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

The Revolution of 1861 successfully demonstrates the transatlantic experience of the American Civil War. Andre Fleche places the war in an international framework to argue that world events influenced both how Americans understood their domestic conflict and how they explained their war to the world. Fleche argues that for too long Civil War historians have focused on the domestic or diplomatic context of the conflict, neglecting the broader aspects of internationalism in the nineteenth century. The revolutions and rebellions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries bonded the peoples in the Americas and Europe through shared experiences and liberal ideologies. For contemporaries, the American Civil War stood to determine not just the viability of the Confederate States of America, but also the future of nationalism, self-determination, and revolution.

Fleche begins by demonstrating how closely Americans followed revolutions abroad. In particular, the European revolutions of 1848 captured American attention and support because they seemed to resemble America's revolution of 1776. Americans welcomed European refugees of 1848; in return, the refugees helped Americans understand their own conflict. Northerners believed that their fight against a slaveholding aristocracy resembled European peoples' struggles against landed aristocracies. Southerners believed their fight for the right of self-determination better resembled European revolutionaries' concerns. For contemporary observers, the American Civil War presented a choice between two liberal principles: democracy and self-determination.

Fleche deftly handles the competing ideologies and tensions in the North and South. The US government faced a seemingly hypocritical choice. Having historically supported the rights of a people to choose their own government, the suppression of secession forced the government to "articulate the Union cause in a way that balanced the liberal principles of freedom with more conservative ideals of order and authority" (60). Lincoln's solution was to appeal to conservative notions of law and order and to stress the difference between "illegal rebellion and legitimate resistance to opposition" (76). Although Lincoln's argument appealed to some European observers, the Confederacy's argument held its own. Confederate diplomats and southern nationalists "compared themselves to the European freedom fighters" and claimed they fought an oppressive government that refused to recognize their "rights of self-government" (81). They argued that support for nationalist struggles in Greece, Poland, Belgium, and Hungary implied support for the nationalist movement in the CSA. Economic interests—cotton would no longer be constrained by northern protectionism—and the Confederacy's successes on the battlefield convinced many Europeans of the legitimacy of the CSA's cause: "In mid-September of [1862], the British cabinet met to discuss intervention in the American conflict" (105). Union victory at Antietam followed by Lincoln's Preliminary Proclamation of Emancipation shifted the relative weight of the ideological battle.

Fleche explains that Lincoln's decision for emancipation secured the majority of European public opinion in the North's favor: "It gave the Union a common cause and a shared history with the thousands of revolutionaries in Europe who had taken up arms for liberty, equality, economic justice, and liberal nationalism in the years since 1789" (108). Lincoln abandoned his conservative course that had garnered little actual support and chose to make the war more like a people's war with a new meaning of nationalism. Northern nationalism promised to value "free labor, equality before the law, and the protection of civil rights" and would deny the privileges of concentrated wealth and false aristocracies (117). The North's ideology inspired Europeans who struggled with class conflict, monarchy, and aristocracy. The sudden sway in European public opinion drove the Confederates to explain why their ideology held more potential to solve Europe's perennial problems. They identified radical notions of universal equality as the cause of failure for past nationalist revolutions and argued that "only subordination of the working class could prevent the spread of anarchic socialism in Europe and America" (142). This reactive Confederate nationalism failed...