The Revolution of 1861: The American Civil War in the Age of Nationalist Conflict by Andre Fleche (review)

Andre Fleche has written a book that truly delivers on its promise to enhance our understanding of the Civil War in an international context of revolution, nationalism, and nationhood. He compares America's second revolution—a concept Charles and Mary Beard first posited—to the revolutions of Europe, illustrating how northerners and southerners drew inspiration from the legacy of 1848. As Fleche points out, with the massive influx of European immigrants arriving on American shores in the 1850s came the ideas that had driven the cause of Old World democratic revolution.

Historians have recognized how the North and South drew legitimacy for their respective causes from the contested meanings of the American Revolution. The United States and the Confederate States found inspiration in the War for Independence, but they applied different lessons from that conflict thanks to competing notions of nationalism. Fleche adds to this body of scholarship by tracing the development and manifestation of American nationalism—in its northern and southern versions—alongside the European impetus for self-government. According to Fleche, the Confederacy located its right to revolution and the rationale for a new union in the European nationalist legacy. The Union, however, drew a far different lesson from the revolutions of 1848; they portrayed the Confederates as aristocratic slaveholders seeking to halt human moral progress, much like the aristocratic rulers who crushed the spirit of progressive revolution in Europe. The northerners' Civil War drew from the wellspring of European resistance to privilege and overweening power to repel the specter of the slave power. Accordingly, German and Irish immigrants, among others, faced a choice in 1861: support the Confederacy's struggle to "affirm the rights of self-determination for all peoples" or oppose a "slaveholding aristocracy dangerous to the civil liberties of all mankind" (38).

Fleche persuasively argues that northerners and southerners developed competing notions of nationalism in an international context. Though he does not explicitly state as much, questions of nationalism and states' rights that had lingered in Americans' minds since the Confederation era, and that the Constitution had left unanswered, remained and led to discord by the eve of the Civil War. Long before 1861, northern intellectuals had looked toward creating a consolidated nationalist state, whereas southerners looked at consolidation as a Yankee leviathan that would consume the genius of American politics—state sovereignty. Fleche adds immeasurably to our understanding of the nationalist debate by explaining how both sides found legitimacy for their beliefs in the history of European revolution. Northerners believed that without consolidation the United States would descend into a confederation of petty states. Southerners, however, embraced the confederation model as a safeguard for their peculiar institution, which had facilitated the rise of King Cotton and by the 1850s had become tightly woven into the social, cultural, and economic fabric of the South itself. Whereas northern consolidationists saw confederation as a weak and outmoded form of American nationalism, southern states' rights proponents saw consolidation as an attack on liberty, racial unity, and class harmony. Fleche makes perhaps his greatest contribution to a deeper understanding of Civil War causation and nationalism by showing how North and South legitimized their opinions in the context of European consolidation versus decentralization.

Fleche's most tenuous link between American and European revolutionary thought rests in his discussion of race. He takes care to note that unionists who called for an end to slavery rarely championed civil rights for African Americans. Unionists may well have "believed that the defeat of the 'slave-holding aristocracy' would enable the world's free workers to prosper as small landholders," but would African Americans join the proletariat's westward march? (5). Fleche notes throughout his book that northerners—whether recent immigrants or multi-generational Americans—sought the defeat of an elite white adversary rather than black equality, but the question of where African Americans as...