Looming Civil War: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Imagined the Future by Jason Phillips (review)

In this intriguing account of how Americans in the 1850s imagined their uncertain future, Jason Phillips contends that one object dominated the national horizon: the looming threat of bloody civil war. This prospect, he asserts, energized some people and filled others with dread. Those equipped with a modern, anticipatory sensibility moved confidently toward the future, convinced that they could influence it through human agency. Fire-eating secessionists like Edmund Ruffin, for example, not only envisioned an independent southern future in his antebellum text “Cassandra—Warnings” (1859) but also acted to secure that future by warning his fellow white southerners of the dangers of abolitionism and by firing the first shot at Fort Sumter. Similarly, tens of thousands of young men enlisted in the armies of the North and the South in the spring of 1861, eager to reach the seat of war where they imagined they could exercise a decisive impact on the contest. Other Americans, including many women and enslaved African Americans, possessed an older, religious expectant worldview that made them more likely to wait for the future to come to them. Often sensing the hand of God at work in the world, they waited patiently—or often fearfully—to learn their fate.

Positing a neat binary between anticipation and expectation of the future can be somewhat problematic. While Phillips acknowledges fluidity and that many individuals and groups could and did move from an active state of anticipation to a passive one of expectation (or vice versa), it is not always clear why their perception of the future did or did not alter at key junctures. Neither is his assessment of some contemporary leading personalities’ attitudes as anticipatory or expectant about the future necessarily helpful. For example, he depicts southern-born Abraham Lincoln, a man who failed in business in 1835 and articulated an increasingly fatalist view of the Civil War, as an essentially passive figure awaiting God’s judgment on the nation. This assessment chimes well with the president’s famous description of himself as a man controlled by events, but it hardly fits the plentiful evidence that Lincoln was, in reality, a remarkably active executive who did everything in his power to ensure that the American future was an undivided one.

These points aside, Phillips marshals his evidence from contemporary diaries, letters, and published texts with admirable skill. The book overflows with insights about the importance of material culture to his subjects and the capacity of new technologies, such as telegraphy and the railroads, to affect how Americans regarded the future. He is rightly alert to the centrality of race and racism in nineteenth-century political discourse, and he deploys characters like Ruffin and John Brown as illuminating leitmotifs.

The book’s chief value may lie in its demolition of what the author describes as “the short war myth” (p. 6). Although some politicians and volunteers anticipated a brief and glorious fight in 1861, Phillips presents abundant evidence showing that many expectant white Americans dreaded the prospect of a long war that was likely to bring them only suffering. The postbellum fixation with the idea of the short war, he argues persuasively, fed a purposeful national coming-of-age narrative that depicted Civil War Americans on both sides as innocents—a comforting tale sustained in the modern era by a range of authorities, including the historian Bruce Catton and the documentary filmmaker Ken Burns. This fine book demonstrates convincingly that antebellum Americans were far from unaware of the carnage to come, and that some actively embraced the prospect of civil war.