One War at a Time: The International Dimensions of the American Civil War, and: The Blessed Place of Freedom: Europeans in Civil War America (review)

By writing One War at a Time and The Blessed Place of Freedom, Dean Mahin has undertaken two very large and complex tasks. In the former work, he seeks to capture the international impact of the Civil War while stressing the role of Abraham Lincoln in guiding Federal foreign policy. With the latter, he attempts to examine the part Europeans played in the conflict and dwells on their Civil War experiences. The war's global impact, particularly the British public's opinions about the conflict, has already inspired much strong scholarship. D. P. Crook's The North, the South and the Powers, 1861–1865 (1974) remains an excellent overall survey of the international diplomacy associated with the war while R. J. M. Blackett's Divided Hearts (2001) is perhaps the best study of British attitudes. Mahin's ambitions, however, are surely justified when dealing with Europeans' participation in the Civil War. Not since Ella Lonn's Foreigners in the Confederacy (1940) and Foreigners in the Union Army and Navy (1951) has anyone attempted a comprehensive survey of this enormous field.

In One War at a Time, the author is at his best when explaining the complex diplomatic maneuvering revolving around events like the Trent affair, the crisis associated with the escape of the Alabama from Liverpool, and the difficulties stemming with the Laird rams. Mahin's clear narrative serves as a good introduction to these events. Mahin also displays a good eye for telling quotations that provide his narrative with color. Unfortunately, this narrative, particularly in One War at a Time, is often disrupted by staccato-like chapters that focus on one small bit of the picture at a time. This approach makes it difficult to comprehend the important connections between all the bits so important to understanding international diplomacy. Mahin tackles British and French policy toward America in different chapters, an awkward approach when each state's diplomacy depended on the other. For instance, the story of John Roebuck's 1863 parliamentary motion to recognize the Confederacy is difficult to understand without extensive reference to Napoleon III. Mahin's judgments, however, are quite astute, especially with regard to Lincoln and William Seward. Mahin also performs a great service by providing a highly critical reassessment of Lord Lyons, the British minister to Washington, D.C., from 1859 to 1864. Long praised by historians for his discretion, Lyons repeatedly provided poor intelligence to his government.

If Mahin is critical of Lyons, he is perhaps not critical enough in his approach to both primary and secondary sources. Mahin seems unfamiliar with the findings of recent historiography, especially in One War at a Time. He still employs a traditional social interpretation of British public opinion during the war, asserting the upper classes championed the South while the working classes supported the North—a notion long discarded by historians in the field. Mahin also relies extremely heavily on published English-speaking sources (along with a smattering of German works). This reliance not only proves something of a handicap in covering the foreign policy of France and events in Mexico, both of which assumed much importance in Civil War diplomacy, but also in examining the immigrant experience during the conflict. Particularly in The Blessed Place of Freedom, Mahin displays an unwillingness to analyze his primary sources, writing, "I have preferred to let Europeans speak for themselves rather than to attempt to generalize about their reactions" (x). Although this stance makes for intriguing reading, it also leads him to take an uncritical attitude toward the sources. Mahin uses Northern diplomats, like Charles Francis Adams, to assess British public opinion or strongly pro-Confederate British observers, such as...