The Blessed Place of Freedom: Europeans in Civil War America (review)

This book, the second by the author about European involvement and diplomacy in the U.S. Civil War, is a survey about European immigrant involvement in the conflict as well as the role of European diplomats, observers, and newspaper correspondents. Mahin succeeds in bringing to light, at least for the nonspecialist, the fascinating world of the foreign press reporters and European consulates operating in America. He also succeeds in portraying the often frustrating and delicate positions both Union and Confederate officials found themselves in as they brokered deals for their respective countries with the governments of England, France, and the German states. He spends most of the pages discussing the experiences of the Irish, German, and other ethnic Americans in the war, but is less successful in this regard.

The book is divided into twenty-five short, chronologically and thematically ordered chapters. The "ethnic" chapters examine in turn the key immigrant groups in both the Union and the Confederacy and the reasons they volunteered, how they fought, how many served, why some resisted serving, and controversies and stereotypes surrounding each group. These chapters laboriously study each group in detail, starting with those in the North and progressing to the ethnics—the few that existed—in the South. The "topical" chapters, as Mahin explains in his Preface, "focus on the reactions of European immigrants in North and South and of volunteers and visitors from Europe to the major phases of the war" (p. ix). In these chapters the reader will encounter the familiar stories associated with the Irish: the destruction of the Irish Brigade at Marye's Heights at Fredericksburg, the New York City Draft Riots, the exploits of the heavily Irish "Louisiana Tigers," and so on. The Germans' experiences are also chronicled: the plight of the Texas Germans resisting Confederate authorities, the disaster suffered by the half-German 11th Corps at Chancellorsville, the Frémont Movement in the 1864 election. The Scandinavians and other smaller ethnic groups tend to get lost in the shuffle and receive only minimal coverage.

Mahin's odd organization scheme, while logical on the surface, distracts the reader and compartmentalizes the ethnic groups into neat, easily defined categories. Frequently we are presented with basic information in the "ethnic chapters" that the author promises to flesh out in the later "topical" chapters, only to find that the later elaboration is either very brief or fails to address the most extant scholarship.

Most troubling about this book—which admittedly is the best work yet attempting to update Ella Lonn's two outdated and filiopietistic tomes, first published in 1940 and 1950, respectively—is the author's failure to critically address and/or contribute to the scholarly debate about ethnics in the Civil War. For example, Mahin dances around the famed ethnocultural thesis in his first chapters, even naming some prominent authors, but never fully confronts the issue or stakes out a position. He is content simply to discuss what others have already discussed, and this tendency also plagues the rest of the book. Nearly all of his sources are secondary, and the primary sources he has consulted are all published, well-worn accounts previous scholars have already pored over. In the end, The Blessed Place of Freedom provides us with a survey of most of the current scholarship on Europeans and immigrants in the Civil War, written in a style and using a methodology that most lay-readers will find acceptable. The professional scholar of the Civil War, and particularly of the ethnic involvement in it, will probably find it only marginally useful.