Themes of the American Civil War

PART
Legacy
IV

CHAPTER
From Union to Nation?
The Civil War and the Development
of American Nationalism
SUSAN-MARY GRANT
It is generally accepted that the American Civil War of 1861–65 and its immediate aftermath—the Reconstruction period of represents a watershed in American national development. In practical terms, the war that Henry James referred to as the great convulsion certainly provides a definitive turning point in the timeline of American history.
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In recognition of this, student textbooks frequently divide American history neatly in two, with a first volume covering the period up to the Civil War and
Reconstruction, and a second picking up the history of America from
Reconstruction onwards. As the years pass this divide will surely have to change, although it is hard to predict what new turning point the textbook publishers will select once the sheer volume of post-Civil War American history forces an alternative division. More fundamentally, the Civil War is regarded as that event which transformed a Union into a Nation The
Civil War certainly succeeded in holding America together as one nation at a time when it might have come apart. It resolved the question of whether the Union was a voluntary organization from which the separate states had the right to secede—as the South had argued—or whether it was, as Lincoln described it in 1861, perpetual. The Union’s perpetuity, according to Lincoln,
was assured not only by the Constitution and the law (although he interpreted both in such away as to deny absolutely the South’s right of secession)
but by geography. Physically speaking, we cannot separate he pointed out.
“A husband and wife maybe divorced, and go out of the presence, and beyond the reach of each other but the different parts of our country cannot do this.”
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However, the transition from Union to Nation involved much more than the establishment by force of federal authority over the physical territory of the United States. The military and moral defeat suffered by the
Confederacy changed the South dramatically and forever. For the North, too,
the change was no less dramatic. The very process of taking up arms against the Southern challenge prompted a transformation in the Northern response both to the idea of Union and to the imperatives of national construction.
The specifics of this transformation have yet to be fully explored either by historians of America or by nationalism scholars, although the words of
Abraham Lincoln provide a tantalizing starting point for those interested in the process. In his First Inaugural in 1861, Lincoln frequently invoked the Union using the word some twenty times in the course of his address. He did not, however, refer directly to America as a nation relying instead on a vaguer phraseology concerning America’s national fabric.”
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By
1863, however, on the occasion of his famous Gettysburg Address, Lincoln’s chosen emphasis had changed. In that short but significant speech he did not mention the Union once, but instead referred five times to America as a “nation.”
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The question this chapter seeks to address is how and to what extent the Civil War brought about a perceptible shift in American nationalist ideology. Did Lincoln’s reference to the American nation rather than to the
Union in 1863 in any sense reflect a change in thinking in America as a whole,
and what difference—if any—was there between the idea of the Union and that of the Nation

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