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  • Liberty and Slavery: European Separatists, Southern Secession, and the American Civil War by Niels Eichhorn
  • Mischa Honeck (bio)
Liberty and Slavery: European Separatists, Southern Secession, and the American Civil War. By Niels Eichhorn. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2019. Pp. 202. Cloth, $45.00.)

“We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing,” Abraham Lincoln famously remarked at the opening of the Baltimore Sanitary Fair in April 1864. According to Niels Eichhorn’s new book, this aphorism might have been just as valid had [End Page 563] Lincoln spoken of separatism. In Liberty and Slavery, Eichhorn charts an understudied ideological current that connected violent nation-building projects on both sides of the mid-nineteenth-century Atlantic. Too much ink has been spilled on the irreconcilability of liberalism and slavery, the author suggests, while Civil War historians have largely overlooked Euro-American actors who viewed southern secessionism and European separatism as kindred movements. Highlighting the difficulties and contingencies involved in transplanting revolutionary experiences made in one place to nationalist conflicts raging in another, Eichhorn is at his best when he shows that many immigrants forced to choose sides in the U.S. Civil War dreaded centralized modern leviathans as much as they loathed reactionary aristocracies.

At its core, Liberty and Slavery is a book about the “other” Forty-Eighters—those participants of the failed European revolutions of the late 1840s and early 1850s who were more concerned with breaking away from oppressive states than with nationalist unification. But it also provides useful orientation in acquainting readers with little-known separatist revolutions that preceded the formation of the southern Confederacy. The first chapter ably sketches a string of tumultuous uprisings in 1830, stressing the common view held by independence seekers in Hungary, Poland, Ireland, and Schleswig-Holstein (less so in the U.S South) that “they were enslaved people who needed liberation” (12). What may sound cynical to modern ears—whites likening themselves to slaves—proved an effective rhetorical tool for secessionists of different origins. The upheavals of 1848, which are the subject of the second chapter, furthered the separatist creed across the North Atlantic world. Justifications for secession and the intensity with which such demands were articulated varied from place to place, and from person to person. Regrettably, the chapter is somewhat elusive on whether these differences were the product of cross-border exchange and adaptation or mainly an outgrowth of local circumstances.

Transnationalism occupies a more prominent spot in the ensuing chapters. After briefly retracing the migratory routes of influential European separatists who fled to the United States after 1848, Eichhorn turns to what he calls “antebellum separatist interaction.” The analysis spans from a fresh reading of Lajos Kossuth’s quasi-diplomatic tour in 1851–52 to incisive portrayals of lesser-known exiles such as the Polish radical Adam Gurowski or the Schleswig-Holstein journalist Theodor Olshausen who struggled to adjust their European backgrounds to the increasingly bitter divisions of their host country. Their stance on slavery, Eichhorn argues, ultimately depended on whether they saw white southern leaders as political allies standing on firm constitutional footing or, conversely, as [End Page 564] progenies of Europe’s oppressive nobilities. The fifth and sixth chapters follow these exiled separatists through “America’s separatist revolution” of 1861 and the war that erupted in its wake. Eichhorn’s collective biography approach permits him to illustrate that nationality and ethnicity barely determined immigrant loyalties. Civil War careers like the one of the Polish Novembrist Kapcer Tochman, who offered his services to the Confederacy, disrupt the monolithic image of European revolutionists throwing their unquestioned support behind the Union. In one of the most fascinating episodes, Eichhorn presents the case of Rudolf Schleiden, a revolutionary-turned-diplomat from Schleswig-Holstein who embarked on a passionate yet ultimately quixotic quest in April 1861 to convince Union and Confederate leaders to step back from the brink of war. Throughout the book, Eichhorn makes clear that the immigrants’ “political roots” (11) and their continued reevaluation mattered. Very likely, the separatists’ choice of residence along with the personal and professional relationships they formed in the United States mattered...

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