Themes of the American Civil War

Over thirty years later, the scholarly approach to the subject of American nationalism remains diverse. Some argue that in the period before the Civil War both the Union itself and American nationalism were, in certain fundamental ways, weak, and that it was this weakness which led first to secession and then to four years of bloody fighting between North and
South.
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This view has, over the years, come under attack from those who detect the existence of nationalizing forces both in the eighteenth century and in the antebellum period. Those who adhere to this latter view, however,
face the task of explaining why, if nationalist sentiment was strong and the
Union stable, Civil War broke out in The recent upsurge in scholarly interest in the subject of nationalism has extended the boundaries of the debate without really bringing the alternative approaches to American nationalism into the same orbit. Nationalism scholars have, in the main,
avoided the American example, and American historians continue to approach the subject from a variety of perspectives. Initially, the colonial and revolutionary periods were seen as crucial in the development of a distinctive
American nationalism. The act of revolution against Great Britain was regarded as both the outward expression of and the catalyst fora fledgling but fast-growing sense of national identity.
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More recent studies, although they take the Revolution as their starting point, have examined the early republic, or what used to be called the early national period These emphasize the role played by festivals and celebrations, such as the Fourth of July festivities, in nationalism construction in the years before the Missouri
Compromise (Since the focus of the most recent studies is primarily on the emergence of the American political system, the growth of American nationalism is examined in the context of the development of party politics and the creation of a national popular political culture in America during this period.
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What they reveal is that it was conflict rather than consensus which encouraged the growth of national sentiment, as contestants tried to claim true
American nationality and the legacy of the Revolution The danger is that,
from this perspective, American nationalism can be interpreted as little more than apolitical strategy, developed at different times by specific groups”
within American society.
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There is no doubt that the different parties, from the early national period onwards, frequently sought to make political capital out of national images and ideology. It would be wrong, however, to conclude that the ideology itself was either produced or contained within the parameters of partisan debate. From the outset, the process of American national development was entangled with wider sectional impulses which drew on, but at the same time undermined, an overarching national ideology.
Indeed, Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were no more in agreement about the status and function of the Union and its relationship to the American nation than twentieth-century scholars are. Consequently,
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whichever period a historian selects from the years before the Civil War is likely to provide evidence of conflict over both the function of the federal
Union and the nature of American nationalism.
Conflict, in fact, is the key to understanding the shifting responses both to the idea of Union and to that of Nation in America conflict between the fledgling political parties of the early republic but also, and more damaging for the nation as a whole, conflict between North and South. That a coherent sense of the nation should derive from conflict is not as contradictory an argument as it might at first appear. The growth of any nationalist sentiment is normally sustained by opposition to a perceived threat, usually but not exclusively external in nature. In the American case the threat was first and foremost Great Britain, but that threat was removed by the act of revolution. Having successfully achieved independence, Americans found themselves facing the crisis of legitimacy which all post-revolutionary societies face once the unifying impulse created and sustained by the external enemy has disappeared.
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For the revolutionary generation the most immediate requirement was the construction of a functioning political Union.
This was rendered problematic by the fact that although the separate colonies had acted in concert to some degree in order to achieve independence, in fundamental ways the Revolution had really comprised thirteen separate revolutions. As Daniel Boorstin put it, the American nation was really a byproduct of the assertion of each colony’s right to govern itself ” rather than the result of a spontaneous outpouring of national sentiment. The result in political terms was that the period between the Revolution and the Civil
War was overcast by a federal vagueness.”
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Political instability was not the only problem facing the new nation.
The experience of revolution had also bequeathed it a divisive legacy. The
Revolutionary War itself was a conflict which pitted the colonists against each other as much as one waged solely by the colonists against an imperial power.
In the aftermath of the Revolution the loyalists had, for the most part,
fled to Nova Scotia, Canada, New Brunswick, or back to Britain, but the revolutionary generation could hardly have forgotten the existence of loyalist sentiment or its implications. The Union’s position was, from any angle,
a precarious one. America represented an experiment in anew form of government, and not everyone expected the experiment to succeed. During the early years of the republic the prediction that the Union would not last was so common as to be a standard conversational gambit Indeed, as
Linda Kerber reminds us, it was the persistence of union which excited surprise rather than recurring secessionist sentiment David Humphreys,
a former aide to George Washington, posed, in 1804, what even by that early stage in the new republic’s existence was a loaded question when he asked,
“What but disunion can our bliss destroy Disunion was the specter at the feast at every nation-affirming celebration held in the early republic, which
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is not to say, as Elizabeth Varon reminds us, that the idea of disunion was synonymous with secession far from it, in some respects. Instead, disunion,
“once the most provocative and potent word in the political vocabulary of
Americans,” both contained, and stimulated, their fears of extreme political factionalism, tyranny, regionalism, economic decline, foreign intervention,
class conflict, gender disorder, racial strife, widespread violence and anarchy,
and civil war and was seen, simultaneously, as a deformity, a disease,
a monster, a storm, a sea, a whip, an arrow, a poison, afire, a spell, and a curse.”
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Disunion, as Varon has analyzed it, functioned within five registers as a prophesy of national ruin, a threat of withdrawal from the federal compact,
an accusation of treasonous plotting, a process of sectional alienation, and a program for national independence By the antebellum period, however,
these registers were increasingly reinforcing each other along a North–South axis, and it seemed increasingly probable that if the Union were to come apart then it would do so because of the essential differences between the North and the plantation South. There was, in effect, little real unity in the early Union. Local and sectional loyalties always threatened to subvert the developing sense of national mission and destiny. In the American case, as has been argued, the fears of Montesquieu and older political theorists were not without foundation. If a single great republic was to survive here, it would have to find away of stemming the secessionist tide.”
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One of the ways national consolidation was attempted was through celebratory rites focused on the Revolution, such as the Fourth of July festivities, but also through the elevation of the war’s supporting documents the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—and the conflict’s military leader and America’s first President, George Washington to the status of national symbols. Over the years additional symbols were added, most notably the Great Seal with its classical allusion “Incipit novus ordo saeclorum” (anew order of the ages is born) and the motto E pluribus unum” (one out of many. Both were, however, more expressive of future hopes than contemporary realities. The need to downplay the harsh realities of the Revolution led to its outcome being portrayed less as the fruit of military victory over both internal and external foes than as the logical product of an Enlightenment philosophy which found its fullest expression in the new, democratic republic that America represented.
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This was the beginning of a process whereby Americans sought to justify the
Revolution by transforming it into the bedrock of a unifying national mythology. The Revolution soon took its place alongside the foundation myths of the arrival of the Pilgrim Fathers aboard the Mayflower and the Great Migration of the Puritans in the seventeenth century in a fast- developing sense of American historical achievement and an as yet still inchoate national tradition.”
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At the centre of this fledgling national
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mythology stood the Union, the symbol of all that America had achieved by the act of revolution. As a divine instrument, as Liberty’s harbinger, and as the nation’s triumph the Union encapsulated America’s past success and future destiny.
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Before the Civil War, however, the Union seemed to be strong only in the face of an external threat. Great Britain played that role once again at the start of the nineteenth century in the so-called second war for independence,”
the War of 1812. At the conclusion of the conflict the American diplomat and Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin felt enthused enough to observe that the war had renewed and reinstated the national feelings which the
Revolution had given and which were daily lessened. The people have now more general objects of attachment with which their pride and political opinions are connected. They are more American they feel and act more like a nation and I hope that the permanency of the Union is thereby better secured.”
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Gallatin’s recognition of the connection between the Union and a sense of the nation is revealing, but his optimism was premature. The upsurge of nationalism induced by the War of 1812 was somewhat soured by the memory of New England federalist extremists advocating secession from the Union in 1814. In the years following, overconfidence in the
American democratic experiment and in the strength of the Union went hand in hand with deep-rooted fears over the national character and the nation’s future. The Founding Fathers had been all too conscious that the
Union represented at best a perilous political experiment Succeeding generations, however, held a somewhat different view—or views, rather, since consensus proved difficult to achieve in the years between the Revolution and the Civil War.
Rush Welter has argued that the Americans of this period saw themselves as heirs of all the ages and their nation as the fulfillment of the progressive dreams of mankind.”
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Heirs of the ages they may have been, but nineteenth- century Americans could never forget the fact that they were more directly heirs of the revolutionary generation, and that the challenge they faced was to live up to the ideals enunciated in the Declaration of Independence.
In effect, they felt—indeed, they welcomed—a sense of responsibility to
“create the excellence which the revolutionaries had demanded.”
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This was a tall order, and in a sense Americans were not equal to the task. Although conscious of an imbalance between their new nation’s professed ideals—
most notably its devotion to liberty—and the reality of a Union in which slave states coexisted with free, the revolutionaries progeny failed to grasp the political and moral nettle of slavery and sought compromise rather than closure on this most divisive of issues. In some senses the continuous search fora workable compromise reveals how hard Americans were prepared to strive for the Union. Their efforts were, however, unsuccessful. The Union that they created was built on sand. One did not have to bean abolitionist
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to realize that there was a fundamental difference in outlook between the
North and the South—although, of course, that helped—and that as time passed the difference was becoming more, not less, pronounced. Americans north and south had much in common a shared history, however brief, of which migration and the Revolution formed the bedrock shared heroes,
most notably Washington and Jefferson a shared political system, albeit one prone to change a shared way of life, in the main a shared belief in the merits of popular government and a shared commitment to the ideals of liberty. Alternative interpretations of this last point, however, served only to widen the gulf between the free and slave states.
We all declare for liberty Lincoln observed in the course of the Civil
War] but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing.
With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor.
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Lincoln was, in this context, referring quite specifically to slavery, but he well knew that the argument over the definition of liberty went beyond the issue of slavery alone. In the midst of the secession crisis in 1861, Lincoln was moved to consider what great principle or idea it was that kept this
Confederacy so long together The answer he arrived at was that the sentiments enunciated in the Declaration of Independence offered liberty not alone to the people of this country, but hope to the world for all future time.”
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For Lincoln, as for many Americans, the Declaration of
Independence encapsulated all that the Union represented. It was the
American nation’s key foundation document. Its ambitious sentiments and inspiring rhetoric not only held out the hope of liberty to the world, but provided the only means to nationhood fora population as diverse and varied as Americans were in the nineteenth century. In the course of the famous Lincoln–Douglas debates in 1858, Lincoln had addressed the question of American nationality and the role of the Revolution and the Declaration of Independence in this. Aware that many Americans could not carry themselves back into that glorious epoch on the grounds of ancestry, Lincoln argued that the Declaration of Independence enabled them to establish their American nationality, since they had the right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of those who penned it. The moral sentiment of the Declaration of Independence,
Lincoln averred, constituted an electric cord which linked the nation together.
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