Legacy of Disunion: The Enduring Significance of the American Civil War (review)

In the introduction to Legacy of Disunion: The Enduring Significance of the American Civil War, Susan-Mary Grant and Peter J. Parish suggest that the "great issues of the Civil War era—nationalism, democracy, liberty, equality, race, majority rule and minority rights, central authority and local self-government, the use and abuse of power, and the horrors of all-out war—are as alive in the early twenty-first century as they were in the mid–nineteenth century" (5). And so, Americans and others in the world—not just professional historians, by any means—return time and again to the struggles and conflicts of the Civil War, endeavoring to work out and define their meaning for following generations. One problem with this endeavor, as the editors readily admit, is that the subject of the consequences, or legacy, of the war can "spread out over the whole of subsequent generations . . . it becomes more and more difficult . . . to establish which developments were or were not shaped by the war, how great an effect the war had and how far its influence spread" (1). Moreover, the central conflicts of the Civil War and Reconstruction have bequeathed a legacy of argument and contestation—a consensus that the war had profound consequences has not led to any unanimity over precisely what those consequences were. Indeed, the conflicts over the issues of the war guarantee that ongoing debates over its legacy will continue into the foreseeable future.

Growing out of a conference in London in 1997 that explored the implications of the Civil War for the United States, the essays that constitute Legacy of Disunion reflect the breadth of inquiry—the seemingly endless range of possibilities for exploring the war's short- and long-term impact—and the

central issues that were at stake in the war and its aftermath. Each author takes a distinctive approach to the question of the war's consequences. The essays explore such disparate topics as Lincoln's vision of the war as a test of bedrock American principles, the impact of the war on civilian-military relations, and the efforts of African Americans to assert their ofin understanding of the war's meaning and legacy. Any one of these topics could in itself be the subject of multiple volumes; each essay, therefore, provides a window onto ongoing or potential Welds of inquiry.

The essays also work well together, in particular those grouped in the first two sections of the book, which is divided into three parts. In the first section, four essays explore aspects of Civil War memory and mythology. Charles Joyner and Bruce Collins write about the legacy of the Confederacy. Joyner, commenting movingly as both a Southerner and a historian of the South, emphasizes the tragedy of sectionalism. In it he see the seeds of twentieth- and twenty-first century patterns of "separatist nationalism," in which smaller and weaker nations proliferate, "each lacking in political or economic stability, each unified mainly by the bitter hostility of its citizens toward their neighbors" (20). Collins traces the history of Confederate memorialization and mythology, stressing the ways in which the images of the Confederacy developed after the war and well into the twentieth century so as to elide the issue of slavery, emphasize the abstract issue of "states rights," and romanticize the antebellum South and the war itself. Essays by Robert Cook and Melvyn Stokes fill out this section. Cook explores the efforts of African American leaders to ensure that observances of the Civil War centennial acknowledged the centrality of slavery and the role of black soldiers in the conflict at a time when segregationists were determined to make the anniversary a celebration of the Confederacy. Stokes examines the interesting history—or relative lack thereof—of the Civil War in the movies.

The four essays in the second section examine the war in relation to politics. Adam I. P. Smith and...