Themes of the American Civil War

Union and Nation?
The Declaration of Independence, as Lincoln interpreted it, provided a basis both for ideological unity and, by extrapolation, for political Union, but not everyone saw it that way. Indeed, its precepts were a major bone of contention for Lincoln’s generation. The North came increasingly to interpret the
Declaration of Independence as their nation’s mission statement and used it to justify an expansive and outward-looking philosophy which drew on
America’s revolutionary heritage both to define and encourage a growing sense of what would, in the s, be termed Manifest Destiny Building on the eighteenth-century belief that America represented the New Israel and its population God’s new chosen people, many Americans regarded it as their divinely inspired right to expand across the continent. When Lincoln argued in his First Inaugural that the North and South could not physically separate, he was expressing a belief in geographic predestination that informed America’s expansionist aims.
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This was not solely a Northern perspective. The South was equally, if not more, keen on expansion in the years prior to the Civil War. However, the fact that it saw this as a means to consolidate the peculiar institution of slavery rather than as an opportunity to spread the benefits of liberty placed it at odds with the sense of national mission that Lincoln had invoked both in 1858 and 1861. From a European perspective, of course, Lincoln’s argument was hardly watertight. It may have been undesirable, but it was certainly not inconceivable that the United
States should have split into two separate countries, as many in the South came to argue in 1861. For the South, the Declaration of Independence came to represent less a mission statement than an insurance policy against the encroachments of central power. The argument that a people had the right to alter or abolish a government which no longer guaranteed their
“safety and happiness became more important to southerners than the “life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness philosophy that, Lincoln argued,
informed America’s national doctrine.
In the decade immediately prior to the Civil War, opinion on the meaning,
and the future, of the American democratic experiment was mixed. In the Massachusetts senator Caleb Cushing exuberantly described his country as that colossus of power, that colossus of liberty, that colossus of the spirit of nations.”
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In the following year, however, the famous New York lawyer and diarist, George Templeton Strong, sounded a more cautious note when he confided to his diary that Americans are so young a people that we feel the want of nationality, and delight in whatever asserts our national American existence. We have not, like England and France,
centuries of achievements and calamities to look back on we have no record of Americanism and we feel its want.”
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In the absence of any strong sense of nationality, all Americans really had was the Union, but in the antebellum period it was becoming clear that without a strong sense of nationality the
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existence of the Union was in serious jeopardy. The link between the Union and the nation was evident, too, in that none of the potentially unifying,
nationalizing, features of American life made sense without the Union. By the antebellum period Americans had constructed a basis for national definition predicated on a number of factors the Great Migration of the
Puritans to New England in the seventeenth century, and the eventual establishment of a Godly Commonwealth in the New World success in the Revolution, a success that was later validated by France’s adoption of
America’s revolutionary principles and, above all, the construction of a functioning Federal Union which represented anew, democratic, popular form of government. The outbreak of Civil War placed all this in jeopardy.
If the Union failed, the American experiment failed, and both the physical struggle across the Atlantic and the military upheaval of the Revolution would have, in a sense, been in vain.
As far as national construction was concerned, initially it seemed as if the
Confederacy, at least, had been successful. In the second year of the Civil War, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, William E. Gladstone, speaking at a dinner in Newcastle upon Tyne, expressed the view that of the two sides involved in the war it was the South which deserved the appellation “nation.”
The North, he argued, ought to accept the dissolution of the Union,
since Jefferson Davis and other leaders of the South have made an army;
they are making, it appears, a navy and they have made what is more than either, they have made a nation.”
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Whether the Confederacy did constitute a separate nation has been a matter of debate among historians for many years. Part of the confusion stems from alack of consensus on what, exactly,
is meant by nationalism. Is it the construction of a strong central state Does it refer to that now overused phrase of Benedict Anderson’s, the imagined community Or is it a combination of the two Another part of the debate derives from the perceived differences between nationalist sentiment in the antebellum South and that which developed during the Civil War.
Scholars frequently acknowledge the growth, in the antebellum period,
of a distinct sense of the South and some go so far as to argue that this constituted a fledgling Southern nationalism The Confederacy’s failure in the Civil War, however, is offered up as evidence that Southern nationalism as an ideology was insufficient to sustain southerners in their attempt at national construction and that it was, therefore, not a true nationalist ideology at all. Whilst it is recognized that Confederate nationalists surely existed Confederate nationalism is dismissed as more a dream than anything else.”
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The argument that military defeat revealed a fatal flaw in Confederate nationalist sentiment relies, however, on hindsight. The Civil War’s outcome validated Northern nationalist claims, and placed the Confederacy firmly and forever in the Lost Cause camp. The nationalism of the Union
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triumphed, and so historians too frequently reason that the Northern variant of American nationalism had always been the stronger and more valid. From the perspective of the time, however, the war’s outcome was by no means certain, and in any case the failure of the South to breakaway from the Union does not in itself prove that Confederate nationalism was fundamentally weak—only that it was, ultimately, unsuccessful. Neither does it prove that
American nationalism as promulgated by the North was, by comparison,
strong. More recent research has succeeded in showing that Confederate nationalism was rather more than a pipe dream and that the ideology that sustained the South’s attempt at secession had both form and substance.
Yet, crucially, these studies continue to examine the Confederacy almost in isolation. Lacking the wider context of the Union’s search for national meaning, they continue to present the Confederacy very much as a world,
and a nation, apart.
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Certainly that is what the Confederacy very much hoped to be, but despite its best efforts the battle for Confederate nationalism was conducted both in the context of and in ironic parallel with a similar process in the North. The Confederate struggle toward national definition was tightly bound up with the Union’s defense of the Civil War and its reformulation of American nationalism during the war years. Each relied,
in fundamental ways, on the other. Conflict—ideological as well as military
—between the Union and the Confederacy helped each side to construct and then defend its relative position. The Union victory ensured that its particular interpretation of American nationalism would dominate, but this new nationalism was both forged and, to a degree, tainted by the challenge offered to the Union by the South. In short, the experience of the Civil War operated on the construction and refinement of both Union/American and Confederate nationalism in much the same way.
Studies of the contemporary response to the war have concluded, for example, that a substantial portion of the Confederate people identified strongly with their southern republic Using the letters and diaries of southerners written during the conflict, Gary Gallagher has shown how southerners frequently employed terms such as our nation and my country which clearly reflected national identification and purpose Yet
Union troops were equally prone to such sentiments, and similarly cited love of their country as their motivation to fight.
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In referring to their
“country,” of course, Johnny Reb and Billy Yank meant rather different things, but their devotion to their respective nations was equally strong.
Similarly, troops in both the Federal and the Confederate armies, as well as the civilians on the home front, found that military service encouraged the development of a broader, more national outlook than had prevailed before the war began. Gallagher has argued that this was particularly the case for Southern civilians, whose links with loved ones fighting far from home broadened their horizon and led them to think nationally as well as
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locally.”
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However, the same was true for northerners, many of whose relatives were fighting on battlefields even farther away from their homes.
For the troops themselves, as the war progressed and casualties mounted,
they often found themselves fighting alongside men from different units and other states. This experience intensified and made solid a nationalist perspective that many of them had in theory but which, until the war, few had experienced in practice. Indeed, as Peter Parish has argued, the Union army itself was one of the most potent agencies of American nationalism.”
Not only did it introduce its troops to places and people hitherto remote,
but now fixed in their minds as part of the same American nation to which they belonged but the involvement of noncombatants in supporting and maintaining the army inculcated afar stronger sense of commitment and loyalty to the nation than had ever existed prior to Ina very real sense, too, both North and South drew on exactly the same ideas and symbols of nationhood in their defense of the Union and the Confederacy respectively. Both sides were completely immersed in the ideology and symbolism of the Revolution, with the result that it was held up as defense and justification for both the act of secession and the military response against it. As Reid Mitchell notes, indeed, the Civil War proved curiously filled with echoes of the American Revolution.”
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Keeping the example of the Revolution continuously before them, troops, noncombatant spokesmen, and politicians on both sides saw themselves as defenders of the nation’s glorious past, and frequently compared themselves to the revolutionaries of the previous century. A captain in the 5th Alabama Infantry,
therefore, felt prompted to consider how trifling were the wrongs complained of by our Revolutionary forefathers, in comparison with ours,”
while an officer in the st Ohio recalled how our fathers in coldest winter, half clad, marked the road they trod with crimson streams from their bleeding feet that we might enjoy the blessings of free government.”
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Both sides argued, too, that they were upholding the ambitions of the revolutionary generation and sticking to the letter, and the sentiment, of both the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. The point is often made that, in constructing a separate Confederate constitution, southerners did little more than imitate the Constitution of 1787, and in their declarations of the causes of secession the various states similarly drew on the Declaration of Independence. There were, of course, telling differences between the original documents and the revised Confederate versions.
Most obviously, the idealistic desire to form a more perfect union contained in the Preamble to the original Constitution became, in the Confederate version, a rather prosaic intention to form a permanent federal government Nevertheless, this reliance on America’s founding documents as support fora nation which was attempting to secede from the Union not only revealed that the South was, and remained, very much in two minds
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about its actions, but also demonstrated that southerners regarded themselves as the authentic heirs of the Founding Fathers, the true defenders of the ark of the covenant.”
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In many ways, it was a much more straightforward matter for southerners to find historical precedents for their attempt at separate nationhood than it was for northerners to defend their opposition to secession. Southerners could far more easily align themselves with the revolutionary generation,
and declare:

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