Editors’ Overview

Devoting an issue of a journal to a specific theme is an appealing, but often complicated, prospect. While this, our second issue of 2015, appears to be a thematic issue on the transnational dimensions of the Civil War, this resemblance is purely accidental. Although we did not intend this to be an issue concerned with the transnational ramifications of the war, we are pleased that it has become a de facto one. In their methodologies, arguments, and source bases, the works of Michael Douma and Niels Eichhorn illustrate the considerable promise of this increasingly important subfield.

Through its use of Dutch-language sources, Michael Douma’s “The Lincoln Administration’s Negotiations to Colonize African Americans in Dutch Suriname” advances our understanding of nineteenth-century attempts to colonize African Americans outside of the United States. Recent studies, most notably Philip Magness and Sebastian Page’s impressive Colonization after Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement of Black Resettlement (Columbus: Univ. of Missouri, 2011), have cast new light on the quest to colonize former slaves. Douma enhances this ongoing reinterpretation of Lincoln’s interest in colonization by examining American efforts to partner with the Netherlands, a nation previous scholars of colonization have either ignored or discussed with an alarming number of factual errors, to colonize newly freed slaves in Dutch Suriname. Thanks to the use of Dutch diplomatic sources that have sat in obscurity since their arrival in the Dutch national archives, Douma shows that “the Dutch plan provides an additional and alternative case demonstrating the seriousness and depth of the Lincoln administration’s interest in colonization.” Indeed, as Douma demonstrates, “most of the diplomatic correspondence on colonization in Suriname occurred after the Emancipation Proclamation took effect,” with the Dutch-American accord on the resettlement of African Americans dying “a slow death” primarily because “diplomatic inefficiencies delayed progress and preparation for the scheme and African Americans demonstrated a consistent reluctance to migrate to foreign lands.”

Meanwhile, Niels Eichhorn’s “North Atlantic Trade in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: A Case for Peace during the American Civil War” engages the refusal of European nations to fall under the sway of “King Cotton” diplomacy by examining patterns of trade between Europe and the United States. Eichhorn concludes, “Trade explains why the European powers maintained strict neutrality during the Civil War. . . . Neither cotton nor corn was king; trade with the northern states was the monarch that the southern states failed to dethrone during the Civil War.” Having painstakingly reconstructed trade statistics from a variety of European ports, including oft-ignored Bremen and Hamburg, Eichhorn shows that the increasing integration of Atlantic World economies in the antebellum period made the states that joined the Union absolutely essential trade partners for European countries. While reliance on southern cotton did have some impact on the domestic economies of European nations, the prospective collapse of the European export trade to the American north would have carried devastating economic consequences for European nation-states that chose to formally ally with the Confederacy. As a result, because “the northern market was and remained important during the war, risking it was not on Europe’s agenda. . . . An intervention due to economic factors was therefore unlikely. The transatlantic economic relations were one of many peace factors during the American Civil War.”

Our book review section includes several recent titles that examine the legacy of slavery and abolitionism, Abraham Lincoln, and the role of guerilla conflict in shaping the outcome and memory of the Civil War. Especially prominent in this issue’s reviews are a series of edited collections that contain essays from new voices in our field’s scholarly conversations as well as ones written by established experts.