America as a Military Power: From the American Revolution to the Civil War (review)

Jeremy Black has written or edited approximately three dozen books, many of them concentrating on warfare in the Western world. However, in 1998 he ventured much further afield with his War and the World: Military Power and the Fate of Continents, 1450-2000. Now he has added a study of U.S. military history from 1775-1865. Within this crucial era Black probes for both continuities and its unique aspects, and pays particular attention to the new nation's "strategic culture"—its political, economic, social, and geographic context. More importantly, acutely aware of America's tendency toward "self-absorption and self-referencing" (p. 26), he explores the idea of "exceptionalism" by comparing and contrasting America's military developments with those elsewhere in the West, which he defines as Europe and Latin America.

Based primarily on a wide-ranging secondary literature, the book is not without problems. Although allusions to the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and the Wars of German Unification are frequent, other important conflicts are virtually ignored. For instance, the War of the Triple Alliance (1864-70) receives only a few brief sentences. And instead of fully developed comparative case studies—a detailed comparison of the Mexican and Crimean Wars, for example—the approach is like a shotgun blast with individual pellets scattering across the landscape.

Nonetheless, many of the pellets strike flesh, leading to fascinating insights, only a few of which can be mentioned. Rather than conceptualizing the American Revolution as unique or paralleled only by the French Revolution, historians should consider it "as a uniquely successful war in a series of unsuccessful popular risings" (p. 27); elsewhere during the eighteenth century regular troops regularly suppressed revolts. Andrew Jackson's celebrated defeat of the British at New Orleans in 1815 had less to do with the general's iron-willed determination than with an amphibious force's inherent limitations once it came ashore, since such British expeditions also failed in Argentina, Holland, Egypt, and Flanders. America's westward expansion was actually relatively easy; despite immense distances, towering mountains, and arid deserts, the environment was benign compared to Siberia's bitter cold, central Africa's dense forests, and the Tropics' diseases. On the other hand, disunity among the Natives was an advantage to the imperialists whether in North America, India, Central Asia, or Australia. Throughout the Western world during the mid-nineteenth century, not just in the American Civil War, the evidence regarding military modernization and the protagonists' professional competence is frustratingly ambiguous.

In the end, Black demonstrates that American exceptionalism in military developments is less exceptional than Americans believe. Moreover, the correct paradigm is not simply to contrast European and American warfare, but to discern "a myriad of exceptionalisms" (p. 208) that emerged from the varied military organizations and wars within Europe and the Americas.