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  • The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War by Don H. Doyle
  • Michael Vorenberg
The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War. By Don H. Doyle. (New York: Basic Books, 2015. Pp. xviii, 382. $29.99, ISBN 978-0-465-02967-9.)

With the rise of globalization and the turn to world history in the last quarter century, a new international history of the American Civil War is most welcome. Fortunately, the topic has been taken up by one of the history profession’s best scholars and writers: Don H. Doyle. The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War is the most original, readable book to date on the place of the Civil War in the wider world. [End Page 441]

The book’s main argument is that President Abraham Lincoln’s belief that the war was a global test of the viability of a republican nation was an idea shared and promoted by people across the world. The Civil War occurred in the midst of an Atlantic-wide counterrevolution against liberalism, begun in 1848. By the time of the outbreak of the war in 1861, Doyle argues, the forces of monarchism and absolutism had the upper hand everywhere but in the United States. Victory for the Confederacy, an absolutist entity because of its commitment to slavery, would mean the completion of the counterrevolution. Liberals and antimonarchists in Europe understood this facet of the Civil War even before Lincoln and American Unionists did. In making this argument, Doyle unabashedly, though not explicitly, buys into the strain of American exceptionalism that regards the United States as the long-standing beacon of democracy to the rest of the world.

Doyle’s two subsidiary arguments, however, run against the grain of American exceptionalism. Rather than taking the triumphalist view that the Union fought a war against slavery from the beginning, Doyle acknowledges the steadfast reluctance of the Lincoln government to make emancipation a war aim, and he credits commentators in Europe and elsewhere for helping define the war as a contest about slavery. Doyle’s final argument qualifies this European commitment to emancipation. Like historian Howard Jones, Doyle sees Western European powers as ready to recognize and even support the proslavery Confederacy as late as 1862. But Doyle explains that Europe did not take the final step toward recognition for moral or diplomatic reasons but because of unrelated, purely contingent events. In the late summer of 1862, a failed attack led by the radical hero Giuseppe Garibaldi against the absolutist forces of Italy convulsed all of Western Europe, ultimately forcing England and France to back away from the possibility of becoming involved in the war in the United States and to turn instead to quelling internal dissent movements. For European leaders, pacifying a public that sided with Garibaldi and the liberal movement for universal emancipation required continued nonintervention in the American conflict.

These arguments reflect Doyle’s central assumption that public opinion mattered at least as much as public policy. Doyle explains that the “soft power” of diplomatic relations, like shaping public opinion, has been neglected by historians in favor of “hard power,” the threat and actual use of economic, political, and military force (p. 4). U.S. secretary of state William Henry Seward was dismissive of foreign public opinion and favored “hard power,” but eventually the Lincoln administration embraced the “soft power” strategy advocated by Republican Party leader Carl Schurz. Lincoln even wrote an appeal directly to the “Workingmen of Manchester” in January 1863. The Confederacy, in the meantime, had their own cadre of propagandists in Europe trying to play down the proslavery basis of the southern states’ secession. Eventually, though, once European leftists like Garibaldi and Agénor de Gasparin persuaded their fellow Europeans and many Americans that the Union stood for emancipation and the Confederacy for slavery—and this they did, Doyle argues, even before Lincoln issued his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation—“the Cornerstone speech hung like a millstone around the neck of the Confederacy” (p. 270). [End Page 442]

This is not a short book, yet it is hard not to want more...

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