America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation by David Goldfield (review)

David Goldfield has long been one of the nation's premier urban historians. Much of his urban scholarship has focused upon the South, exemplified by works such as Region, Race, and Cities: Interpreting the Urban South (1997) and Cotton Fields and Skyscrapers: Southern City and Region, 1607-1980 (1982). But Goldfield began his career as a Civil War historian, and the impact of that conflict pervades much of his research. In his latest work, Goldfield has employed his mastery of urban, southern, and Civil War history to produce a brilliant analytical narrative that rivals James M. McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (1988) and Bruce Catton's This Hallowed Ground (1955) as the best single-volume history of the Civil War era. The major themes of Goldfield's narrative are familiar. Its first eight chapters recount the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic Know-Nothing movement; the political battles over the expansion of slavery in the territories from the conflicting constitutional doctrines of free soil, popular sovereignty, and state sovereignty; the failed efforts to resolve these conflicts through the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the collapse of the existing partisan alignment; and the impact of events such as the Wilmot Proviso, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, the Supreme Court's Dred Scott Decision, the Bleeding Kansas and the Lecompton Constitution Debate, the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, John Brown's Harpers Ferry Raid, the 1860 election, the unsuccessful Crittenden Compromise, and the secession crisis.

The middle third of the narrative addresses the military and political issues surrounding the war itself. Readers who appreciate blow-by-blow accounts of campaigns and battles are likely to feel some ambivalence toward Goldfield's narration of military events. His discussions of even the most important battles—such as Shiloh, Fredericksburg, Antietam, Chickamauga, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Sherman's Atlanta campaign and March to the Sea—tend to be brief, highlighting major tactical maneuvers and strategic and political consequences of their outcomes. But when he steps onto the battlefield, he transports the reader into the middle of the action with vivid, often gut-wrenching descriptions that evoke the chaos and terror of battle, the acrid odor of gunpowder, the horrendous physical and environmental destruction, and the stench of death and human suffering. Especially painful are his after-battle descriptions of bloated and mutilated bodies roasting in the sun or freezing in the cold, and of hospitals where surgeons conducted amputations without anesthesia, wiped their instruments on filthy aprons, and stacked the limbs like so much cordwood. His accounts of life and death in prisoner-of-war camps such as Andersonville in Georgia and Elmira Prison in New York are equally vivid and heartrending.

Goldfield devotes ample discussion to the war's political, economic, and social dimensions. In chapter 12, "Blood and Transcendence," he narrates Lincoln's skillful effort to transform the conflict from one whose sole object was to save the Union into one with a moral purpose to end slavery. The author is especially adept at intertwining the president's handling of issues such as confiscation, recruitment, and organization of black troops, and the formulation of the Emancipation Proclamation with the flow of Union military fortunes and conflicting public demands for peace and emancipation. In the economic arena, he highlights important nationalizing and modernizing initiatives that the South had blocked for decades. When the war began, the national government's main civilian function was mail delivery. But the demands of arming, equipping, and transporting huge armies spurred rapid industrial development, mechanization of agriculture, and expansion of the railroad network, including initiation of the Transcontinental Railroad. The Homestead Act, coupled with railroad expansion, promoted settlement of the national domain, provided food and fiber for growing industrial cities, and intensified pressure to remove the Indians from western lands. Goldfield's discussion of northern war finance measures, including the first income tax, issuance of paper...