|
Article Excerpt
During the Civil War, European newspapers and journals regularly debated what the conflict meant for America's political future. Many of those hostile to the Union initially believed that the destruction of America's republican "experiment" was only a matter of time. Attacking what they saw as a government fighting an immoral war under the sway of popular prejudices, European writers often pictured the Union army as a mercenary force made up largely of recent immigrants and ignorant laborers. According to these foreign detractors, the conflict revealed the bankruptcy of the North's political system. Some European commentators would later come to look upon the Union with more favor. But this hardly mollified Northerners. As they shaped their interpretations of the war, they did so not in isolation but in response to what they perceived to be an ongoing hostility toward their war effort and the political system it safeguarded. Although historians have explored European attitudes toward the war and the Union and Confederate governments' foreign policies, little attention has been paid to the way a transatlantic discourse shaped domestic representations of the conflict, much less how such representations might have affected the conduct of the war or shaped postwar policies. One reason is that despite recent calls for a more internationalized approach to the study of U.S. history, the majority of Civil War historians remain resolutely focused on domestic events, particularly those occurring on the battlefield. (1)
Regardless of the nuances and fluctuation of European opinion, Northerners remained intensely concerned with countering early foreign criticisms of the war because such criticism had struck at the very heart of their identity. As numerous historians have noted, a persistent and deeply held belief in the nation's exceptional role in world history formed the core of nineteenth-century American nationalism. Combining a founding Protestant belief in the nation's divinely ordained mission with a liberal faith in economic progress and a republican hope that America's political system could escape the tyranny and reaction that had plagued former republics, Americans distinguished themselves in opposition to Europeans. (2) Whereas Northerners had long exalted the superiority of their stable and progressive political system and the economic expansion it enabled, during the war they faced not only its potential collapse but also a hostile foreign press that questioned the justice and conduct of their cause. Condemnations from abroad distilled many of the Confederacy's critiques of the Union, as well as adding to a vocal antiwar movement in the North that denounced Unionism, and especially the state centralization it entailed, as pointless, immoral, and dangerous to the nation's fate. Having declared the nation an example to others, many Unionists felt compelled to shape an image of the war that could be used to rebut foreign and domestic censure.
Unlike modern historians who point to military factors to explain the war's outcome, the vast majority of Unionists argued unequivocally that their success resulted from the superior morality and civic virtue of their people--a version of the war well suited to reasserting American exceptionalism at home and abroad. Throughout the conflict Unionists characterized the war effort as a spontaneous uprising of citizens eagerly volunteering either to fight for the nation or minister to its defenders. By virtue of their selflessness, Northerners believed they had rekindled God's favor and thus passed successfully through the scourge of war. Despite its obvious attractions, this interpretation of victory was not preordained. Northerners might just as easily have touted the benefits of capitalist development by emphasizing their superior industrial capacity. Or they might have highlighted the peerless bravery of Northern soldiers, the importance of centralized government, or any of the other factors that could plausibly be said to have contributed to the Union's success. Instead, they preferred to see the war as a story in which selflessness prevailed and civilian voluntarism played a central role.
Tributes to Northern voluntarism were one of the major sites in which this version of the war took shape. Long before war's end, voluntary organizations competed for support by publicizing their activities in newspaper and journal articles, public meetings, annual reports, and letters from the field. As the conflict drew to a close, dozens of rival voluntary groups set about collecting and expanding on this material in an effort to memorialize their work. Lengthy tribute albums appeared, narrating the accomplishments of sanitary fairs, soldiers' aid societies, and local relief efforts. (3) Several oversized, lavishly bound volumes dealt specifically with women's benevolent activities, while a number of others sought to comprehend the entire range of wartime voluntarism. (4) Likewise, the three largest wartime organizations--the United States Sanitary Commission (USSC), the United States Christian Commission, and the Western Sanitary Commission--all produced huge illustrated histories of their labors. (5) Invariably, the middle-class writers who produced these tribute albums described voluntarism as a wholly united, spontaneous, and overwhelming effort. An examination of their writing can help to delineate how Unionists shaped their interpretations of the war.
Historians examining celebratory portraits of wartime voluntarism, however, have tended to focus either on disputing their accuracy or showing how they functioned to consolidate the power of elite white men. Pointing to erroneous depictions of unified male and female volunteers working on behalf of the Sanitary Commission, for instance, Jeanie Attie notes that the wartime mobilization of women's labor was "spasmodic" at best, and that most volunteers failed to adhere to the bureaucratic and nationalistic goals that the USSC's male leadership sought to impose. (6) Others have contradicted the images of unity presented in memorials to voluntarism by pointing to civilian disaffection with war aims and progress in the North, evidenced by desertions, bounty jumping, draft riots, and increasing support for the Peace Democrats. (7) Because these memorials are unrealistic and self-congratulatory, historians have interpreted the impetus behind the memorialization of voluntarism as wholly self-serving. In an influential study of Northern intellectuals during the Civil War, George Fredrickson contends that most prominent philanthropists publicized their work in order to extol the benefits of social order, organizational efficiency, and leadership by conservative elites such as themselves. (8) Similarly, scholars have focused on how male-authored tributes to Northern women's voluntarism framed their labors in narrow and traditional terms in an attempt to reimpose gender arrangements destabilized by the war. (9)
Yet these interpretations sidestep the question of why Northerners were so eager to present a united, even buoyant, front that erased all evidence of competition between rival voluntary groups, Northern civilians, and women and men. The answer lies in the fact that memorialists of voluntarism were engaged in a widespread and hitherto unexamined campaign to respond to the North's critics, both foreign and domestic. Reexamining tributes to Northern voluntarism in light of a critical transatlantic debate over the North's wartime motives and conduct can account for the remarkable consistency of these writings as well as their purpose. Rather than simply conveying a distorted version of reality, tributes to voluntarism helped to shape a history of the war that served to repress precisely those troubling issues that threatened the national self-image.
Foreign criticism galvanized white middle-class Northerners into spelling out their vision for the nation--a vision that not only reasserted American exceptionalism abroad but also sought to impose itself at home. This vision specifically opposed militarism and state-centralization and endorsed political unity, civic participation, and Christian benevolence. Its importance lies not only in the way it bolstered American nationalism in the face of an extraordinary challenge but also in the way it shaped the lessons that Northerners drew from the war. Viewing their victory as an indication of divine favor and an endorsement of Northern morality, political unity, and civilian voluntarism, Northerners were freed from looking too deeply into fissures opened up by the war, such as mounting class conflict or an unequal distribution of the war's costs. And having promoted voluntarism so strongly, Northerners were quick to urge self-help as a solution to the massive inequalities faced by ex-slaves in the postwar South. Turning away from the troubling issues raised by the conflict, memorialists of Northern voluntarism instead set their sights on restoring America's battered image in a global context.
When the official history of the Sanitary Commission was published, a New York Times reviewer touted the work as "a splendid vindication of Republican institutions" and "an unanswerable reply to the mean and mendacious attacks of the European Press on the motives and meaning of the war." (10) Several other reviewers suggested that the tired old story of military campaigns ("so many men, so many guns ... an enemy in such and such a force") conveyed nothing of value about the conflict, while testimonials to Northern benevolence "really showed of what democracy was capable" and should thus be required reading at home and abroad. (11) Another reviewer followed up his published suggestion that the work be widely disseminated in Europe by sending a note to USSC president Henry Bellows, exhorting him to "send copies abroad. There are some people in Germany & England whom I would like to have see it." (12) Such prompting was unnecessary, since the USSC had already drawn up a list for the dissemination of their history that encompassed prominent philanthropists, military leaders, aristocrats, and newspaper and journal editors throughout Europe. (13) A perceived hostility toward the Northern war effort, particularly in the British and French press, helps to explain why these reviewers were so eager for a foreign audience. Launching a bitter diatribe against the Union, foreign critics had attacked the basis of American identity, suggesting that the nation was heading down a path strewn with the ruins of failed republics. If some foreign commentators changed their tune over time, it was the "mean and mendacious attacks" that stuck in Northerners' minds.
Even before Union and Confederate forces met on the battlefield, British commentators were gleefully predicting the collapse of America's political system. In May 1861, Sir John Ramsden proclaimed to the British House of Commons that they "were now witnessing the bursting of the great republican bubble which had been so often held up to us as the model on which to recast our own English Constitution." (14) Only slightly less hostile to the Union war effort, the London Times declared the destruction of "the American colossus" a good "riddance [to] a nightmare. Excepting a few gentlemen of republican tendencies, we all expect, we nearly all wish, success to the Confederate cause." (15)
In the North, a widespread belief that the majority of the British commercial and upper classes were hostile to their cause provoked a level of Anglophobia unrivaled since the War of 1812. (16) Every mean-spirited characterization of the American people and their political system was widely exposed in the Northern press and indignantly debated and refuted. Swapping insult for insult, the generally moderate Harper's Weekly was moved to assert that "the uniform, consistent policy of the British nation has been ever based on hostility to every other nation in the world.... At home and abroad, they hate every body, and are hated in return." (17) Similarly, hardly a day went by without some outraged discourse on foreign opinion in the editorial columns of the New York Times, while the British and French presses obliged by providing a constant stream of discussion on the American conflict. Indeed, the Civil War was the most widely discussed topic in the British press at this time and French readers were treated to a...
|
