Nations, Markets, and War: Modern History and the American Civil War (review)

The Civil War was not only fought on the battlefield. It was also a clash in the realm of ideas, as leaders, both North and South, sought to convince individuals in their own sections, in the opposing region, and in the world at large of the righteousness of their cause. Coauthors (and brothers) Nicholas and Peter Onuf state, “Our purpose in Nations, Markets, and War is to illuminate the critical conceptual developments in Western liberal thought that enabled Lincoln to see the crisis of the union as an epochal struggle for the new nation’s soul” (4). They want to examine the ideas “that enabled Americans to think themselves out of the old union and into two separate and hostile nations” (181). Despite its worthy goals and the insightful analyses of particular thinkers, the Onufs’ book does not succeed in relating the evolution of Western thought to the American Civil War.

The first part of the book, less relevant for Civil War historians, examines European thought from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. In five chapters, this section analyzes writers such as Hugo Grotius, David Hume, Emmerich de Vattel, Thomas Hobbes, and, particularly, Adam Smith. These pages present a great deal of information on views of civilization, concepts of progress, the emergence of “liberalism,” and the idea of a nation. But Nicholas Onuf, who wrote this section, makes little effort to link these chapters to the overall goal of understanding the Civil War. More broadly, these chapters too often lack coherence or a clear argument.

Making sense of this section, even on a sentence level, is frequently tough sledding. Readers must wrestle with statements such as, “In Foucault’s account, resemblances come in many forms, but in Renaissance discourse, four forms of ‘similitude’ dominate,” or, “If faculties translate into rights in the relations of equals they translate into property when considered on their own in relation to everything else in nature” (113, 132).

The second part, written chiefly by Peter Onuf, looks at American thought from Thomas Jefferson to the Civil War, although a chapter reflects again on the influence of Adam Smith. Here the lines of influence between writers and those involved in the sectional clash are shorter. Still, the links often remain vague. These chapters present thoughtful essays on Smith as a moral historian and Jefferson’s views of nationhood but do not show how such views influenced exchanges in the 1850s. Discussions of Pennsylvanian Henry C. Carey and South Carolinian William Henry Trescot are valuable and seem more pertinent, because these individuals were also participants in the conflict. But again the impact these writers had on the larger debate is not always clear. Many northerners rejected Carey’s advice, just as southerners often spurned Trescot’s counsels. Part of the difficulty the Onufs face lies in the need to ground intellectual discourse, the focus of their work, in political and social realities.

One assertion the authors make repeatedly is that “the American Civil War was the first fully modern war; there would have been no war had the North and South not been modern nations” (18). But this statement is puzzling, particularly since the Onufs describe the North and South as “modern nations that commanded the loyalties and lives of their peoples” (4). If this depiction is questionable for the North, it certainly does not hold for the Confederacy, where large areas were disaffected and at least one in five individuals who took up arms joined the opposing side. More plausible would be the contention that a modern nation (as they define the term) was the result rather than a cause of the Civil War.

The task the Onufs have set for themselves is ambitious and potentially of great value. The two authors, both accomplished scholars, have read a vast array of treatises, pamphlets, and other primary sources. But the final product is unsatisfactory. Despite its length and breadth...