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1 ON JUNE 15, 1864, ERNEST DUVERGIER DE HAURANNE ARRIVED IN New York to observe the final act of what he would later call “five years of revolution, political turmoil and civil war” in the United States. The French liberal hoped to follow in the footsteps of Alexis de Tocqueville, a close family friend, by observing American democracy in action. While his illustrious predecessor had reported to French readers on the promise as well as the problems of a functioning republic, Duvergier de Hauranne would document how a democratic people dealt with the disintegration of their nation.1 Federal and Confederate partisans wasted little time in outlining their positions. One Union officer explained to the visitor that the abolition of slavery and the defeat of the rebellion would ensure the survival of the United States. Slavery and rebellion were inextricably linked in the soldier ’s mind. Slavery, he believed, posed a dire threat to America’s experiment in modern nation-building. The uncompensated labor of enslaved human beings, he held, had led to the concentration of wealth in the hands of a select few. The class interests of rich planters ran counter to the development of a united polity based on the sovereignty of all the people, making true nationalism impossible. Slavery, he told the French visitor, threatened to lead to the emergence of “a military aristocracy.” Destroying the institution would level the social hierarchy, thereby sustaining a nation based on representative government. “Give us a little more time,” the officer concluded, “and that arrogant class that calls itself the aristocracy of the South will sink into the mass of the common people.” Duvergier de Hauranne agreed. The newcomer to America immediately made connections between southern planters and the landed nobility that had so often resisted change in his native France. He became gradually convinced that “slavery in the South, bound up as it was with the ownership of land, was Introduction The American Civil War and the Age of Revolution 2 • INTRODUCTION giving birth to aristocratic vices that were eating out the heart of republican institutions.”2 Duvergier de Hauranne’s developing opinion did not go unchallenged for long. A French-Caribbean slaveholder and supporter of the Confederacy explained to him that the North’s attempt to subjugate the South was doomed to fail. He believed that the South was exercising its legitimate right to national self-determination, and there was little the federal government could do to stop it. “The war will have served only to eternalize the division of the Republic,” the Confederate supporter feared. He rejected any celebration of America’s unique destiny in the world. Instead, he believed that North America, as Europe had, would fracture into a congeries of distinct, squabbling states. “In vain does this Republic boast that it has escaped the evils of the Old World,” he told Duvergier de Hauranne. “Rather, it is entering an era of revolutions and civil wars, and God only knows when it will get out of it!” The United States, the observer from the Caribbean believed, would do better to accept the right of self-determination and break into two separate nations. “The Unionists are made to appear as alien despots,” Duvergier de Hauranne reported, “while the Confederates are pictured as the true defenders of the nation and of liberty.”3 Though in general Duvergier de Hauranne favored the North, no European needed to be reminded that the cause of national self-determination should be entitled to respectful consideration. The French liberal quickly became aware, as did many Americans, that America’s Civil War was a struggle to resolve the great “nation question” that troubled the nineteenthcentury world. During the decades that preceded the Battle of Fort Sumter, Europeans and North and South Americans had all taken up arms on at least one occasion to shape the character of the emerging international system of nation-states. The questions they addressed included the relationship between race and nation; the place of slavery, servitude, and class distinction in representative republics; and the legitimacy of the right of self-determination. When the Civil War broke out in the United States in 1861, Unionists and Confederates had a long history of precedents from which to draw ideas and inspiration. Indeed, mid-nineteenth-century Americans believed they lived in what some historians have termed an “age of revolution.” Ever since the American and French revolutions of the late eighteenth century established what Benedict Anderson has called “models” for “pirating” nationalist revolution...

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