Liberty and Slavery

European Separatists, Southern Secession, and the American Civil War

by Niels Eichhorn

216 Pages / 5.50 x 8.50 x 0.60 in

Hardcover

9780807171677

Published: October 2019

$45.00

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eBook

9780807171820

Published: October 2019

(Requires the Leaf e-Reader app)

$19.95

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In Liberty and Slavery, Niels Eichhorn examines the language of slavery, which he considers central to revolutionary struggles, especially those waged in Europe in the nineteenth century. Eichhorn begins in 1830 with separatist movements in Greece, Belgium, and Poland, which laid the foundation for rebellions undertaken later in the century, and then shifts focus to the 1848 uprisings in Ireland, Hungary, and Schleswig-Holstein. He argues that revolutionaries embraced or rejected the language of slavery as they saw fit, using it to justify their rebellions and larger goals.

The failure of these insurgencies propelled a wave of revolutionary migrants across the Atlantic world. Those who journeyed to the United States felt the need to adjust to the political and sectional divisions in their new home. Eichhorn shows that separatism was widespread during this period; the secessionist aims of the American Confederacy were by no means unique.

Additionally, Eichhorn explores these migrants’ motivations for shunning the Confederacy during the American Civil War. Having been steeped in the language of slavery and separatism, they naturally sided with the Union when the sectional crisis culminated in civil war in 1861.

Niels Eichhorn is the author of Liberty and Slavery: European Separatists, Southern Secession, and the American Civil War. He lives in Wels, Austria.

Niels Eichhorn has brilliantly succeeded in explaining Confederate Secession as the latest in a series of comparable and contemporaneous similar movements. In the process, he has also added a great deal to our understanding of the motivations of European immigrants for joining in the American Civil War. ~Enrico Dal Lago, author of William Lloyd Garrison and Giuseppe Mazzini: Abolition, Democracy, and Radical Reform

Liberty and Slavery deftly connects American secessionism and separatist movements in nineteenth-century Europe. Although separatists shared the same language of liberty, Eichhorn explores the different meanings those terms acquired on different sides of the Atlantic, making an important contribution to the scholarship on the international context of the American Civil War. ~Paul Quigley, author of The Civil War and the Transformation of American Citizenship

Niels Eichhorn offers a capacious transnational history of nineteenth-century separatist movements. His work is certain to deepen our understanding of the international dimensions of the American Civil War. ~Andre Fleche, author of The Revolution of 1861: The American Civil War in the Age of Nationalist Conflict

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