The American Civil War was not only the culmination point of a hitherto “unfinished nation” and the central crisis in American history but it also had significant international ramifications for the political, social, economic, and military conditions in many parts of the world. What usually is described as an ‘age of nationalism’ witnessed the rise of the modern constitutional state and globalized interdependent capitalist economies. America’s Civil War was central to the transformation of the modern world in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
For a very long time, the Civil War has been the central chapter in America’s national history. For generations, the American public as well as historians and readers elsewhere in the world have seemed content with a parochial vision of the Civil War within a strictly national framework. The recent turn toward transnational historical studies is now beginning to have an effect on the way historians view the war. How does our understanding of the American Civil War change once we step back and view the conflict in its global context? How does this perspective revise what we previously accepted? This book provides, at least, a provisional answer to these questions. What follows are chapters by several of the pioneers in the new transnational history of the American Civil War.
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How much of transnational history is necessary to fully comprehend the Civil War and all the complexities of its causes and results? Is the transnational perspective simply a way of casting a new light on an episode that we can still understand as a predominantly national story of war and collective memory? The German historian Jürgen Kocka has argued that transnational history is at times incapable of explaining historical developments that take place within the nation-state since it is inherently ill-equipped to analyze particular aspects of society and politics that are created within and, hence, confined within the container of the nation-state. 1
With this cautionary warning about the limits of the explanatory power of transnational history for historians, it is important to keep in mind that contemporaries of the Civil War era immediately understood the vast transnational repercussions of the conflict. Few were more perceptive of this than John Lothrop Motley, author, gentleman historian, and US minister to the Austrian Empire. Motley, addressing the New York Historical Society in 1868 on “Historic Progress and American Democracy,” summarized his main point brilliantly: “The law is Progress; the result Democracy.” Motley also spoke of an “electric chain” that united America and Europe. “So instantaneous are their action and retroaction,” he wrote, “that the American Civil War, at least in Western Europe, became as much an affair of passionate party feeling as if it were raging on that side the Atlantic.” In Motley’s eyes, the American crisis was something much more than “an affair of party feeling” within one nation, for the “effect of the triumph of freedom in this country on the cause of progress in Europe is plain.” Given his intimate knowledge of Austrian politics in the 1860s, it was not surprising that he looked out for the “effects” of the war on Austrian politics. He found that the so-called Ausgleich, the replacement of Austrian centralism by a dualism of two imperial halves, Austria and Hungary, which happened in 1867, emerged from the learning process that was stimulated by the American federal example. 2 This may seem paradoxical insofar as the Austro-Hungarian Dualism looked like, as John Hawgood wrote, as if “Andrew Jackson had made a deal with the South Carolina Nullifiers, giving them a privileged position in the union that the other states did not share.” 3 The Austrian Empire indeed suffered two secessions during the 1860s. The first came when Bismarck attempted to solve the German Question by establishing a German Empire without Austria, which resulted in Prussia’s victory at the Battle of Königgrätz in 1866. This “German Gettysburg,” as the historian Robert Binkley once famously remarked, “was won by the secessionists.” 4 The second “secession,” the establishment of the Austro-Hungarian dualism in 1867, may also have been a victory of the secessionists, in this case, the Hungarians, who had staged a revolutionary independence movement in 1848. The Austrians crushed their fight for independence in 1849, but in 1867 Hungarians won a relatively broad autonomy within the imperial framework of the Habsburg monarchy without having to win a “Gettysburg.” Motley obviously wanted to understand this major event in the constitutional history of the Habsburg Empire as a reasonable attempt to put the Habsburg monarchy on solid ground by minimizing the risk of a bloody split-up. The idea of “e pluribus unum had failed,” wrote Motley, and instead “an e pluribus duo was resolved upon.” 5 Given the fact that the Habsburg monarchy was not a union but rather a collection of estates with the Habsburg dynasty as the landlord, this kind of compromise between Austria and Hungary seemed to Motley a mark of genuine progress. His address is illuminating for everyone who thinks of transnational history as a field of “electric chains.”
Within the last decade we have seen a remarkable increase of historical works concerned with the transnational dimension of the American Civil War. 6 Although the interest in placing this central national American conflict into an international analytical context has existed for quite some time, it is time that we synthesize comparative history with entangled history more than before, in order to gain a better understanding of the transnational dimension of the American Civil War. 7 These approaches are indeed inherently interconnected with fluid transitions. Just one example: when Stig Förster and Jörg Nagler conceptualized their project on total war in America and Germany in the 1990s, they started with a strictly comparative approach. The basic question concerned the genesis of total warfare that, in the twentieth century, led to the two horrific world wars. How was warfare in the nineteenth-century age of industrial capitalism connected to the rise of nationalism? The comparative approach, however, also became a transnational one when historians realized that there was a direct transatlantic exchange of people, information, and ideas that mutually influenced each other. For example, the American notion of total war was, ironically, brought to Germany in 1870 by Gen. Philip Sheridan himself. As a military observer, Sheridan watched the German troops and later urged Otto von Bismarck to handle the French guerrillas with the same brutal practice of punishing civilians that he had applied during his Shenandoah Valley campaign of 1864. “The people must be left with nothing but their eyes to weep with after the war,” Sheridan told the Germans. 8
Wars tend to send out stronger signals to the world than is the case with peacetime situations. These transmitted signals—what Motley called the “electric chain” of “action and retroaction”—can have severe consequences in the economic, social, political, military, and cultural spheres in certain regions of the world, depending upon the degree of entanglement with the nation seized by war. Only seldom do historians ask in what systematic ways are wars and globalization interconnected. 9
Evidently the current forces of globalization have encouraged historians to think internationally, not least because the World Wide Web has now provided access and communication that made this “global turn” possible. The sheer quantity of recent monographs and articles that focus on the transnational and global aspects of the American Civil War era is noteworthy. 10 The central theme in the macro-transnational framework of the American Civil War era was nationalism and nation building connected with the violent forces of centralization and its opposite, secession. 11 Michael Geyer and Charles Bright have rightly labeled this the era of “global violence and nationalizing war.” 12 One needs to ask if the impact of the American Civil War was greater in regions where there were similar and concurrent developments in nationalist consciousness. Or, did the American Civil War act as a catalyst capable of spurring nationalism? Other national formations were at work almost simultaneously, as in Italy, Germany, Japan, Mexico, Paraguay, and, less violently, in Canada. The Taiping Rebellion in China had less to do with national unification than these Western conflicts, but it occurred simultaneously with, if disconnected from, the Euro-American wars, and in the scale of its bloodshed (estimated at nearly thirty million casualties) it towered over the others. One central question an international history of this era poses is why did these processes occur almost simultaneously in so many different parts of the world?
When we address the issue of a transnational significance of a historical event such as the American Civil War, we need to ask about the contemporary international awareness of this conflict, a precondition for answering the question of impact. Men like John Lothrop Motley understood immediately that events on both sides of the Atlantic were linked as though by an “electric chain.” Undoubtedly, many other contemporaries thought that the American Civil War would permanently change the world. Here it is important to emphasize that the three paradigms of awareness, connections, and impact are also methodically interconnected. For example, in order to have an impact on a certain region, there needs to be personal connections, or some awareness that is rendered through information on the American Civil War. Information about the war and its meaning was transmitted through certain channels of communication, such as diplomatic correspondence, newspapers, letters, and more rarely through personal contact. Communication channels during the mid-nineteenth century, at least for most of the transatlantic world, were already well developed with vast networks of overland telegraphs, railroads, fast oceanic mail service by steamship, and mass audience newspapers and magazines. From Western centers information was distributed to their peripheries, accelerated by the speed of railroad systems and steamship lines. 13 New mass circulation newspapers reported the details of the American War. Less conspicuously, there was a massive exchange of information through diplomatic correspondence and private letters that added immensely to knowledge about the war in nearly all parts of the world. This exchange of information and public opinion on the American War was among the early and most fruitful lines of investigation among historians of the international Civil War. 14
Key political figures in Europe and elsewhere also interpreted the Civil War in light of their particular view of the world. Intellectuals, journalists, and political leaders acted as multipliers, transmitting their understanding of the information and basic events of the Civil War to their respective publics, often with specific political intentions in mind. They utilized the events of the American Civil War as a screen on which to project their own political and social agendas. William E. Gladstone, for example, compared the mass emancipation of slaves in the United States to the British reform movement to expand voting rights as a way of discrediting the latter. Republicans in France debated la question amércaine as a veiled way of engaging in forbidden political debate under Napoleon III’s censorious regime.
Another highly pertinent line of inquiry concerns the transnational significance of the impact of the American Civil War on the historical change of war and military organization. The American conflict has often been interpreted as the anticipation of the total wars of the twentieth century. 15 Just how did the reported observations by international observers—civilians or military—of the war cause changes in the way nations organized armies and waged war; how did events in America affect strategy, tactics, and weaponry in the wars that came after 1865? This is an inviting field of study, especially for those prepared to examine the “entangled histories” approach toward a better understanding of transnational networks and the exchange of military knowledge. Parallel investigations might explore how and in what way social (self-)mobilization during the American Civil War influenced other nations faced with the challenge of mobilizing mass citizen armies. One important imprint of the American War was the new codification of the international law of war, as formulated by Francis Lieber, a German political refugee. Lieber’s 1863 “Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field, General Order No. 100,” known as the Lieber Code, formed the basis of the Hague Convention of 1899. 16
Historians of the international Civil War will also take into account the significance of the British Empire as a geopolitical rival responding to the rising commercial and military prowess of the United States and to consider how the British Empire recalculated its global strategy as a result of the American conflict. The challenge posed by the reformation of a powerful United States, now with a strong navy and with enormous commercial reach in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Latin America was especially grave for Great Britain. Historians have rarely examined the direct impact of the American Civil War on British imperial strategy in the American hemisphere and elsewhere. Was Britain’s neutrality during the American Civil War a conscious defensive strategy that anticipated the future direction of Great Britain as a global superpower?
Historians are often tempted to adopt teleological models of modernization, nationalism, and democratization that have dominated our understanding of the American Civil War for some time. Because the United States later became a hegemonic world power, it is easy to interpret the Civil War as the watershed and genesis for this future development. We must, however, remain aware of the complexity of global networks that had deve...