The Civil War in the Age of Nationalism

By Duncan A. Campbell and Niels Eichhorn

Duncan A. Campbell and Niels Eichhorn note the importance of situating the American Civil War within the context of global conflicts and trends of the time.

To the untrained eye, these could be images from the same conflict, given the similarity of the soldiers’ dress and the technological standards of the cannons. In fact, the first depicts U.S. troops in the Civil War in the defenses around Washington, D.C., while the second is of French soldiers in the Franco-German War in a fort on the outskirts of Paris, two of the three major mid-nineteenth century conflicts which served as a transition point between the Napoleonic Wars and the First World War.
Officers and Men, 3d Regiment Massachusetts Heavy Artillery. Washington, District of Columbia. United States, 1865. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/2018671568/.
“Fort Du Mont Valerien, c. 1871.” Prints, Drawings and Watercolors from the Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:85638/


Globalization may not be the buzzword it once was, and even Marshall McLuhan’s “Global Village” is now a cliché. Nonetheless, the world we live in is a deeply interconnected one, and this was also very much true of the nineteenth century. Instantaneous—if sporadic—communication, courtesy of the telegraph; the mass movement of goods, peoples, and ideas; and increased literacy rates resulted in national populations that were reasonably well informed about the world outside their borders. Consequently, they engaged with larger world affairs and were influenced by them. An American citizen in, say, 1860 would have known about—and likely held opinions on—events such as the Crimean War, Hungary’s struggle for independence, the power struggle between Buenos Aires and the Argentine Confederation, the Indian Mutiny, and Italian unification, just to name a few. Ulysses S. Grant applauded Otto von Bismarck’s Kulturkampf against the Roman Catholic Church. Before he became president, Abraham Lincoln was a staunch admirer of Hungarian leader Lajos Kossuth, to the extent that he wore a so-called “Kossuth hat” to political events. Southerners, meanwhile, witnessed—and feared—the steady march of abolitionism abroad. Foreigners, too, looked at the United States, but like Americans looking abroad, they often did so through their own national and cultural lens, which shaped their interpretation and understanding of events.

As Carl Degler pointed out in his 1990 lecture, “One among Many: The Civil War in Comparative Perspective,” while often studied in almost total isolation from other global events, the American Civil War (“the Civil War” hereafter) was in fact one of many conflicts surrounding national unification, secession, and independence that took place around the world from the 1840s to the 1870s. Noting this, Degler challenged historians of the Civil War to explore its many issues within a global context, but very few have been willing to pick up the gauntlet. Indeed, with a few honorable exceptions, many have simply fallen back on an American exceptionalist assumption that because the world is merely America in the making, the Civil War was a test of democratic, or free, institutions. If the American Union was not preserved, freedom and republican government, even democracy, everywhere would supposedly be in jeopardy, as Lincoln implied in the Gettysburg Address. From this vantage, every advance in freedom following the conflict was a consequence of the Union victory, while the opposite phenomenon—which was just as frequent, including in the United States when African Americans lost the voting rights they had gained during Reconstruction—was apparently owed to other factors. In short, this approach Americanizes world history instead of globalizing American history.

The fact is that many of the Civil War’s key issues, including nationalism, slavery and emancipation, the development of the liberal state, and the impact of industrialization upon warfare, were replicated abroad. The same is true of issues such as the role of religion, realpolitik, and imperialism, to say nothing of memory. Placing the Civil War experience within a wider global framework remains a necessary task.

The American Civil War took place in an era of nationalism, mass mobilization, and growing public engagement. The two mass meetings depicted here illustrate the deepening connections between people, nation, and government as the residents of New York in Union Square cheer and celebrate the United States at the war’s outset while the statue of George Washington towers over them. Similarly, the people of Paris celebrate the announcement of the Third Republic, under a monument commemorating the Revolution of 1830. As “La Place de la Bastille” suggests, this was a site of great significance from the French Revolution.
“The Great Meeting in Union Square, New York, to Support the Government, April 20, 1861.” Harper’s Weekly, May 4, 1861.
“La Place de la Bastille.” L’Illustration Européenne (Brussels), April 15, 1871.

Slavery and the future of the enslaved in post-emancipation societies is one area that has attracted scholarly attention, but even here more comparative and transnational analysis is needed. The United States was not the only nation that emancipated its enslaved population during a rebellion. Almost a decade before Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation, Ramón Castilla declared that all slaves in Peru were free during a revolution in his nation. As with Lincoln, Castilla saw this move as a path to both win the conflict and seize the moral high ground from his opponent.

While the issue of slavery ignited the Civil War, it was also a conflict of national unification versus southern independence. Insofar as there was an American national identity, it was largely confined to the North; by contrast, the South created a separate identity in a manner similar to that of the Hungarians, the Irish, and other peoples. At the time of the conflict, the United States was an unfinished nation, much like Italy and Germany. With respect to Germany, Lincoln had a great deal in common with his contemporary, Bismarck. Both men, by military means, effectively unified semi-autonomous (in the case of the U.S.) or quite independent (in the case of Germany) states into a national whole. Recognizing the similarity between the German and American nation-building experiences, Ulysses S. Grant, as president, wrote to Bismarck, congratulating him on completing the long-desired unification of his nation and for his decision to create a federal union like the United States.

In the case of the defeated party, the “Lost Cause” movement that justified the South’s attempt at independence bore a close resemblance to other failed secessionist and independence movements elsewhere, such as those of Hungarian, Polish or, indeed, Irish nationalism. As the war unfolded, southerners were aware that slavery was generally unpopular across the western world, and they examined nineteenth-century European secessionist claims as well as the obvious example of 1776 when they sought to justify their bid for independence.

Similarly, although the American Civil War has often been referred to as the first modern war, the reality is that it was one of three modernizing wars in the mid-nineteenth century. The Civil War, along with the earlier Crimean War and later Franco-German War, pioneered and developed new concepts such as troops transported by rail; battlefield photography; up-to-the-minute news bulletins (courtesy of the telegraph); improvements in medical care, including the professionalization of nursing; trench warfare; and ironclad ships and other new military technologies. All three conflicts were transitional and anticipated the devastating wars of the twentieth century. Yet, at the same time, being continuations of developments resulting from the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, all three also provided examples of antiquated technology and obsolete ideas. 

The Civil War in the Age of Nationalism takes a comparative and transnational approach in exploring these and other issues that placed the conflict very much within the wider world of which the United States was a part.


Headshot of Niels Eichhorn

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

Headshot of Duncan A. Campbell

Duncan A. Campbell is professor of history at National University in San Diego and the author of Unlikely Allies: Britain, America and the Victorian Origins of the Special Relationship.


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While historians have acknowledged that the issues of race, slavery, and emancipation were not unique to the American Civil War, they have less frequently recognized the conflict’s similarities to other global events. As renowned historian Carl Degler pointed out, the Civil War was “one among many” such conflicts during the mid-nineteenth century. Understanding the Civil War’s place in world history requires placing it within a global context of other mid-nineteenth-century political, social, and cultural issues and events. In The Civil War in the Age of Nationalism, Niels Eichhorn and Duncan A. Campbell explore the conflict from this perspective, taking a transnational and comparative approach, with a particular focus on the period from the 1830s to the 1870s.

The Civil War in the Age of Nationalism avoids the limitations of American exceptionalism, making it the first genuine comparative and transnational study of the Civil War in an international context.


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