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America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation

by David Goldfield, Bloomsbury Press

In his brilliant exegesis of the Civil War and its role in creating the modern American nation, David Goldfield boldly suggests “that the political system established by the Founders would have been resilient and resourceful enough to accommodate our great diversity sooner without the tragedy of the Civil War.” Unfortunately, he doesn’t offer much evidence to support his theory. What Goldfield does do magnificently, however, is chronicle how antebellum social movements led to four years of savage warfare that emancipated (although it didn’t completely free) millions of black Americans.

Goldfield argues that war came because the Founding Fathers’ political system broke down, primarily due to a wave of evangelical religious fervor that inundated society, more in the North than the South, and permeated the political arena. It effectively drowned years of deftly managed compromise that had thus far held the Union together.

Add in the death of traditional political parties, the spirit of Manifest Destiny, increasing industrialization and urbanization in the North, and intransigence by well-placed Southern firebrands and, voilà, you have the cataclysmic tsunami foretold by John Brown—a battle between competing ideologies that could be settled only with bloodshed. Whether you agree with Goldfield’s revisionist thesis or not, his persuasively argued and elegantly written synthesis of war historiography should find its way to every thoughtful American’s bookshelf or electronic reading device.

The saga begins with the burning of the Ursuline Convent outside Boston, Mass., in 1834, foreshadowing the Second Great Awakening that was about to spread throughout the land. It concludes with America celebrating the 1876 Centennial, which was a secular salute to technological progress and scientific rationalism.

In between, Goldfield doesn’t offer a fundamentally different interpretation of the war. But his prose spins a web of magical realism, where an anecdote or event inevitably leads to insights about broader historical concepts. This narrative strategy crystallizes in the chapter on Shiloh. “How American soldiers and civilians viewed the civil war in their midst, however, changed for all time,” Goldfield argues. “And with that altered vision, the nation changed as well.”

America Aflame is a big book, the kind of meta-history that is now rarely attempted. By skillfully peeling away the veneer of righteousness from the North as well as putting the stain of the South’s racial bondage in historical context, Goldfield reveals an America that all its citizens hoped it might someday become: a “democracy of transcendence” where anything was possible, and open to anyone with sufficient perseverance and industry.

 

Originally published in the October 2011 issue of Civil War Times. To subscribe, click here