The American Civil War in the Age of Revolution

In early 1864, the Baltimore Unionist John Pendleton Kennedy, writing under the penname Paul Ambrose, reflected on the nature and meaning of Southern secession, which had plunged the nation into almost three years of bloody war. “The movement was a revolution,” he wrote, “an attempt to break to pieces an existing dynasty by force; and history will so describe it.” At the time, many Americans in both the North and the South joined Kennedy in comparing the Civil War to a revolution. The men and women who lived during the mid-nineteenth century were well aware that a series of violent social and political conflicts had transformed the Western world in the eighty-or-so years that had preceded the Civil War.¹

Revolutionaries in North and South America had shattered most of Spain and Britain’s New-World empires, and the slaves and free blacks of Santo Domingo had destroyed slavery on the island, thereby establishing the independent nation of Haiti. Europe itself had also experienced violent revolutionary change. The French Revolution of 1789 attacked monarchy, aristocracy, and inherited class privilege. Though France’s first republic was relatively short-lived, in the years that followed, European republicans plotted to establish representative governments across the continent, at times succeeding in fomenting revolts and deposing kings, as in France in 1830. In 1848, a wave of revolutions rocked Eastern and Western Europe. The revolutions of 1848 advanced the developing ideology of romantic nationalism, which asserted that oppressed ethnic groups had the right to rise up and establish homogenous nation-states, thereby inspiring the successful Italian Risorgimento of the late 1850s and early 1860s and the unification of Germany in the 1860s and 1870s. The 1848 revolutions also sought to address the growing labor question by challenging serfdom in Eastern Europe, abolishing slavery in the French West Indies, and establishing National Workshops in France in response to the demands of socialists and the unemployed for the “right to work.” The Civil War echoed these earlier conflicts, engaging the very same issues of nationalism, self-government, class, labor, race, and slavery that had driven much of the violence of the preceding century.

Though John Pendleton Kennedy had considered it self-evident that future generations would recognize the close relationship between the Civil War and the revolutions that had preceded it, until very recently, few historians have made such connections. In 1959, R. R. Palmer offered a potential framework for understanding the influence of world revolutions on the Civil War when he published the first of his two-volume work, The Age of the Democratic Revolution. Palmer argued that the American Revolution of 1776 had directly influenced the French Revolution of 1789, and that both had shared a common goal of bringing democratic self-government to the world. Still, Palmer ended his story in 1800. Eric Hobsbawm described a more expansive “Age of Revolution,” but settled on 1848 as the date after which revolutions and revolutionary ideology ceased to offer a unifying framework for the history of the Western world. Though the work of Palmer and Hobsbawm convinced many that Europe and America had experienced a common revolutionary age, most historians assumed that the era had come to an end by the middle of the nineteenth century.²

As a result, most historians of the Civil War remained content to examine the undeniably powerful influence that the American Revolution and the ideology of 1776 had on the generation that fought the Civil War. For example, James McPherson found that Northern soldiers believed that they fought to preserve the republic that the Revolution had created. Many Unionists feared that should the United States fracture, representative government around the world might perish with the split. Confederates, on the other hand, argued that the war for Southern independence sought only to exercise the rights of self-government that the American Revolution had established. The proposed policies of Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party, they claimed, were as oppressive to the Southern states as British imperial legislation had been to the colonies. In such a situation, Confederate soldiers and officials acted...