New Perspectives on the American Civil War

What I learned from reading Jeremy Black is that brevitas, like faith, is a natural gift, even if it is cultivated and perfected with practice. It does not consist in laboriously pruning a redundant text with Occam's razor or Hemingway's Iceberg, but in what Napoleon called the coup d'oeil, an enhanced natural ability of shaping the terrain. Whoever has this gift instantly identifies the perspective consistent with his purpose, broadens the horizon beyond any given frame and begins to calculate the possible interactions.

Much of Jeremy Black’s immense scientific production, and especially the most recent one, which summarizes over half a century of work, is based not only on the coup d’oeil, but also on two fundamental theodolites. The first is the What if? or counterfactuality (necessary to balance the retrospective teleologies that the outcome was in any case inevitable and the faith in the rationality of history, and to be able to understand the logic of decisions and gambling in the face of uncertainty and the fog of war). The second is contextualisation, at least on a global scale, and sometimes even diachronic, if the object requires it.

That the South, despite its initial successes, was destined to fail is not just an afterthought. Marx, who judged secession to be a daring “Bonapartist-style conspiracy”, predicted its fatal failure already in March 1862 in one of the correspondences from London for Die Presse on the American civil war, in which he gave an account of the resistance of parliament, the working class and the British capitalists themselves against the attempts of the Tories to provoke an English intervention against the Union by taking advantage of the cotton crisis and the Trent incident. But Marx’s was an argument to dissuade intervention, not a prediction, however well founded and proven.

As for contextualisation, if it may seem bizarre to evaluate the impact of an 1861 volcanic eruption in Eritrea on the military operations of 1862 in Northern Hemisphere (p. xi), comparing the American history of 1840-1870 to contemporary Chinese and European developments allows us to identify the factors that in each context were truly decisive in a clearer and more precise way than can emerge from a purely regional vision. In the American case, the contrasts of visions and interests worsened with the secession of white Texan colonists from Mexico and their later entry into the Union, which strengthened the front of the slave states, and, on the opposite hand, with the expansion to the Pacific coast and the entry of a naval squadron into Tokyo Bay in 1853, the same year in which New York was the site of the second World’s Fair.

These events, combined with “Bleeding Kansas” (a series of violent political clashes between pro-slavery and anti-slavery settlers, c. 1854-1861), relativize the idea of ??an antebellum America immune from the revolutionary contagion of European 1848. This may havebeen only only because America, and especially New York, became the refuge of a new wave of European exiles and agitators, who joined the Irish who emigrated to escape the famine aggravated by British policies. All seasoned with a flame-up of inter-ethnic and religious tensions, with the Protestant and radical reaction against the supposed pontifical attempt to “catholicise” North America (with the Marian Consecration of the United States promoted by the Catholic episcopate in 1846, the year of the war against Mexico, recalled in 2026, on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of Independence, by the first pope coming from the U. S.).

Black brilliantly captures the analogy between the Italian and German national unities (1859-1870) and the American civil war as a "war for national unity", forcing the confederal character of the constitution, similar to that of the Germanic confederation and the ephemeral and opportunistic Italian league of 1848. And in fact the Union was called the "Republic" for a long time, and the martial law in the South, with Southern banditry, presented analogies with the Italian war on southern brigandage (1860-1865).

But the analogies do not explain the differences (for example between the German unification which occurred by its own force and the Italian one, supported by France and England in the framework of the First European West, born from the Eastern Question). Nor the ideological and religious contradictions, with Garibaldi deserting the unionist cause due to Lincoln's refusal to give him supreme command, and giving part of the Bourbon prisoners to the Confederate recruiters. Or the Papal and Catholic powers support to the Southerners, who were largely Protestant.

Instead, as Black points out, the adventure of Napoleon III and Maximilian of Habsburg, far from favouring a Mexican revanche against the North Americans, provoked the insurrection against the imperialist drive of the European Catholic powers. Similarly, tribal divisions among Native Americans isolated and made ephemeral the belated attempts at resistance of some Indian leaders.

Marx's aforementioned correspondences for Die Presse also illuminate the connection between the American civil war and the Eastern Question (and also offer analogies for our current situation). Marx considered Palmerston a Russian agent, for the Anglo-French appeasement of 1856, especially the refusal to seize ships and financial assets, which in his opinion had nullified the Crimean War. But he was still confident in the possibility of an Anglo-French intervention in favor of the Polish-Lithuanian insurrection (he had asked Garibaldi, extraordinarily popular in England, to make an appeal to this effect, but during his triumphal visit to London in 1864, the “Hero of Two Worlds” limited himself, to receiving the homage of a delegation of Polish exiles, arousing Marx's disdain).

Alexander II feared this, and, precisely to prevent a possible attack by the Royal Navy against the Baltic and Pacific fleets (repeating the one carried out by Nelson in 1801 against the Danish fleet), he had them placed safe in New York and San Francisco, where they were welcomed as a guarantee against European interventions, and the Russian officers were celebrated by the Unionist ladies as messengers of the enlightened tsar who had abolished serfdom in 1861, two years before Lincoln took the reckless decision to proclaim the abolition of slavery. What Marx completely missed was the complexity of geoeconomic and geopolitical cooperation between Russia and the United States against their common enemy, Britain. Dating back to 1763 and strengthened by the Monroe Doctrine, by railway cooperation and by the Russian-American agreements on the Pacific which had allowed Russia to balance the relative defeat in the Black Sea with the acquisition of Vladivostok and to receive American support for the reconstruction, including that of the Black Sea Fleet. Cooperation handled in particular by the Grant presidency, and continued during the Russo-Japanese War, the Russian Civil War and the Second World War and ceased only in 1946, as a result of the succession American to the British Empire and in the politics of peripheral control of Earthland.

Among the many original aspects that characterize this book, I finally mention the comparison (pp. 214-216) between the European underestimation of the military lessons of the Crimean War, carefully studied instead by the American Delafield Commission (which included McClellan), and then of the American Civil War, initially even derided as a disorderly clash between improvised militias, and which instead was carefully studied (in particular Sherman, Lee, and Grant) by great English military historians such as George Henderson (1898), Frederick B. Maurice (1925), Basil Liddel Hart (1929) and J.F.C. Fuller (1932).

---///---

Our Reviewer: The President of the Italian Society of Military History, Prof. Ilari, formerly of the Catholic University of Milan, has been a consultant to the Italian Army Chief of Staff, the Italian Defense Institute, the Italian Institute for International Affairs and Research, among other organizations. His numerous publications include Il pensiero military Italiano, Storia militare della Prima Repubblica, and a bibliography of Italian military writers from the fifteenth through the eighteen centuries.

---///---

Note: The Civil War is also available in e-editions.

StrategyPage reviews are published in cooperation with The New York Military Affairs Symposium