, which does not seem a worthy motive. How does an international approach change our understanding of the American Civil War? What is the value added? One of the first answers to this important question I found in the foreign press coverage of the war and the American press coverage of opinion and policy abroad. America’s war was not just a local skirmish in a quarrelsome democracy thousands of miles across the Atlantic; it mattered and mattered greatly to government leaders, writers and intellectuals, workers, students and common people abroad. Nothing gave greater evidence of this than the outpouring of grief across Europe especially, and throughout much of the world, following the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in April 1865. United States diplomats were astonished when more than a thousand letters of condolence, signed by tens of thousands of citizens from all ranks, poured into United States diplomatic posts abroad that spring. The letters evinced sympathy for America, and more than that, they revealed that America’s distant contest was also theirs.

To ask why America’s internecine war meant so much to foreigners is to ask, what exactly did it mean to them? There were, of course, deep economic strains brought on by the war, especially in the industrialized areas of England, France, Belgium and wherever cotton manufacturing prevailed. The American South supplied the lion’s share of the world’s raw cotton, and merchants and manufacturers scrambled to find new sources of cotton in India, northern Africa, Brazil and elsewhere. Conservative members of the governing classes also worried that massive unemployment in the industrial regions of Europe would bring dangerous social unrest to Europe.

What I discovered in the international press, however, was that one of the main concerns of foreign observers on both sides of the political spectrum were the ideological and political implications of the war. Many interpreted the American war as proof that the “republican experiment” was doomed to failure, that people could not govern themselves without kings and aristocracies to give them stability. Skeptics had long thought republican government to be inherently weak and doomed to descend, sooner or later, into anarchy or dictatorship, especially vulnerable to stain of war. Today’s neoconservatives advocate democratic peace theory, which holds that major wars come from the aggression of antidemocratic governments and that democratic societies incline toward peace with one another. The mid-nineteenth-century corollary was that self-governing nations could not wage war; that they would disintegrate into anarchy or despotism under the strain of war. A wave of pamphlets with titles such as The American Bastille excoriated President Lincoln for abusing the rights of rebel sympathizers and appealed to a widely held prejudice that “extreme democracy” led to abuses of individual freedom.³

Conservative Europeans had a field day when America’s vaunted “Great Republic” descended into fratricidal war, pronouncing the entire experiment in popular self-rule an utter failure and turning this proof against those agitating for reform at home. Tory MP Sir John Ramsden in May 1861 warned that Britain was “now witnessing the bursting of that great Republican bubble which had been so often held up to us as the model on which to recast our own English Constitution.” The first duty of the British government, he advised, ought to be to strengthen “the great distinction between the safe and rational, and tempered liberties of England, and the wild and unreflecting excesses of mob-rule which had too often desecrated freedom and outraged humanity in America.” Many in Parliament cheered when they heard his words.⁴

The Earl of Shrewsbury, another venerable Tory MP, stood before his constituents in Worcester and congratulated Britain on its aristocratic government. He drew disparaging comparisons between it and the extreme democracy running amok in America. “In America they saw Democracy on its trial, and they saw how it failed.” Those standing before him now, he prophesied, “who lived long enough would . . . see an aristocracy established in America.”⁵

Sir Alexander James Beresford Beresford Hope, the Conservative editor of the Saturday Review, gave a series of well-attended public lectures in which he applauded the South’s secession and happily forecast further division of the “once United States.” An impartial view of the map, he instructed his British listeners, shows that “the inevitable design of Providence” dictated that “the country should be divided into at least four great commonwealths,” the Northeast, Midland, South, and Pacific. Such division, he proposed, would create a balance of power in North America much like that of Europe (conveniently ignoring centuries of bloodshed in the Old World). Each new fragment would have to maintain a standing army to guard its frontiers, instead of there being one nation menacing Canada and Mexico. “Every other country in the world does the like, and it is time that our bumptious cousins” did the same instead of displaying such “childish petulance” unbecoming to a mature nation.

Students in the Oxford Union also debated the American question on several occasions during the war. On February 7, 1861, the Union entertained the proposition: “That this House deeply regrets the present condition of the United States, and trusts that they may honourably avoid the evils of disruption.” The result was divided: Ayes: 27, Noes: 19. Two years later, on February 19, 1863, at this point, after Lincoln had enacted the Emancipation Proclamation, the Oxford Union considered, “That the moral support accorded by England to the Southern Confederacy is a disgrace to the Country” and came out with a tie, Ayes: 23, Noes: 23. The president cast his vote in favor of the motion. Later in November 1863, long after the battle of Gettysburg, the Union debated the proposition, “That of the two contending states in North America the Southern Confederacy is most deserving of our sympathy.” Ayes: 31, Noes, 25. As late as May 4, 1865, well after news of Robert E. Lee’s surrender and Abraham Lincoln’s assassination arrived, the Oxford Union voted 37 to 25 in favor of the following motion: “That this House deeply regrets the late successes of the Federal arms; and believes the triumphs of the Government of Washington to be fatal to the freedom of America.”⁶

The French had their own tumultuous history of republicanism, which conservatives drew upon to denounce the American experiment as an utter failure. “Your Republic is dead, and it is probably the last the world will see,” one French cabinet officer, Achille Fould, brazenly announced to an astonished American in the fall of 1861. “You will have a reign of terror, and then two or three monarchies.”⁷ Le Monde, an arch-monarchist journal, condemned the American experiment as a mistake from the beginning. Eighty years ago, “the republican tree” had been planted; now “its spoiled fruits had fallen, and its roots were rotten.” Now, it added, one beholds slaveholding rebels crying “Vive la liberté!”⁸

Few European editorials were more severe than Madrid’s El Pensamiento Español, a staunchly conservative Catholic journal.

In the model republic of what were the United States, we see more and more clearly of how little account is a society constituted without God, merely for the sake of men. . . . Look at their wild ways of annihilating each other, confiscating each other’s goods, mutually destroying each other’s cities, and cordially wishing each other extinct!

It mocked the “model republic” founded in rebellion and atheism, “populated by the dregs of all the nations in the world” and living “without law of God or man.” Now America’s republic stood doomed to “die in a flood of blood and mire” and serve as a rebuke to “the flaming theories of democracy.”⁹

Europe’s Great Powers did not wait for America’s republican experiment to destroy itself; they quickly seized the advantage offered by the American debacle. The Monroe Doctrine proclaiming off-limits the further European colonization of the American hemisphere was suddenly toothless. Like vultures, European powers preyed on the weakest Latin American republics that had been protected by the United States. In late March 1861, Spain sent a fleet from Havana into a deeply divided Dominican Republic and later proclaimed it reannexed into the Spanish Empire. Later, Spanish naval incursions provoked wars with Peru and Chile, apparently in a scheme to take back lost American empires.

In late October 1861, Spain, France and Britain met in London to form the Tripartite Alliance whose first act was to launch an allied invasion of Mexico that December, supposedly to recover i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Negotiating the Peripheries
• PART I Negotiating Perceptions of Slavery, Civil War and the Confederacy
• PART II A Stable Society? Transgressive Behaviors and Lives on the Peripheries
• PART III African American Experiences of Emancipation and Freedom Reconsidered
• List of Contributors
• Index