The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the Civil War by Don H. Doyle (review)

Don Doyle’s The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the Civil War marks the maturation of the transnational reframing of U.S. Civil War historiography. Deeply engaged with the significant primary and secondary evidence in both the United States and Europe, and written with a verve and clarity that makes his book accessible to academic and nonacademic readers alike, The Cause of All Nations persuasively and in great detail situates the U.S. Civil War within the global struggle that in the middle decades of the nineteenth century pitted the forces of monarchy and hereditary privilege against the proponents of liberal republicanism.

As Doyle makes clear, the transnational stakes involved in the U.S. Civil War were apparent to contemporaries in the Old and New Worlds alike. The outbreak of internecine conflict in the United States, he notes, “heartened the enemies of democracy” around the world (8). The brilliant Charles Francis Adams, Lincoln’s envoy to London, wrote in his diary in early 1862 that the “secret of the ill will” to the Union cause among the Old Guard in Europe could be “traced to the terror of democratic movement entertained by the aristocracy. They feel it hanging over their heads, and think they may evade it by appealing to the example of our failure.” (98). As Adams understood, the anti-republican proponents of hereditary power welcomed the dissolution of the United States because they believed that the failure of the world’s most powerful democracy would undermine the ideal of equality and self-government around the world. Progressive nationalists in Europe, where the wounds of the failed democratic revolutions of 1848–49 remained fresh, also believed that the failure of the republican experiment in the United States would check the global advance of democratic principles. In Paris, the liberal historian Édouard Laboulaye offered popular lectures and published a number of essays that articulated the worldwide importance of the struggle between the North and South. “The world is a solidarity,” Laboulaye insisted, “and the cause of America is the cause of Liberty” (284).

Laboulaye began agitating for the Union cause in October 1861, but other notable liberal nationalists, such as the Italian freedom fighter Giuseppe Garibaldi and British MP John Bright, frustrated with Lincoln’s inaction on slave abolition, initially hesitated to fully embrace the Union cause. Doyle frames his narrative by discussing the key question asked by Garibaldi when, in the summer of 1861, the Lincoln administration requested that he travel across the Atlantic to serve as a major general in the Union army. The Italian asked Lincoln’s representative if the North fought for “the emancipation of the Negros” and was surprised and disappointed at the news that the Union government narrowly defined the conflict as a war of national self-preservation. Insisting that without the abolition of slavery the Civil War was nothing more than an “internecine war . . . like any other civil war in which the world at large could have interest and sympathy,” Garibaldi refused to fight for the Federal army (24).

Garibaldi’s surprise at the limited war aims of Washington during the first year of the conflict was widely shared in Europe. During the first year, Doyle notes, the most European liberals were “genuinely puzzled by the Union’s conservative, legalistic position and lack of moral purpose in waging the war.” Lincoln’s initial emphasis on preserving the Union, Doyle argues, was “more than just an amoral placeholder for emancipation. From the outset, he and Seward had elevated the Union’s right to exist to a higher plane of the universal republican experiment.” Yet, as Doyle also makes clear, for liberal nationalists around the world “the appeal to ideals of liberty and equality ran hollow without emancipation” (216). U.S. diplomats, such as Carl Schurtz, Washington’s envoy to Spain, warned the White House...