PA L G R AV E M A C M I L L A N T R A N S N A T I O N A L H I S T O R Y S E R I E S

THE TRANSNATIONAL
SIGNIFICANCE OF THE
AMERICAN CIVIL WAR

Edited by Jörg Nagler, Don H. Doyle,

and Marcus Gräser
Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series

Series Editors
Akira Iriye
Harvard University
Cambridge, USA

Rana Mitter
Department of History
University of Oxford
Oxford, United Kingdom
This distinguished series seeks to develop scholarship on the transnational
connections of societies and peoples in the nineteenth and twentieth cen-
turies; provide a forum in which work on transnational history from differ-
ent periods, subjects, and regions of the world can be brought together in
fruitful connection; and explore the theoretical and methodological links
between transnational and other related approaches such as comparative
history and world history.
Editorial board:
Thomas Bender, University Professor of the Humanities, Professor of
History, and Director of the International Center for Advanced Studies,
New York University
Jane Carruthers, Professor of History, University of South Africa
Mariano Plotkin, Professor, Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero,
Buenos Aires, and member of the National Council of Scientific and
Technological Research, Argentina
Pierre-Yves Saunier, Researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche
Scientifique, France
Ian Tyrrell, Professor of History, University of New South Wales

More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14675
 Jörg Nagler • Don H. Doyle • Marcus Gräser
Editors

The Transnational
Significance of the
American Civil War
Editors
Jörg Nagler Don H. Doyle
Friedrich-Schiller-University University of South Carolina
Jena, Germany Columbia, USA

Marcus Gräser
Johannes Kepler University
Linz, Austria

Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series

ISBN 978-3-319-40267-3 ISBN 978-3-319-40268-0 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40268-0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016953845

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

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 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book originated in two conferences on “The Transnational

Significance of the American Civil War” which were held at Friedrich
Schiller Universität, Jena, Germany (September 15–18, 2011) and at the
German Historical Institute, Washington, DC (September 20–22, 2012).
The German Historical Institute contributed the major funding for both
conferences. The Washington conference was also funded by the Fritz
Thyssen Foundation. The conference in Jena received additional fund-
ing from the University’s Faculty of the Humanities as well as from the
Ernst Abbe-Foundation, Jena, the American Embassy at Berlin, and the
Hamburg Institute for Social Research (HIS). We are most grateful for
their generous support of this project.
We thank all those colleagues who participated in the two conferences as
chairpersons, contributors, and discussants and whose contributions could
not be published here. We are equally grateful for the diligence and coop-
eration of the authors whose essays are included here. We also thank the
staff at both institutions, in Jena and Washington, DC, whose work helped
us enormously in realizing the conferences. We would also like to thank
Kristin Purdy, our editor at Palgrave Macmillan, who has been an ardent
supporter of this project.

v
 CONTENTS

1 Introduction: The Electric Chain of Transnational

History 1
Jörg Nagler, Don H. Doyle, and Marcus Gräser

Part I Liberalism, Citizenship, and International Law 13

2 Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Seas?: Civil War Statecraft

and the Liberal Quest for Oceanic Order 15
Robert Bonner

3 The American Civil War and the Transatlantic Triumph

of Volitional Citizenship 33
Paul Quigley

4 Lincoln as the Great Educator: Opinion and Educative

Liberalism in the Civil War Era 49
Leslie Butler

vii
viii CONTENTS

Part II Transnational Political Economy and Finance 67

5 Southern Wealth, Global Profits: Cotton,

Economic Culture, and the Coming of the Civil War 69
Brian Schoen

6 International Finance in the Civil War Era 91

Jay Sexton

Part III Transnational Discourses on Freedom

and Radicalism 107

7 Uprooted Emancipators: Transatlantic Abolitionism

and the Politics of Belonging 109
Mischa Honeck

8 Africa and the American Civil War: The Geopolitics

of Freedom and the Production of Commons 127
Andrew Zimmerman

Part IV Nation Building and Social Revolutions:

The American Civil War and Italy 149

9 The United States, Italy, and the Tribulations

of the Liberal Nation 151
Tiziano Bonazzi

10 Nation-Building, Civil War, and Social Revolution

in the Confederate South and the Italian Mezzogiorno,
1860–1865 169
Enrico Dal Lago
 CONTENTS ix

Part V Race and Nationalism in Latin America and

the Caribbean During the American
Civil War Era 187

11 Race and Revolution: The Confederacy, Mexico,

and the Problem of Southern Nationalism 189
Andre M. Fleche

12 Tocqueville’s Prophecy: The United States

and the Caribbean, 1850–1871 205
Nicholas Guyatt

13 Reconstructing Plantation Dominance

in British Honduras: Race and Subjection
in the Age of Emancipation 231
Zach Sell

Index 243
 LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Tiziano Bonazzi is Emeritus Professor of US History and Politics, Department of

Political and Social Sciences University of Bologna. A political and intellectual
historian, he has been President of the Italian Association of American Studies
(AISNA) and member of the Board of the European Association for American
Studies (EAAS). His most recent work is Abraham Lincoln: Un dramma ameri-
cano (2016).
Robert  Bonner is Professor of History at Dartmouth College. His research on
nineteenth-century politics and culture includes Mastering America: Southern
Slaveholders and the Crisis of American Nationhood (2009).
Leslie  Butler is Associate Professor of History at Dartmouth College. Her
work has explored nineteenth-century Anglo-American thought and culture.
Her first book was Critical Americans: Victorian Intellectuals and Transatlantic
Liberal Reform (2007), and she is working on a book titled American Democracy
and the Woman Question.
Enrico Dal Lago is Lecturer in American History at the National University of
Ireland, Galway. He is the author of Agrarian Elites: American Slaveholders
and Southern Italian Landowners, 1815–1861 (2005); American Slavery,
Atlantic Slavery, and Beyond: The U.S. “Peculiar Institution” in International
Perspective (2012); William Lloyd Garrison and Giuseppe Mazzini: Abolition,
Democracy, and Radical Reform (2013); and The Age of Lincoln and Cavour:
Comparative Perspectives on Nineteenth-Century American and Italian Nation-
Building (2015).
Don H.  Doyle is McCausland Professor of History at the University of South
Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina. His recent books include The Cause of All
Nations: An International History of the American Civil War (2015); American

xi
xii LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Civil Wars: The United States, Latin America, Europe, and the Crisis of the 1860s
(2017); Secession as an International Phenomenon (edited) (2010); Nations
Divided: America, Italy and the Southern Question (2002); Nationalism in the New
World, edited with Marco Pamplona (2006).
Andre  M.  Fleche is Associate Professor of History at Castleton University,
Castleton, Vermont. He is the author of The Revolution of 1861: The American
Civil War in the Age of Nationalist Conflict (2012), for which he received the
2013 James A. Rawley Award from the Southern Historical Association.
Marcus  Gräser is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Johannes
Kepler University in Linz, Austria. His most recent publications include “World
History in a Nation-State: The Transnational Disposition in Historical Writing in
the United States,” in Journal of American History 95 (2009): 1038–1052. He is
preparing the volume on North America in the series “Neue Fischer Weltgeschichte.”
Nicholas  Guyatt is a university lecturer and Fellow of Trinity Hall, University of
Cambridge. He is the author of several books including Providence and the
Invention of the United States (2007), the co-editor of War, Empire and Slavery,
1770–1830 (2010), and, most recently, Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans
Invented Racial Segregation (2016).
Mischa  Honeck is a research fellow at the German Historical Institute in
Washington, DC. He is the co-editor of Germany and the Black Diaspora: Points of
Contact, 1250–1914 (2013), and the author of We Are the Revolutionists: German-
Speaking Immigrants and American Abolitionists after 1848 (2011), which was
named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. He is the author of several articles,
published or forthcoming, in journals such as Amerikastudien, the Journal of the
Early Republic, the Journal of the Civil War Era, and Diplomatic History. He is
writing an imperial history of the Boy Scouts of America.
Jörg  Nagler is Senior Professor of North American History at Friedrich Schiller
University in Jena, Germany. He has written extensively on nineteenth- and twen-
tieth-century US history, with a particular focus on war and society. His publica-
tions include On the Road to Total War: The American Civil War and the German
Wars of Unification, 1861–1871 (co-edited with Stig Förster, 3rd ed., 2002),
Lincoln's Legacy: Nation Building, Democracy, and the Question of Civil Rights and
Race (2009), Lincoln und die Religion. Das Konzept der Nation unter Gott (co-
edited with Michael Haspel, 2012), and a biography of Abraham Lincoln (3rd ed.,
2013). He is writing a global history of the American Civil War.
Paul Quigley is James I. Robertson, Jr. Associate Professor of Civil War History
at Virginia Tech, where he directs the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies. He is
the author of Shifting Grounds: Nationalism and the American South, 1848—1865
 LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS xiii

(2012), winner of the British Association for American Studies Book Prize and the
Jefferson Davis Award from the Museum of the Confederacy.
Brian Schoen is Associate Professor of History at Ohio University, Athens, Ohio.
He is the author of The Fragile Fabric of Union (2009), and co-editor of The Old
South’s Modern Worlds (2011) and Between Sovereignty and Anarchy: The Politics of
Violence in the American Revolutionary Era (2015).
Zach  Sell is a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
His research examines the unprecedented wealth, misery, and dreams of freedom
that emerged between the American South and the British Empire during the
nineteenth century.
Jay Sexton is Kinder Chair at the University of Missouri and distinguished fellow
at the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University. He is the author of
Debtor Diplomacy: Finance and American Foreign Relations in the Civil War,
1837–1873 (2005), The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-
Century America (2011), The Global Lincoln (co-edited with Richard Carwardine,
2011), and Empire’s Twin: Varieties of US Anti-Imperialism since 1776 (co-edited
with Ian Tyrrell, 2015).
Andrew Zimmerman is Professor of History at the George Washington University
in Washington, DC.  He is the author of Anthropology and Antihumanism in
Imperial Germany (2001) and Alabama in Africa: Booker T.  Washington, the
German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (2010). He is also the edi-
tor of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Civil War in the United States (2016).
He is working on a book analyzing the American Civil War as a confluence of
transnational revolutionary movements against slavery and against wage labor.
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: The Electric Chain

of Transnational History

Jörg Nagler, Don H. Doyle, and Marcus Gräser

The American Civil War was not only the culmination point of a hitherto
“unfinished nation” and the central crisis in American history but it
also had significant international ramifications for the political, social,
economic, and military conditions in many parts of the world. What usu-
ally is described as an ‘age of nationalism’ witnessed the rise of the modern
constitutional state and globalized interdependent capitalist economies.
America’s Civil War was central to the transformation of the modern
world in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
For a very long time, the Civil War has been the central chapter in
America’s national history. For generations, the American public as well as
historians and readers elsewhere in the world have seemed content with a
parochial vision of the Civil War within a strictly national framework. The
recent turn toward transnational historical studies is now beginning to have

J. Nagler ( )
Friedrich Schiller Universität, Historisches Institut, Jena, Germany
D.H. Doyle
University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, United States
M. Gräser
Johannes Kepler Universität Linz, Institut für Neuere Geschichte und
Zeitgeschichte, Linz, Austria

© The Author(s) 2016 1

J. Nagler et al. (eds.), The Transnational Significance of the
American Civil War, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40268-0_1
2 J. NAGLER ET AL.

an effect on the way historians view the war. How does our understanding
of the American Civil War change once we step back and view the conflict
in its global context? How does this perspective revise what we previously
accepted? This book provides, at least, a provisional answer to these ques-
tions. What follows are chapters by several of the pioneers in the new trans-
national history of the American Civil War.
***
How much of transnational history is necessary to fully comprehend
the Civil War and all the complexities of its causes and results? Is the
transnational perspective simply a way of casting a new light on an epi-
sode that we can still understand as a predominantly national story of war
and collective memory? The German historian Jürgen Kocka has argued
that transnational history is at times incapable of explaining historical
developments that take place within the nation-state since it is inher-
ently ill-equipped to analyze particular aspects of society and politics
that are created within and, hence, confined within the container of the
nation-state.1
With this cautionary warning about the limits of the explanatory
power of transnational history for historians, it is important to keep
in mind that contemporaries of the Civil War era immediately under-
stood the vast transnational repercussions of the conflict. Few were more
perceptive of this than John Lothrop Motley, author, gentleman histo-
rian, and US minister to the Austrian Empire. Motley, addressing the
New York Historical Society in 1868 on “Historic Progress and American
Democracy,” summarized his main point brilliantly: “The law is Progress;
the result Democracy.” Motley also spoke of an “electric chain” that
united America and Europe. “So instantaneous are their action and ret-
roaction,” he wrote, “that the American Civil War, at least in Western
Europe, became as much an affair of passionate party feeling as if it were
raging on that side the Atlantic.” In Motley’s eyes, the American crisis
was something much more than “an affair of party feeling” within one
nation, for the “effect of the triumph of freedom in this country on the
cause of progress in Europe is plain.” Given his intimate knowledge of
Austrian politics in the 1860s, it was not surprising that he looked out for
the “effects” of the war on Austrian politics. He found that the so-called
Ausgleich, the replacement of Austrian centralism by a dualism of two
imperial halves, Austria and Hungary, which happened in 1867, emerged
from the learning process that was stimulated by the American federal
example.2 This may seem paradoxical insofar as the Austro-Hungarian
 INTRODUCTION: THE ELECTRIC CHAIN OF TRANSNATIONAL HISTORY 3

Dualism looked like, as John Hawgood wrote, as if “Andrew Jackson had

made a deal with the South Carolina Nullifiers, giving them a privileged
position in the union that the other states did not share.”3 The Austrian
Empire indeed suffered two secessions during the 1860s. The first came
when Bismarck attempted to solve the German Question by establish-
ing a German Empire without Austria, which resulted in Prussia’s vic-
tory at the Battle of Königgrätz in 1866. This “German Gettysburg,” as
the historian Robert Binkley once famously remarked, “was won by the
secessionists.”4 The second “secession,” the establishment of the Austro-
Hungarian dualism in 1867, may also have been a victory of the seces-
sionists, in this case, the Hungarians, who had staged a revolutionary
independence movement in 1848. The Austrians crushed their fight for
independence in 1849, but in 1867 Hungarians won a relatively broad
autonomy within the imperial framework of the Habsburg monarchy
without having to win a “Gettysburg.” Motley obviously wanted to
understand this major event in the constitutional history of the Habsburg
Empire as a reasonable attempt to put the Habsburg monarchy on solid
ground by minimizing the risk of a bloody split-up. The idea of “e plu-
ribus unum had failed,” wrote Motley, and instead “an e pluribus duo
was resolved upon.”5 Given the fact that the Habsburg monarchy was
not a union but rather a collection of estates with the Habsburg dynasty
as the landlord, this kind of compromise between Austria and Hungary
seemed to Motley a mark of genuine progress. His address is illuminat-
ing for everyone who thinks of transnational history as a field of “electric
chains.”
Within the last decade we have seen a remarkable increase of historical
works concerned with the transnational dimension of the American Civil
War.6 Although the interest in placing this central national American con-
flict into an international analytical context has existed for quite some time,
it is time that we synthesize comparative history with entangled history
more than before, in order to gain a better understanding of the transna-
tional dimension of the American Civil War.7 These approaches are indeed
inherently interconnected with fluid transitions. Just one example: when
Stig Förster and Jörg Nagler conceptualized their project on total war in
America and Germany in the 1990s, they started with a strictly compara-
tive approach. The basic question concerned the genesis of total warfare
that, in the twentieth century, led to the two horrific world wars. How was
warfare in the nineteenth-century age of industrial capitalism connected to
the rise of nationalism? The comparative approach, however, also became a
4 J. NAGLER ET AL.

transnational one when historians realized that there was a direct transat-
lantic exchange of people, information, and ideas that mutually influenced
each other. For example, the American notion of total war was, ironically,
brought to Germany in 1870 by Gen. Philip Sheridan himself. As a mili-
tary observer, Sheridan watched the German troops and later urged Otto
von Bismarck to handle the French guerrillas with the same brutal practice
of punishing civilians that he had applied during his Shenandoah Valley
campaign of 1864. “The people must be left with nothing but their eyes
to weep with after the war,” Sheridan told the Germans.8
Wars tend to send out stronger signals to the world than is the case
with peacetime situations. These transmitted signals—what Motley called
the “electric chain” of “action and retroaction”—can have severe conse-
quences in the economic, social, political, military, and cultural spheres in
certain regions of the world, depending upon the degree of entanglement
with the nation seized by war. Only seldom do historians ask in what sys-
tematic ways are wars and globalization interconnected.9
Evidently the current forces of globalization have encouraged histo-
rians to think internationally, not least because the World Wide Web has
now provided access and communication that made this “global turn”
possible. The sheer quantity of recent monographs and articles that focus
on the transnational and global aspects of the American Civil War era
is noteworthy.10 The central theme in the macro-transnational frame-
work of the American Civil War era was nationalism and nation build-
ing connected with the violent forces of centralization and its opposite,
secession.11 Michael Geyer and Charles Bright have rightly labeled this
the era of “global violence and nationalizing war.”12 One needs to ask
if the impact of the American Civil War was greater in regions where
there were similar and concurrent developments in nationalist conscious-
ness. Or, did the American Civil War act as a catalyst capable of spurring
nationalism? Other national formations were at work almost simultane-
ously, as in Italy, Germany, Japan, Mexico, Paraguay, and, less violently,
in Canada. The Taiping Rebellion in China had less to do with national
unification than these Western conflicts, but it occurred simultaneously
with, if disconnected from, the Euro-American wars, and in the scale of
its bloodshed (estimated at nearly thirty million casualties) it towered over
the others. One central question an international history of this era poses
is why did these processes occur almost simultaneously in so many differ-
ent parts of the world?
 INTRODUCTION: THE ELECTRIC CHAIN OF TRANSNATIONAL HISTORY 5

When we address the issue of a transnational significance of a historical

event such as the American Civil War, we need to ask about the contempo-
rary international awareness of this conflict, a precondition for answering
the question of impact. Men like John Lothrop Motley understood
immediately that events on both sides of the Atlantic were linked as though
by an “electric chain.” Undoubtedly, many other contemporaries thought
that the American Civil War would permanently change the world. Here
it is important to emphasize that the three paradigms of awareness, con-
nections, and impact are also methodically interconnected. For example,
in order to have an impact on a certain region, there needs to be personal
connections, or some awareness that is rendered through information on
the American Civil War. Information about the war and its meaning was
transmitted through certain channels of communication, such as diplomatic
correspondence, newspapers, letters, and more rarely through personal con-
tact. Communication channels during the mid-nineteenth century, at least
for most of the transatlantic world, were already well developed with vast
networks of overland telegraphs, railroads, fast oceanic mail service by steam-
ship, and mass audience newspapers and magazines. From Western centers
information was distributed to their peripheries, accelerated by the speed
of railroad systems and steamship lines.13 New mass circulation newspapers
reported the details of the American War. Less conspicuously, there was a
massive exchange of information through diplomatic correspondence and
private letters that added immensely to knowledge about the war in nearly all
parts of the world. This exchange of information and public opinion on the
American War was among the early and most fruitful lines of investigation
among historians of the international Civil War.14
Key political figures in Europe and elsewhere also interpreted the Civil
War in light of their particular view of the world. Intellectuals, journalists,
and political leaders acted as multipliers, transmitting their understanding
of the information and basic events of the Civil War to their respective
publics, often with specific political intentions in mind. They utilized the
events of the American Civil War as a screen on which to project their
own political and social agendas. William E. Gladstone, for example, com-
pared the mass emancipation of slaves in the United States to the British
reform movement to expand voting rights as a way of discrediting the lat-
ter. Republicans in France debated la question amércaine as a veiled way
of engaging in forbidden political debate under Napoleon III’s censorious
regime.
6 J. NAGLER ET AL.

Another highly pertinent line of inquiry concerns the transnational

significance of the impact of the American Civil War on the historical
change of war and military organization. The American conflict has often
been interpreted as the anticipation of the total wars of the twentieth
century.15 Just how did the reported observations by international
observers—civilians or military—of the war cause changes in the way
nations organized armies and waged war; how did events in America
affect strategy, tactics, and weaponry in the wars that came after 1865?
This is an inviting field of study, especially for those prepared to examine
the “entangled histories” approach toward a better understanding of
transnational networks and the exchange of military knowledge. Parallel
investigations might explore how and in what way social (self-)mobi-
lization during the American Civil War influenced other nations faced
with the challenge of mobilizing mass citizen armies. One important
imprint of the American War was the new codification of the interna-
tional law of war, as formulated by Francis Lieber, a German political
refugee. Lieber’s 1863 “Instructions for the Government of Armies of
the United States in the Field, General Order No. 100,” known as the
Lieber Code, formed the basis of the Hague Convention of 1899.16
Historians of the international Civil War will also take into account
the significance of the British Empire as a geopolitical rival responding
to the rising commercial and military prowess of the United States and
to consider how the British Empire recalculated its global strategy as a
result of the American conflict. The challenge posed by the reformation
of a powerful United States, now with a strong navy and with enormous
commercial reach in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Latin America was especially
grave for Great Britain. Historians have rarely examined the direct impact
of the American Civil War on British imperial strategy in the American
hemisphere and elsewhere. Was Britain’s neutrality during the American
Civil War a conscious defensive strategy that anticipated the future direc-
tion of Great Britain as a global superpower?
Historians are often tempted to adopt teleological models of modern-
ization, nationalism, and democratization that have dominated our under-
standing of the American Civil War for some time. Because the United States
later became a hegemonic world power, it is easy to interpret the Civil War
as the watershed and genesis for this future development. We must, how-
ever, remain aware of the complexity of global networks that had devel-
oped by mid of the nineteenth century. They were not only developed in a
bi-national or tri-national fashion but rather on a multi-national level.
 INTRODUCTION: THE ELECTRIC CHAIN OF TRANSNATIONAL HISTORY 7

To do justice to the transnational significance of the American Civil

War, we need to break down the methodological divisions between com-
parative, transnational, and entangled history approaches and connect
the various specialized geographic components of history and learn from
specialists on Africa and Asia, economists, political scientists, sociologists,
and historians who have been active in other areas of transnational his-
tory. We should employ the dialectics of “outside-in” and “inside-out”
approaches that either situate American developments within larger global
trends, or take us from US history to world history, and thereby avoid a
US-centric view. Events in the United States were shaping the world at the
same time forces outside the nation were shaping it.
***
The chapters that follow were selected from papers presented at confer-
ences held at the University of Jena, Germany, and the German Historical
Institute in Washington, DC. Each chapter makes its unique contribution to
our understanding of the transnational significance of America’s Civil War,
but we have arranged them according to several unifying themes. Part I,
on “Liberalism, Citizenship and International Law,” begins with Robert
Bonner’s novel examination of the ultimate transnational space, the high
seas of the Atlantic, and to the highly contested understanding of the
laws on piracy and neutrality during the war. A key oceanic achievement
of these years was the suppression of trans-Atlantic slaving in the wake of
the 1862 breakthrough Anglo-American accord. Paul Quigley turns to
another highly salient legal subject, the ways in which the war challenged
existing views on migration and citizenship as a voluntary choice. Given
the enormous numbers of immigrant soldiers involved in the war, this
became an important topic. Quigley argues that the American Civil War
and its outcome helped lift longstanding problems of migration, military
service, and allegiance, to the top of the international political agenda.
Leslie Butler’s chapter deals with the related concern among transnational
liberals concerned with the expansion of the electorate and the improve-
ment of education and information for the purpose of enlightening voters
in the United States and Great Britain. Abraham Lincoln’s skills in lead-
ership became an inspiration to British and American reformers in their
pursuit of an educated citizenry and an enlightened popular government.
Part II, on “Transnational Political Economy and Finance,” examines
the ways in which cotton politics at home and cotton diplomacy abroad
shaped the emergence of transatlantic markets of commerce and finance.
Brian Schoen examines the ways in which cotton politics at home and
8 J. NAGLER ET AL.

cotton diplomacy abroad shaped the emergence of a transatlantic free trade

movement, the politics of slavery, and the sectional crisis. By focusing on
the ways in which US control of international raw cotton supply was per-
ceived to have shaped British policy toward the United States in the 1840s
and 1850s, it demonstrates the confidence that secessionist brought into
their disunionist agenda. Conversely, he shows how northern political
economists ultimately rejected the King Cotton position using it and early
Confederate policies as support for taking a harder stance against Pro-
Cotton, Pro-Slavery traitors they perceived as attacking northern inter-
ests. Jay Sexton explores two themes that are central to understanding the
global dimensions of the US Civil War. First, he considers the financial
diplomacy of the Union and Confederacy. Though neither side scored a
major foreign loan, the chapter examines the British and European finan-
ciers that took the risk of loaning capital to the warring parties. Second,
his chapter argues that the Civil War was important in reconfiguring the
place of the United States on international money markets. Forced to look
to domestic sources for the overwhelming majority of its capital needs,
the United States reoriented its financial institutions and structures along
new national lines. This national financial system was built upon the trans-
national banking structures of the early nineteenth century and reconfig-
ured, rather than severed, financial links with the wider world.
Part III, on “Transnational Discourses on Freedom and Radicalism,”
begins with Mischa Honeck’s chapter, which argues against a naive sepa-
ration of abolitionism and nationalism. Focusing on the period from the
European Revolutions of 1848/49 to the end of the American Civil War,
his chapter charts the transatlantic space through which varied antislavery
activists moved to highlight the complicity of abolitionism in formulat-
ing strong ethnic and national identities. In addition to a shared hostility
to slavery, many of these actors had comparable experiences of upheaval,
uprootedness, and forced migration caused by racial and political strife,
which fueled the contentious process of reconstituting civic roles and
national allegiances in this second age of Atlantic revolutions. Andrew
Zimmerman widens the frame by bringing Africa into his examination of
the geopolitics of slavery and freedom in the Atlantic world of the nine-
teenth century. In this period, as the Atlantic slave trade declined, regions
on both sides of the Atlantic split into states committed to slavery and
states committed to freedom. Across these boundaries enslaved people
engaged not only in a politics of fugitivity but also in the creation of a
commons that resisted appropriation by state power and capital.
 INTRODUCTION: THE ELECTRIC CHAIN OF TRANSNATIONAL HISTORY 9

Part IV features two chapters on “Nation Building and Social

Revolutions: The American Civil War and Italy.” Tiziano Bonazzi views
the tribulations of two liberal nation-states as each struggled with the prob-
lem of unifying its disparate parts. Taking 1861 as a common reference
point, Bonazzi uses analogous evidence and models to examine how each
nation sought loyalty and cohesion. Enrico Dal Lago compares American
slaveholders and southern Italian landowners and their vital roles in the
creation of the Confederate States of America and the Kingdom of Italy.
Between 1861 and 1865, both of these newly formed nations underwent
horrific ordeals at the hands of their southern rebels, the American Civil
War and of the War of the Brigands. Whereas in 1865 the Confederacy
collapsed, together with the southern slaveholding system, the Kingdom
of Italy survived the inner civil war at the cost of strengthening the gov-
ernment’s authoritarian character and the indiscriminate use of military
force against the largest peasant rebellion to date.
Part V turns to “Race and Nationalism in Latin America and the
Caribbean during the American Civil War Era.” Andre M. Fleche explores
the ways in which Confederate diplomats, editors, and intellectuals
responded to the French incursion in Mexico. The chapter pays particu-
lar attention to the lessons concerning the relationship between race and
nationalism that Confederates believed they drew from the Mexican expe-
rience. In Mexico, Confederate spokesmen detected a failed multiracial
republic, a nation, they believed, in which leadership by mixed-race peoples
had resulted in anarchy. As a result, southern spokesmen welcomed the sta-
bility that rule by a white European prince would bring to Mexico. Nicholas
Guyatt explores the relationship between race, slavery, and imperialism in
the Caribbean and the United States during the Civil War era through
the frame of Tocqueville’s infamous prediction that the pressures on slav-
ery would eventually produce an exclusively white American South and
an exclusively black Caribbean. Tocqueville’s prophecy haunted American
and Caribbean approaches to slavery and emancipation, especially as the
sectional crisis in the United States worsened. The chapter summarizes the
shifting racial and political geographies of this moment and explains how
Tocqueville’s segregationist vision survived the Civil War and informed US
expansionism in the Caribbean after 1865. Zach Sell shows how race and
economic production transformed the adaptation of former slave-owning
planters coming from the American South to British Honduras. In the
age of black emancipation, these diasporic planters were thought to have
knowledge vital to the expansion of the plantation system, even as dreams
10 J. NAGLER ET AL.

of black freedom thwarted their success in the American South. Looking

especially at the history of one Louisiana sugar planter in British Honduras,
this chapter focuses on hidden aspects in the struggle to reconstruct social
dominance after slavery was no longer available as a means of exploitation.

NOTES
1. Jürgen Kocka, “Sozialgeschichte im Zeitalter der Globalisierung,”
Merkur 60 (2006): 305–316.
2. John Lothrop Motley, Historic Progress and American Democracy:
An Address Delivered Before the New  York Historical Society, At
Their Sixty-Fourth Anniversary, December 16, 1868 (New York:
Charles Scribner, 1869), 6, 35f, 39–51.
3. John Hawgood, “The Civil War and Central Europe,” in Heard
Round the World. The Impact of the American Civil War Abroad,
ed. Harold Melvin Hyman (New York: A. Knopf, 1969), 175.
4. Robert C.  Binkley, Realism and Nationalism 1852–1871 (New
York: Harper and Brothers, 1935), 269.
5. Motley, Historic Progress, 51.
6. See Marcus Gräser, “World History in a Nation-State: The
Transnational Disposition in Historical Writing in the United
States,” Journal of American History 95 (2009): 1038–1052; for a
good overview of transnational approaches to the history of the
American Civil War see W.  Caleb McDaniel, and Bethany
L. Johnson, “New Approaches to Internationalizing the History of
the Civil War Era: An Introduction,” The Journal of the Civil War
Era 2 (2012):145–150; Douglas R. Egerton, “Rethinking Atlantic
Historiography in a Postcolonial Era: The Civil War in a Global
Perspective,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 1 (2011): 79–95.
7. On comparative work see, for example, David M.  Potter, “Civil
War,” in The Comparative Approach to American History, ed. C.
Vann Woodward (New York: Basic, 1968), 135–145; George M.
Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American
and South African History (New York: Oxford University Press,
1981); Steven Hahn, “Class and State in Postemancipation Societies:
Southern Planters in Comparative Perspective,” American Historical
Review 95 (1990): 75–98; Michael Geyer and Charles Bright,
“Global Violence and Nationalizing Wars in Eurasia and America:
The Geopolitics of War in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,”
 INTRODUCTION: THE ELECTRIC CHAIN OF TRANSNATIONAL HISTORY 11

Comparative Studies in Society and History 38 (1996): 619–657; On

the Road to Total War: The American Civil War and the German
Wars of Unification, 1861–1871, ed. Stig Förster and Jörg Nagler
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Peter Kolchin, A
Sphinx on the American Land: The Nineteenth-Century South in
Comparative Perspective (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press 2003). See also Susanna Delfino and Marcus Gräser, Writing
American History from Europe: The Elusive Substance of the
Comparative Approach, in: Historians Across Borders: Writing
American History in a Global Age, ed. Nicolas Barreyre, Michael
Heale, Stephen Tuck, and Cécile Vidal. (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2014), 95–117; Susanna Delfino, Marcus Gräser,
Hans Krabbendam, and Vincent Michelot, “Roundtable: Europeans
Writing American History: The Comparative Trope,” The American
Historical Review 119 (2014): 791–799.
8. See Carl N.  Degler, “The American Civil War and the German
Wars of Unification: The Problem of Comparison,” in On the Road
to Total War: The American Civil War and the German Wars of
Unification, 1861–1871, eds. Stig Förster and Jörg Nagler
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 68; Joseph
Wheelan, Terrible Swift Sword: The Life of General Philip
H. Sheridan (New York, NY: Da Capo Press, 2013), 312.
9. An exception is Tarak Barkawi, Globalization and War (Lanham,
MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005).
10. See, for example, Don Doyle, The Cause of all Nations: An
International History of the American Civil War (New York, NY:
Basic Books, 2014); Leslie Butler, Critical Americans: Victorian
Intellectuals and Transatlantic Liberal Reform (Chapel Hill, NC:
University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Brian Schoen, The
Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Policy, and The Global
Origins of the Civil War (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2009); Mischa Honeck, We Are the Revolutionists:
German-Speaking Immigrants and American Abolitionists After
1848 (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 2011); Enrico
Dal Lago, William Lloyd Garrison, and Giuseppe Mazzini:
Abolition, Democracy, and Radical Reform (Baton Rouge, LA:
Louisiana State University Press, 2013); Jay Sexton, Debtor
Diplomacy: Finance and American Foreign Relations in the Civil
War Era 1837–1873 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
12 J. NAGLER ET AL.

11. Robert E. Bonner, Mastering America: Southern Slaveholders and

the Crisis of American Nationhood (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2009); Paul Quigley, Shifting Grounds:
Nationalism and the American South, 1848–1865 (Chapel Hill,
NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Andre M. Fleche,
The Revolution of 1861: The American Civil War in the Age of
Nationalist Conflict (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North
Carolina Press, 2012).
12. Geyer and Bright, “Global Violence and Nationalizing Wars in
Eurasia and America.
13. See, for example, Peter J. Hugill, Global Communications since 1844:
Geopolitics and Technology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1999); Christopher Alan Bayly, Empire and
Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in
India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
14. Just a few examples of this literature will suffice. R. J. M. Blackett,
Divided Hearts: Britain and the American Civil War (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 2001); D. P. Crook, “Portents of
War: English Opinion on Secession,” Journal of American Studies 4
(1971):163–179; Mary Ellison, Support for Secession: Lancashire
and the American Civil War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1972); Herbert Zettl, “Garibaldi and the American Civil War,”
Civil War History 22 (1976): 70–76; John Kutolowski, “The Effect
of the Polish Insurrection of 1863 on American Civil War
Diplomacy,” Historian 27 (1965): 560–577; Kinley J.  Brauer,
“Gabriel Garcia y Tassara and the American Civil War: A Spanish
Perspective,” Civil War History 21 (1975): 5–27; Enno Eimers,
Preußen und die United States 1850 bis 1867: Transatlantische
Wechselwirkungen (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2004); Michael
Löffler, Preußens und Sachsens Beziehungen zu den United States
während des Sezessionskrieges 1860–1865 (Münster: Lit, 1999).
15. See Förster and Nagler, On the Road to Total War.
16. See John Fabian Witt, Lincoln’s Code. The Laws of War in American
History (New York: Free Press, 2013).
 PART I

Liberalism, Citizenship, and

International Law
 CHAPTER 2

Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Seas?:

Civil War Statecraft and the Liberal
Quest for Oceanic Order

Robert Bonner

In 1902, an aging Charles Francis Adams Jr. pondered how “the verdict
of history” would justify “all the blood and treasure so freely poured out
by us between Sumter and Appomattox.” Unlike most Union veterans,
Adams did not linger on America’s battlefields or its liberated plantations
but trained his sights upon the high seas, where a growing international
appetite for maritime reform promised a “rounding out and completing
the work of our Civil War.” Future generations would appreciate how,
thanks to Union victory, “the last vestiges of piracy vanished from the
ocean, as slavery had before disappeared from the land.”1
Adams’s optimism—and his admittedly odd pairing of shipping interests
with the freedom of some four million slaves—proved to be short-lived.
The maritime peace of the Anglo-Boer War would be a mere temporary
counter-current to the aggressive navalism that peaked during Europe’s
“Great War.” As late as 1912, Adams believed that the possibility of war
disrupting the scheduled service of the famed Lusitania was “too absurd

R. Bonner ( )
Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, United States

© The Author(s) 2016 15

J. Nagler et al. (eds.), The Transnational Significance of the
American Civil War, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40268-0_2
16 R. BONNER

for a moment’s consideration.” In 1915, a German submarine sent the

Lusitania to the bottom of the North Atlantic, along with scores of citi-
zens from the supposed neutral power of the United States.2
Adams’s expectation of a twentieth century marked by oceanic peace
and security was no individual quirk. His goal of eliminating “the bar-
baric right of capture of private property at sea” was broadly shared by his
generation of late-Victorian liberals. This largely ignored component of
transatlantic reform invites the attention of those seeking global perspec-
tives on the American Civil War, and not simply because it concerns an
oceanic realm comprising three-quarters of Earth’s surface. Liberals of
the late nineteenth century were transfixed by the high seas less because
of its extent than because of the globalizing transformations then spread-
ing the forces of “civilization” into a realm where “barbarism” had too
long prevailed. They instinctively appreciated that oceanic developments
were every bit as bracing—and as susceptible to the age’s “humanizing”
improvements—as the terrestrial developments explored with such cre-
ativity by historians of the nineteenth-century Atlantic world.3
Surveying the links between the Civil War and oceanic liberalization
brings to the fore a maritime economic order of steam-powered, steel-
constructed, and telegraph-coordinated seaborne trade and migration still
in its formative stages when the Lincoln administration assumed power.
The global stakes were high, and hanging in the balance was a mid-century
surge of international capitalist development. The technological impetus to
this 1850s boom was aided by self-consciously liberalizing maritime poli-
cies: the British reduction of tariffs and its 1850 repeal of the Navigation
Acts; the expansion of neutral rights in the 1856 Declaration of Paris; the
opening of new Pacific markets; and the launching of “free-trade diplo-
macy” as a central component of a “Pax Britannica.” Unfettered oceanic
commerce was the lynchpin of a new Anglo-centric “free seas” regime that
produced in a mere twenty years a threefold increase in British exports.
The vital exception to the rule of commercial ascendancy was the Royal
Navy’s ceaseless effort to end the immensely profitable, and unacceptably
barbarizing, trade in West African slaves.4
Foreign commentators worried how the American Civil War might
imperil this updated version of the “free seas,” and thus diminish one
of the era’s grandest achievements. Despite Americans’ traditional vin-
dication of the neutral rights, the Union or the Confederate govern-
ments employed such coercive naval tactics as privateering, commercial
blockades, steam-powered commerce raiding against merchant sailing
 FREE SOIL, FREE LABOR, FREE SEAS?: CIVIL WAR STATECRAFT... 17

vessels, and increasingly intrusive practices of visitation, search, and con-

demnation in prize courts. To many observers, this renewal of maritime
forcefulness heralded a Confederate resumption of the transatlantic slave
trade when “barracoons would be refilled in Africa, slave expeditions
would be organized on a scale hitherto unknown, and whole squadrons of
slave ships (those ‘floating hells’) would transport their cargoes under the
Southern colors, proudly unfurled.”5
Liberal attempts to contain this anticipated surge of maritime disor-
der achieved mixed results before mounting American grievances toward
England suspended cooperation altogether by late in 1863. Only with the
Treaty of Washington in 1871 did it seem possible that the piratical prac-
tices of governments could be restrained. A short time before this Anglo-
American accord, Francis Lieber marveled at an impending era, writing to
Senator Charles Sumner:

What an advance it would be—though requiring nearly twenty-two cen-

turies—from the time when Thucydides said that private property was not
acknowledged at sea as on land, to the middle of the nineteenth century,
when private property—even of the enemy—should be declared to be pro-
tected, even floating without defence, on the wide sea.6

Lieber, who had already codified the conventions of land warfare, voiced
a common liberal refrain in celebrating the security of seaborne commerce
during war. His vantage helps to frame a central question of considerable
importance. Why, we should ask, did this generation’s achievement in estab-
lishing meaningful rules for ground warfare not find a similarly sweeping
counterpart in more “civilized” maritime conventions? In addressing why
a widely supported program of oceanic reform fell short, this chapter will
revisit a set of incidents, episodes, and actors involved in this transnational
initiative between 1850 and 1875. To puzzle through the implications of
this story requires keeping two deeper forces also in mind—the intrinsic
complexities of oceanic law and the conflicting legacies of how the Union
achieved “free soil” and “free men” upon the North American continent.
***
Victorian-era maritime liberalizers grappled with the thorny contra-
dictions and implications of a “free seas” regime associated with Hugo
Grotius’s work of two and a half centuries earlier. Maritime conven-
tions relied upon flags, registries, courts, and legal compendia to estab-
lish the status of ships in areas where territorially based sovereigns lacked
meaningful jurisdiction. In peacetime, flagged ships were immune from
18 R. BONNER

interference by naval vessels from other countries, though this could be

overridden by treaties related to slaving and piracy. Relations between ves-
sels during war involved a separate set of mechanisms and prize courts
that relied on prevailing rules regarding belligerent searches and prize-
court condemnation of contraband. The objective of such regulations was
to channel conflict between warring states to the most narrow grounds
possible, so as to prevent the oceanic commons from becoming a zone
of indiscriminate plunder. The long-standing association of this maritime
regime with “freedom” seems, in retrospect, to be radically misleading.
The freedoms protected by international consensus did not involve per-
sons or property, but that of nationally registered vessels, which were
under the law of nations guaranteed the right to “meet there as equals, as
masters, independent,” as Francis Lieber summed up in 1840.7
The rhetoric of free seas resonated with nineteenth-century reformers
like Lieber, who sought to expand the emancipatory potential of this term,
and thus to make the oceans better accord with various interrelated “civi-
lizing” projects then underway. Antislavery activists associated the vacuum
of authority on the high seas as a presumption against slavery, which since
the landmark Somerset decision of 1772 had required enactment by positive
law. Charles Sumner thus identified the “principle of manumission” with
the ocean’s “strong breezes” while Frederick Douglas insisted: “You can-
not write the bloody laws of slavery on those restless billows. The ocean,
if not the land, is free.” Both men were acutely aware that the oceanic
vacuum of authority regularly empowered the enslavers and subjugated
the victims chained in their holds, however. Despite European powers’
joint renunciation of the slave trade in 1815, illicit trade to Brazil boomed
in the 1840s, while that to Cuba expanded even more over the 1850s.
Abolitionists both within and beyond the UK lauded British attempts to
establish an emancipationist legal and diplomatic order in which the Royal
Navy would complete what seemed merely a de jure end of the slaving.8
“Free trade” reformers led by Richard Cobden sought a similarly broad
expansion of the “free seas” by setting aside the early modern mercan-
tilist practices in which the Grotian order developed. Such Cobdenites
expressed a deep skepticism of government-directed economic measures
and envisioned as an alternative the frictionless movement of goods
between national jurisdictions and, of crucial importance, over ocean
space. The famed abolition of the “Corn Laws” in the 1840s (the ini-
tial step toward a series of tariff reductions) was the first step toward
an internationalist order bent on replacing warfare with commerce as
 FREE SOIL, FREE LABOR, FREE SEAS?: CIVIL WAR STATECRAFT... 19

the prevalent mode of international interaction. For reformers, private

propertied interests (represented by Chambers of Commerce) were har-
bingers of a liberal era of peace no less than of prosperity.9
Liberalizing the oceans in the 1860s required curbing the slaving,
mercantilist, and prize-taking vestiges of a more barbarous age so as to
eliminate the most extreme forms of maritime coercion. The aim was
to establish meaningful freedom for persons (the leading principle for
antislavery activists), or for private property (as Cobdenite free traders
emphasized). This updated version of “free seas” combined the rhetoric of
emancipating with various techniques of ordering, and of establishing new
international structures capable of adjudicating violations that had eluded
the existing system of national sovereignty. One technique of reform
involved applying the early modern category of pirates as Hostis Humani
Generis, or “Enemies of All Mankind” to the forces barbarizing the mod-
ern oceans. The same early nineteenth-century logic that punished African
slave-trading as piracy underlay the growing discomfort with privateering,
an early modern convention that allowed those privately owned vessels
who obtained letters of marque to reap tremendous personal gain by seiz-
ing enemy goods. A quarter-century after Secretary of State John Quincy
Adams linked this “system of licensed robbery” to “the most atrocious
characters of piracy,” the European maritime powers repudiated letters
of marque warfare in the 1856 Declaration of Paris.10 Pirate analogies
applied to Confederates during the Civil War expanded further still after
Union victory. Liberal reformers like Charles Francis Adams Jr. took up
the image as a means of excoriating assaults on any unarmed merchant or
passenger ship, even if a regular navy took the action during a time of war.
The United States, as a rising maritime power and chief rival of the
British, alternated between playing the role of gadfly and innovator in the
intricate diplomatic dance over permissible forms of oceanic violence. The
commitment of the United States to the “freedom of the seas” made it the
most vocal proponent of neutral rights, while its standing as a weak naval
power caused it to be wary of eliminating letters of marque altogether.
The United States also pioneered the association of slaving with piracy,
though an extreme prickliness about British sea power meant that all ships
flying US colors eluded detention from the Royal Navy, even if evidence of
slaving was clear. Of greatest interest to Cobdenites were a long-standing
series of American pronouncements concerning the basic illegitimacy of
attacks on private property at sea. This position could be traced through
memorable formulations by Benjamin Franklin, John Quincy Adams, and
20 R. BONNER

Henry Wheaton to lesser lights such as William Cass and William Marcy,
who deployed this tradition when in 1856 they kept the United States
from joining the Declaration of Paris. The proslavery tilt of US statecraft
during of the 1850s made American leadership in an international reform
unlikely. But a deeper genealogy of liberalizing rhetoric suggested that the
right moment of crisis—and the right kind of crusade against a villainous
enemy—might just become a catalyst for change.11
***
The Lincoln administration developed its maritime policies acutely
aware of how other countries used its actions at sea to render wider judg-
ments about its capacity for civilizing missions. A cosmopolitan network
centered around Charles Sumner alerted Washington officials of foreign
acclaim of the Union’s 1861 disavowal of privateering and its new vigi-
lance against the illegal slave trade. Members of this same network con-
veyed foreign liberals’ objections about the Union’s blockade, which free
traders linked to the Republican party’s enactment of higher tariffs, and
to hostility to free trade more generally. Sumner himself worked with con-
siderable success to gather these disparate Union policies under a single
overarching goal—to isolate an upstart Confederate slavocracy and to thus
eliminate what he considered the greatest menace of all to the high seas.
The Richmond government provided Union message-makers with plenty
of ammunition, beginning with Jefferson Davis’s inexplicable selection of
William Yancey, a key proponent of the slave trade, as his government’s
chief diplomat in London.
The key element of Union statecraft was to make it the world’s respon-
sibility to contain this new barbarizing slavocracy. While US attempts in
1861 to ratify the Declaration of Paris failed, brighter results followed
the new tough enforcement of laws against African slavers based in
American ports. American consul Charles Francis Adams Sr. well appreci-
ated the capital to be had by redeeming “the reputation of the country
from the stigma of any connivance or participation of such odious crime
within its borders.” Sumner ally John Jay drew attention to an equally
important fact—that anti-slaving measures could draw attention to the
Confederacy’s pro-slaving personnel at the same time that it burnished
the Union’s reputation. By the spring of 1862, an Anglo-American treaty
allowing for mutual search and seizure on the high seas passed the US
Senate, representing what Sumner termed his country’s “open pledge to
Human Rights.” A decline in the flow of slaves from Africa caused Sumner
later to recall “never in history was there any treaty which did at once so
 FREE SOIL, FREE LABOR, FREE SEAS?: CIVIL WAR STATECRAFT... 21

complete a work… The treaty came and the wicked work ceased.” Little
more than a decade after its enactment, a close Sumner associate marveled
(with considerable exaggeration) how, with this pathbreaking treaty, “the
ocean, so often traversed by slave-ships, became like a peaceful metropolis
with a well-ordered police.”12
The Slave Trade Treaty could not overcome the acrimony that pre-
vailed between England and the United States over the maritime rights
and duties of neutrals. In early November of 1861, the US Navy’s heavy-
handed seizure of ministers traveling aboard a British-flagged mail packet
sparked the so-called Trent Affair, which pushed England and the United
States to the brink of war. This episode, which has received extensive treat-
ment from historians, completed a reversal of roles by which the United
States established a new position in championing the rights of belligerents
while England expressed rare concern for damage done to neutrals. Shifts
in older positions spurred reformers to work toward the same liberaliza-
tion of maritime war that had marked suppression of the slave trade. In a
widely publicized address, Sumner pledged that his country would look
to the future, so as to “gloriously unite in setting up new pillars, to mark
new triumphs, rendering the ocean a highway of peace, instead of a bloody
field.” Sensing an opening, Richard Cobden privately detailed for Sumner
a series of liberal American precedents from the 1850s, insisted that with
these already in evidence, the United States was perfectly prepared to lead
a “clean sweep of the old maritime law of Vattel, Pufendorf, and Co.”13
The rhetoric of transatlantic cooperation masked the continuing sharp
national differences over which specific aspect of maritime liberalization
would take priority. Cobden joined French advocates of neutral rights
such as Lawrence-Basil Hautefeuille to complain most loudly about the
Union’s blockade, which liberals widely understood as a leading example
of Washington’s selfish disregard of Europe’s cotton-dependent economy.
Though Sumner also opposed commercial blockading in theory, he refrained
from speaking out publicly against what was one of the most important
elements in the Union’s grand strategy. Even while Cobden continued to
understand blockading laws “as rascally an invention as the old Corn Laws,”
his own increasingly pro-Union tendencies led him to downplay the issue,
especially after the public assault on the blockade’s legitimacy became asso-
ciated with pro-Confederate figures. Cobden instead began to elevate the
cause of “merchant immunity” in his Parliamentary efforts, thus inspiring
one of his closest associates in 1864 to explain at length how this broader
principle might cut the Gordian knot of international disputes at sea. Once
22 R. BONNER

the world community embraced the sanctity of ocean-borne property (as

they supposedly had already done for all land-based, non-contraband prop-
erty), the array of controversies over seizures, searches, blockades, and priva-
teering would be relegated to the dustbin of history. In a new dispensation,
armed ships might still inflict damage on other warship in the spectacle of
“naval duels.” But these increasingly fearsome vessels would no longer men-
ace the global economy.14
As the prospects for oceanic reform rose, Sumner and Francis Lieber
began a lengthy interchange over the best means to secure international
consensus and to establish an effective enforcement regime. Lieber real-
ized that what he proposed as a “Code of Regulations for the Government
of Navies in War as authorized by the Laws and Usages of War” required
a different approach than the rules for ground war he was then codifying
for the US War department. A set of intricate rules had already been “fully
elaborated in the works on international law,” which had not been the case
with his ground-war code. Yet he also realized that to change rules would
be perhaps more challenging than to introduce them de novo, especially
if the project was overtaken by navy commanders or Washington officials
guided by national interests rather than by broader “civilizing” impera-
tives. To command the assent of the international community required
the collaboration of University-based scholars, whose force of intellect and
example would establish their legitimacy beyond the realm of statecraft.15
Confederate actions, not cool logic, provided the best opportunities
to rally a campaign against a mounting maritime menace. By late 1862,
high seas lawlessness found a new embodiment in the CSS Florida and the
CSS Alabama, two Liverpool-built Confederate commerce raiders that,
by war’s end, would destroy more than 200 ships and millions of dollars
of American commerce. Cobden agreed with his American allies that this
innovation in steam-powered naval raiding made the Declaration of Paris’s
ban on privateering “a hollow subterfuge.” Late in 1863, he prodded the
American consulate in France to frame a protest for use when “the ques-
tion of belligerent rights comes up again for discussion.” Only a short time
had passed before that consulate did so with a strongly worded complaint
about commissioned naval vessels “whose acknowledged mission is not to
fight, but to rob, to burn, and to fly.” In grouping such warships with the
barbarous letters of marque, these Union diplomats insisted that “what-
ever flag may float from their masthead, or whatever power may claim to
own them, their conduct stamps them as piratical.” At this juncture, it
seemed that the same spirit that had ended the oceanic slave trade and was
 FREE SOIL, FREE LABOR, FREE SEAS?: CIVIL WAR STATECRAFT... 23

vanquishing the American “slave power” might also advance the cause of
humanity and property upon the watery depths of the global oceans.16
***
Wartime progress toward maritime reform required glossing over issues
that divided nations and emphasizing those areas where common ground
existed. Beginning late in 1863, Charles Sumner chose a different path,
holding up the CSS Alabama as proof of British shame no less than that of
Confederate barbarism. In one of the most influential American addresses
on foreign relations in the nineteenth century, Sumner lambasted the
British government’s negligence in allowing the Florida and the Alabama
to be constructed and manned in their own most important Atlantic port.
The trademark verbal pyrotechnics usually reserved for “slave-mongers”
found a new target in erstwhile British allies, whose granting of “ocean
belligerence” Sumner would vilify for the better part of the next decade.17
In narrowing his lines of analysis, Sumner relinquished reform and
instead returned to the pattern of the 1850s, when American interests
and honor were largely detached from the international law reform pro-
posed by Cobdenites. This nationalist temper was evident in Sumner’s
invocation, late in 1864, of hoary British precedents as justification
for the Union’s seizure of the CSS Florida in the neutral waters of a
Brazilian port. Cobden lamented what he understood as his friend’s law-
yerly search for precedent, and his seeming abandonment of progressive
improvement. America’s “only title to existence as a Republic is that you
are supposed to be superior to what we were 60 years ago,” Cobden
chided.18 With Union victory in sight, Cobden was troubled by the “very
grave questions” that divided England and the United States, though he
still clung to the hope that “the whole world may be ready for a thorough
revolution in international maritime law.”19
If Sumner’s angry assault on England slowed the move toward liber-
alizing the oceans, the deaths of Lincoln and Cobden in 1865 proved
more damaging still. As Americans grew understandably pre-occupied
with how to shape the peace at home, Cobdenite initiatives abroad suf-
fered in the absence of what had been a singularly effective leader. Anglo-
American difficulties overshadowed promising developments from other
corners of the maritime community. In 1867, the State Department
rebuffed the overtures of the Italian government, noting that the
“remembrance of the great wrong” committed by hostile neutrals dur-
ing the Civil War meant that the “convenient time has not yet come”
for reviewing American participation in the Declaration of Paris. A year
24 R. BONNER

later, the festering controversy with England again damaged international

reform, as Secretary of State Seward reported that a Prussian-sponsored
treaty to protect high seas commerce during war was unlikely to “find
favor with the Senate… or with the country”20 Only with the elevation
of a new American President and Secretary of State in 1869 would hopes
for a new start be rekindled. Sumner urged his fellow Senators that year
to understand the global stakes of the so-called Alabama claims and to
initiate “an international debate, the greatest of our history and, before
it is finished in all probability the greatest of all history.” A critical ingre-
dient of Sumner’s efforts in these years was a renewed optimism in the
“remodeling of maritime international law” and in finding a comprehen-
sive solution that would achieve “some enduring safeguard for the future,
some landmark of Humanity” that would mark a “gain for all” through
the elevation of the “Law of Nations.”21
In his definitive biography of the Senator, the historian David Donald
suggested that Sumner’s vigorous campaign for British reparations to
the Union “envisioned a memorable and protracted negotiation, com-
parable perhaps to that leading to the Treaty of Westphalia, in which he
might play a shaping role in establishing new rules of international law.”
Donald went on to imply that Sumner was motivated primarily by visions
of personal glory—a sharp evaluation, which, while ringing partly true,
obscures the broader support for reform evident in the late 1860s. The
moral urgency of these post-war years was evident to an American who
called upon his government to build upon the African slave trade sup-
pression so that “the incendiary fires lit by the Alabama … may illumine
the way to a great and beneficent improvement in the laws of war and
nations.” In stressing the need for immediate action, this author pointed
out the range of figures who were making the world aware that naval
capture of enemy property represented “the greatest deformity, the most
abnormal and offensive remnant of barbarism, to be found in the law of
nations and the rules of war.”22
A new dispossession for liberalizing oceans was evident in the
Union’s Caribbean policies of the 1870s no less than its British diplo-
macy. By remaining aloof from Cuba’s “Ten Years’ War” (a conflict
precipitated in 1868 by those seeking to detach the island from the
Spanish Empire), Sumner and other abolitionist veterans made no
effort to hasten emancipation in what was the closest remaining bas-
tion of plantation bondage. Sumner did echo his wartime position
about the barbarities of certain kinds of maritime warfare, however,
 FREE SOIL, FREE LABOR, FREE SEAS?: CIVIL WAR STATECRAFT... 25

as he associated Cuban insurgents not with antislavery reform (which

they intermittently embraced) but with a piratical Confederacy at sea.
Insurgent ships prevented by the Spanish navy from taking prizes to a
court had no right to launch attacks, he insisted. Any vessel that did
so should be rightfully deemed by the international community as “a
lawless monster which civilized nations cannot sanction.”23
Despite high expectations, the 1871 settlement of the Alabama dam-
ages only modestly extended the 1856 Declaration of Paris and altogether
lacked the moral stature of the 1862 Anglo-American slave trade treaty.
Sumner’s own series of unsuccessful amendments demonstrates the missed
opportunities in these proceedings. He attempted, without success, to
apply the pirate analogy to “any armed vessel which plunders and burns
prizes at sea,” thus marking a turn away by his generation from extend-
ing the “enemies of all mankind” designation beyond the stateless pirates
and the brutal slavers. Perhaps more notable was the failure of Sumner’s
attempt to return to the Cobdenite program of immunizing private prop-
erty during war, a suggestion that Congress welcomed with little more
enthusiasm than it did his reported plea to end commercial blockades as a
new principle of international law.24
Sumner conveyed his disappointment to a British confidante by noting
“it is hard to think so good an opportunity was lost for doing so much
to improve the Law of Nations & especially to limit the sphere & peril of
war.” He made no mention of his own role in halting the momentum for
reform at the crucial juncture of 1863, nor did he seem all that interested
that the cause of innovation had already moved beyond statecraft and into
new venues for the academic codification of international law.25
***
Francis Lieber witnessed developments of the early 1870s with greater
optimism than his friend Sumner did. His peculiar vantage took shape
beyond official power and in consultation with other theorists such as
Johann Bluntschli of Switzerland. The difficulties of the Anglo-American
dispute did not loom so large in this venture, which sought to combine
the emergence of new states and new mechanisms with a new commit-
ment to establishing civilized agreements on the extent of hostile force.26
The maritime order’s lingering brutality inspired Sumner no less than
Lieber to take halting steps to build upon the humanitarian sensibilities of
slave-trade suppression, though neither did so with much success. Sumner
identified what he termed the “Coolie trade” of indentured workers from
Asia as a “mode of enslaving men” that differed from the transatlantic
26 R. BONNER

slave trade “in little else than the employment of fraud instead of force to
make its victims captive.” But neither he nor any of his fellow Senators
suggested a Pacific maritime order to soften hardships associated with
new forms of “liquid labor,” and the trade in Asian contract workers
remained an issue without a powerful advocate when Sumner died in
1874.27 Lieber, meanwhile, briefly focused on a different set of trans-
oceanic voyagers in the years before his death in 1872. In private corre-
spondence with Bluntschli, Lieber proposed a treaty structure that would
embody the principle that “peaceful migration is a characteristic of our
epoch.” Among the norms he suggested were provisions to ensure pas-
sengers’ health aboard transit ships (where horrific conditions prevailed
for those traveling in “steerage”), for the employment of international
officials at chief seaports, and for “good treatment of immigrants.” The
sole issue Lieber brought to public attention, however, was a proposed
ban on government-sanctioned deportation across the ocean of paupers
and criminals.28
Most post-Civil War American efforts to reform the law of the sea con-
centrated on property during war rather than persons during peacetime,
however. Here the efforts of Cobden, Sumner, Lieber, and others to forge
an international consensus around the immunity of shipping from bellig-
erent attacks bore their greatest fruit. By 1875, Professor James Lorimer
of the University of Edinburgh could term this proposal as one of “two
burning [international law] questions of the day.” Few topics were dis-
cussed more widely or enthusiastically within the burgeoning literature
of international law reform. The leading edge went to those who agreed
with American codifier David Dudley Field, who in 1876 insisted, with
a nod to Grotius, that “the sea is the highway of nations, and may well be
dedicated by common consent, to peaceful uses.”29
Broader trends and tendencies of the late nineteenth century were evi-
dent in the positions staked out both by proponents and opponents of
shielding seaborne property from the ill fortunes of war. A new generation
dismissed what they saw as a utopian impulse of maritime reformers and
instead appealed to the language of Darwinian struggle. The effectiveness
of Confederate vessels like the Alabama provided an important precedent
for subsequent innovations in the French guerre de course (undertaken by
those associated with the so-called Jeune Ecole). In 1887, the French the-
orist Gabriel Charmes followed his injunction for warships to “fall without
pity on the weak” with the impatient warning: “Let not short-sighted phi-
losophers tax us with barbarism.” The influential American author Alfred
 FREE SOIL, FREE LABOR, FREE SEAS?: CIVIL WAR STATECRAFT... 27

Thayer Mahan shared this worldview, though he was more politic than to
frame the issue with the same blunt attraction to force.30
The most vigorous line of argument taken up by advocates of maritime
reform concerned the sanctity of property. There was a growing realiza-
tion that even without destroying property, the increase of risk and the
wartime spike in insurance rates inevitably made the scourges of land war
spill out and reverberate throughout the maritime order upon which the
entire global economy depended. Such a concern for the prerogatives of
capital aligned with some of the most important principles of American
jurisprudence of the era.31 The wartime security of property drew strong
backing, however, even though more mundane factors delayed any over-
haul in a maritime code, which had grown increasingly complex with the
passage of time. The asymmetries of increasingly capital-intensive naval
fleets made it unlikely that “weak” and “strong” naval powers could find
common ground in setting out a new set of regulations (not to mention
mechanisms for enforcing them). Despite several high-profile attempts,
consensus for naval reform was undermined by the recurring tendency of
those involved to keep within recognized national interests.32
The strongest impetus for Victorian reform was the sense that the
world was improvable, and that the spirit of progress could advance from
one civilizing cause to another in the march toward a more humane order.
In stepping back from the details of Civil-War-era maritime reform to take
in the campaign as a whole, we can see the flaws in this generation’s expec-
tation that the “free men” and “free soil” of Union victory would produce
the “free seas” improvements so inspiring to many. The most important
forces at work in Union victory seemed to be fundamentally at odds with
the necessary ingredients of a liberalized ocean order. Nationalism had
won out over internationalism in 1865, and as the post-Civil War state
system incorporated new nations of Germany, Italy, and Japan, the power
of these new sovereigns only increased in importance. Similarly, war’s
destructiveness was enhanced rather than curbed by the American 1860s,
a development that Lieber’s code clearly pushed forward. Perhaps most
intriguing, the Union’s war against the Confederacy had provided a strik-
ing example of how the personal rights of human freedom were more
aligned with this progressive age than the prerogatives of property upon
which maritime reform in its Cobdenite form rested. The turn to eman-
cipation had been the hallmark of the age, showing with great clarity that
civilization could mean setting aside modes of ownership, even if these
were deeply entrenched in the American order.33
28 R. BONNER

NOTES
1. Charles Francis Adams Jr., “The Treaty of Washington: Before and
After” in Lee at Appomattox and Other Papers (Boston: Riverside
Press, 1902) 139–141.
2. Charles Francis Adams, The Trent Affair: An Historical Retrospect
(Boston, MA: Library Reprints, 1912), 24–25.
3. Bernard Semmel, Liberalism and Naval Strategy: Ideology, Interest,
and Sea Power During the Pax Britannica (London: Allen &
Unwin, 1986); David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); Leslie Butler, Critical
Americans: Victorian Intellectuals and Transatlantic Liberal Reform
(Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
4. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (London:
Macmillan, 1983); Eric J.  Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital,
1848–1875 (New York, NY: Scribner, 1975); David Eltis, Economic
Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1987).
5. Agenor de Gasparin, The Uprising of a Great People, trans. Mary
L. Booth (New York: Charles Scribner, 1861), 121.
6. Lieber to Sumner, June 11, 1868, in The Life and Letters of Francis
Lieber, ed. Thomas Sergeant Perry (Boston: Osgood, 1882),
387–88; John Fabian Witt, Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in
American History (New York: Free Press, 2012).
7. Lieber to Rufus Choate, in Life and Letters, ed. Perry, 165; David
J. Bederman, “The Sea,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of
International Law, eds. Bardo Fassbender, and Anne Peters
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Edward Keene, Beyond
the Anarchical Society: Grotius, Colonialism, and Order in World
Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
8. Sumner to Jacob Harvey, 1842, in Edward L. Pierce, Memoirs and
Letters of Charles Sumner, (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1877) 1: 200;
Frederick Douglass, The Heroic Slave (Boston: n.p. 1853), 237.
9. Anthony Howe, Free Trade and Liberal England, 1846–1946
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).
10. Jenny Martinez, The Slave Trade and the Origins of International
Human Rights Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012);
Wilhelm Georg Grew, The Epochs of International Law (New York,
NY: Walter de Gruyter, 2000); Adams to Rush, in Policy of the
 FREE SOIL, FREE LABOR, FREE SEAS?: CIVIL WAR STATECRAFT... 29

United States Toward Maritime Commerce in War: Volume I

1776–1914, ed. Carlton Savage, (Washington: GPO, 1934).
11. Savage, Policy of the United States.
12. Jay to Seward, October 17, 1861, in Papers of William Henry
Seward, Microfilm set, Reel 66; Adams to Earl Russell, November
6, 1861, in Class B.  Correspondence with British Ministers and
Agents … Relating to the Slave Trade (London: Harrison and Sons,
1862), 166; Charles Sumner, “Final Suppression of the Slave Trade,”
in Works of Charles Sumner (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1875) 6:
485–6; Congressional Globe Vol. 61, Part 2, (February 3, 1869), 818.
13. Speech of Hon. Charles Sumner on Maritime Rights, (Washington:
Congressional Globe Office, 1862), 13; Cobden to Sumner
January 23, 1862 and Cobden to Chevalier, October 1862, both
quoted in John Morley, The Life of Richard Cobden (London:
Fisher Unwin, 1906): 858, 865; Stephen C. Neff, Justice in Blue
and Gray: A Legal History of the Civil War (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2010).
14. Semmel, Liberalism and Naval Strategy; L-B Hautefeuille,
Quelques Questions de Droit International maritime, à Propos de la
Guerre d’Amérique (Leipzig: A. Frank, 1861); Henry Ashworth,
International Maritime Law and Its Effects upon Trade
(Manchester: Alex. Ireland, 1864).
15. Lieber to Sumner, May 23 1863, in Papers of Charles Sumner,
Microfilm Edition, Roll 64; Witt, Lincoln’s Code, passim.
16. Cobden to John Bigelow, Midhurst, October 6, 1863, in
Retrospections of an Active Life (New York: Baker and Taylor,)
2:79; William Dayton to Drouyn de l’Huys, November 6, 1863, in
Foreign Relations of the United States, 1864, 805–06.
17. Charles Sumner, Our Foreign Relations (New York: Young Men’s
Republican Union, 1863).
18. Charles Sumner, “Case of the Florida: Illustrated by Precedents of
British Seizures in Neutral Waters,” in The Works of Charles Sumner
(Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1875) 9: 141; Morley, Cobden, 924.
19. Cobden to Sumner, January 11, 1865, in Morley, Cobden, 924.
20. Seward to Curruti, December 11, 1867 and Seward to Fish,
February 25, 1868, in Savage, Policy of the United States, 479.
21. Pierce, Memoirs and Letters, 4:384.
22. David Donald, Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man (New York:
Knopf, 1970), 393–94; George G.  Yeaman, Some Observations
30 R. BONNER

Upon International Prize Law and the Abolition of Maritime

Captures (Copenhagen: Bianco Luno, 1867), 6; see also William
De Burgh The Elements of Maritime International Law (London:
Longmans, Green and Co., 1868) and L. B. Hautefeuille, Questions
de Droit Maritime International (Paris: Guillaumin, 1868).
23. Sumner, “National Affairs at Home and Abroad (September 22,
1869),” Works 13:122; Jay Sexton, “The United States, the Cuban
Rebellion and the Multilateral Initiative of 1875,” Diplomatic
History 30 (2006): 335–365.
24. Sumner’s amendments to the 1871 treaty, proposed and then
defeated in secret session, are summarized in Pierce, Memoirs and
Letters 4: 489–90.
25. Donald, Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man, 507.
26. Martti Koskenniemi, Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall
of International Law, 1870–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001).
27. Sumner, “Denunciation of the Coolie Trade: Resolution from the
Committee on Foreign Relations, January 16 1867,” Works 11: 82;
Scott Reynolds Nelson, “After Slavery: Forced Drafts of Irish and
Chinese Labor in the American Civil War, or the Search for Liquid
Labor,” in Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making
of the Modern World, eds. Emma Christopher, Cassandra Pybus, and
Marcus Rediker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
28. Lieber to Bluntschli August 21, 1868, in Life and Letters, 338–39;
Lieber to Hamilton Fish, in New York Times, September 29, 1869.
29. James Lorimer, Studies National and International… 1864–1889
(Edinburgh: W. Green and Sons, 1890), 111; David Dudley Field,
Outlines of an International Code (New York, NY: Baker, 1876),
526–32, 539–41; [Anonymous], “Bluntschli’s International Law,”
The American Law Review 3 (1869): 397–403.
30. Charmes quoted in Semmel, Liberalism and Naval Strategy, 90;
Witt, Lincoln’s Code, 345–48.
31. Pat O’Malley, “The Discipline of Violence: State, Capital and the
Regulation of Naval Warfare,” Sociology (1988); Jonathan Levy,
Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in
America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012);
Morton J.  Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law,
1870–1960: The Crisis of Legal Orthodoxy (New York, NY: Oxford
University Press, 1992).
 FREE SOIL, FREE LABOR, FREE SEAS?: CIVIL WAR STATECRAFT... 31

32. British opposition to naval codification in the 1870s was detailed in

Joseph King, “International Agreements and the Sufferers in War,”
The Westminster Review 143 (1895), pp. 492–502.
33. Witt, Lincoln’s Code; James Oakes, Freedom National: The
Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–65 (New York:
Norton, 2012), passim.
 CHAPTER 3

The American Civil War

and the Transatlantic Triumph of Volitional
Citizenship

Paul Quigley

Among the most far-reaching of the American Civil War’s consequences

was the transformation of citizenship. Four years prior to the war, the Dred
Scott decision categorically denied African American citizenship, not only
in the slaveholding South but in the supposedly free northern states as well.
Yet by 1868, slavery had been abolished nationwide, and the fourteenth
amendment created the new constitutional category of national citizen-
ship, guaranteeing equal legal protection to all citizens, whether black or
white. There were, of course, glaring limitations to these gains. But there
is no denying the fact that within eleven years Americans rebuilt the basic
structure of citizenship. Moreover, the war itself had already begun to alter
the nature of citizenship. In both the Union and the Confederacy, the exi-
gencies of near-total war caused governments to make new demands upon
the governed, while also magnifying people’s expectations of government.
Policies such as taxation and conscription forced men and women on both
sides to reexamine their basic conceptions of what it meant to be a citizen.

P. Quigley ( )
Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, United States

© The Author(s) 2016 33

J. Nagler et al. (eds.), The Transnational Significance of the
American Civil War, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40268-0_3
34 P. QUIGLEY

The war and its aftermath, in short, led to a fundamental overhaul of the
ideas and practices of citizenship in the United States.
This transformation—like the American Civil War in general—has typically
been seen in insular terms. Historians have focused on the changing meanings
and boundaries of citizenship for those already present in the country. This
is not surprising. The Civil War and Reconstruction systematized national
citizenship, forged a stronger, more unified national identity, and triggered
a huge expansion in central government authority. What narrative could be
more suited to a national history framework than that?
But what happens if we set these developments within a broader con-
text? When we widen our scope, it becomes apparent that the transfor-
mation of citizenship was not limited to American shores. In Europe
too—and, although they are beyond the reach of this essay, other regions
of the world—the concept was in flux. In simple terms, the American and
French Revolutions initiated a transition, unfolding throughout the long
nineteenth century, from traditional “subjecthood” toward modern “citi-
zenship.” (This shift also took place to some degree in monarchies like
Great Britain, even though they retained the term “subject.”) Whereas
early modern people had conceived allegiance as being natural and hier-
archical, denizens of the modern world began to think of it as being arti-
ficially created and horizontal. The revolutions of 1776 and 1789 posited
a perfectly equal status between all citizens, regardless of their social posi-
tion. Each citizen owed a set of clearly defined obligations to the govern-
ment, and, in return, each citizen could expect certain political, social,
and economic rights. Of course, the theory of equal citizenship rarely
translated neatly into practice. Even in France and the United States, the
pioneers of democratic citizenship, access to the benefits of citizenship
were severely curtailed along lines of race, class, and gender. To some
degree, these exclusions diminished over time. Yet nowhere was this a
straightforward story of inevitable liberal expansion. The post-Civil War
admission of African American men, for example, came along with a deep-
ening exclusion of American women. And in Britain, the enfranchisement
of the “respectable” working class in 1867 came at the cost of increasingly
negative racialized depictions of the Irish “other.” The story becomes
even more complicated when we consider the different dimensions of this
concept—the political, the civic, and the socioeconomic—that scholars of
citizenship have explored. The important point is that in the nineteenth
century, citizenship was in flux throughout the Atlantic world, and was
not always moving consistently in the direction of liberal progress.1
 THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR AND THE TRANSATLANTIC TRIUMPH... 35

Although citizenship followed different paths in different places, it also

developed in a more transnational process, with ideas and influences spill-
ing over national borders. It was redefined not only within but between
different nation-states.2 This was especially true because the corollary of
citizenship’s internal uniformity was a sharpening of the line that sepa-
rates insiders from outsiders, citizens from aliens. As Rogers Brubaker has
explained, “By inventing the national citizen and the legally homogeneous
national citizenry, the [French] Revolution simultaneously invented the
foreigner.”3 To define its own citizens (or, in the case of European mon-
archs, its subjects), each modern nation-state had to define the oppos-
ing category of “alien.” The importance of that line between citizen and
alien, however, raised a vital question. What happened when an individual
wished to transfer his allegiance (for the category was invariably defined
in masculine terms) from one nation-state to another? Thanks to the mass
migrations of the nineteenth century, this problem became endemic,
raising a host of troubling questions. What determined an individual’s
national allegiance? Should it be based on place of birth, or parentage,
or individual choice? Was expatriation a natural right? What should natu-
ralization require? Nineteenth-century governments answered these basic
questions in surprisingly different ways, producing a complicated bureau-
cracy of citizenship that varied widely across space and time.4
The most important divergence was between traditional notions of
perpetual or indelible allegiance—the idea that allegiance was ascribed by
birth—and the notion of volitional allegiance. The central point of con-
tention was whether or not an individual ought to be able to freely expa-
triate himself from one country and naturalize as a citizen or subject of
another. For much of the nineteenth century, European monarchies like
Great Britain and Prussia answered no. They adhered to the traditional
model of perpetual allegiance; “once a subject, always a subject,” as the
maxim went. But in the United States, which had been born in a mass
act of expatriation, allegiance was more often seen as being volitional—
something one could change at will. This disagreement caused recurrent
conflicts in transatlantic relations, particularly between the United States
and Great Britain, from the earliest years of America’s existence. It would
continue to do so until the period 1868–1870 when legislation and trea-
ties in and between countries on both sides of the Atlantic instituted a new
regime of consensual expatriation and naturalization.
Why then? Why was it in the late 1860s, in the wake of the American
Civil War, that the long rise of volitional citizenship reached fruition? This
36 P. QUIGLEY

essay will place the long-term transatlantic debate over allegiance in the
context of the American Civil War—and vice versa—evaluating connec-
tions, entanglements, and mutual influences between the two. As we will
see, the war did not cause the triumph of volitional citizenship in any
direct sense. But the two processes were deeply interrelated, reminding
us that the significance of the American Civil War was not confined to
American shores, or to the years 1861 through 1865. On the contrary, it
was deeply enmeshed in longer-term international processes—including
the decades-long transatlantic struggle over the meaning of allegiance.
Even as the United States was coming into being, expatriation and
naturalization were already subjects of transatlantic debate. After all, the
American Revolution was itself an act of mass expatriation, in defiance of
Britain’s claims upon the loyalty of American colonists. Thomas Jefferson,
among other revolutionary leaders, consistently pressed for the free trans-
fer of allegiance. He even authored a bill (which never passed) for the
Virginia state legislature to establish expatriation as a “natural right.”5
In the decades following the Revolution, the two models of allegiance
frequently collided, largely due to Britain’s insatiable appetite for sailors.
Britain asserted the right to impress into naval service any man born a
British subject—even if he had subsequently naturalized as a US citizen.
From the American perspective, this was an unjust denial of the right to
withdraw from one national allegiance and forge another of one’s free
will. This issue contributed to the deterioration of Anglo-American rela-
tions during the Jefferson presidency and helped lead to the War of 1812.
As Denver Brunsman has shown, the ongoing disagreement with Britain
convinced Americans that volitional citizenship formed a central pillar of
their emerging national identity.6
Still, in the decades following the Revolution American commitment
to the principle was neither uniformly accepted nor fully implemented.
Federalists denied the right of expatriation, and even though Thomas
Jefferson and many other Republicans championed it, they never success-
fully wrote that right into law.7 This hesitancy continued long into the
nineteenth century. When naturalized US citizens were forced to fulfill
military obligations to their native-born countries, notably Prussia, the
United States tended to protest in principle but did not normally inter-
vene in any tangible way—passively acquiescing to the doctrine of per-
petual allegiance. In an influential letter of 1840, Henry Wheaton, the US
minister to Prussia, asserted that his government would offer protection
to naturalized citizens anywhere except their native country—effectively
 THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR AND THE TRANSATLANTIC TRIUMPH... 37

rendering such citizens liable for military service if they returned home.
This continued to be practical policy until after the Civil War.8
Even in the 1840s and 1850s, though, there were signs that the US gov-
ernment might be prepared to take a harder line. Writing amidst the politi-
cal turmoil of 1848 to George Bancroft, American minister in London,
Secretary of States James Buchanan relayed President Polk’s gratitude for
Bancroft’s efforts to protect Irish-born naturalized US citizens charged
with treason by the British government. “Whenever the occasion may
require it,” Buchanan wrote, “you will resist the British doctrine of per-
petual allegiance, and maintain the American principle, that British native-
born subjects, after they have been naturalized under our laws, are, to all
intents and purposes, as much American citizens, and entitled to the same
degree of protection, as though they had been born in the United States.”
Here was the crux of the issue: that any individual had the right to transfer
his allegiance from one nation-state to another, and that once he did so his
status ought to be perfectly equal to a natural-born citizen.9
Although in this example the issue was whether or not naturalized citi-
zens could be charged with treason in another country, it was military
service that emerged most often as the sticking point; it was military ser-
vice that did the most to highlight the problems of naturalization policy.
Ever since the French Revolution, military service had been widely seen
as a defining obligation of the citizen. When they formulated a new con-
stitution in 1848, the Swiss forbade dual nationality in large part because
of the danger that one man could be subject to the draft in two coun-
tries. And in its new constitution of 1850, Prussia ruled that “The right
to emigrate cannot be restricted by the state, except with respect to the
duty of military service.” The right of expatriation was gathering momen-
tum, but military obligations often impeded it. European governments’
claims upon the service of their natural-born subjects continued to bedevil
American governments in the 1850s. In 1858, the new American minis-
ter in Berlin, Joseph Wright, urged his superiors in Washington that the
time had come to take a stronger stand. Both Secretary of State Lewis
Cass and James Buchanan—by then president—agreed. Cass reported
that Buchanan considered expatriation a natural right and believed that
“the doctrine of perpetual allegiance is a relic of barbarism.”10 By the late
1850s, then, the issue looked to be coming to a head. While Prussians and
Britons continued to insist that allegiance was perpetual, Americans were
more interested than ever in asserting the right of free expatriation and
protecting the rights of naturalized citizens.
38 P. QUIGLEY

Then came the American Civil War. The outbreak of war often renders
allegiance a more urgent issue than ever. This had been especially true of
the national wars, or people’s wars, that became more prevalent beginning
with the American and French revolutions. If one’s nationality determined
one’s allegiance in wartime, where did migrants fit in? When warring gov-
ernments instituted conscription, as they did with increasing frequency,
what were the obligations of immigrants? In many cases, these questions
were moot because immigrants responded with enthusiasm to the call to
arms. Countless Irish-Americans, for example, embraced the war as an
opportunity to prove their loyalty and full American citizenship.11 This
attitude reflected a broader trend; across the world during the long nine-
teenth century, from France and Prussia to the United States and Latin
America, citizenship was becoming increasingly identified with military
service.12 Not all immigrants welcomed the opportunity to demonstrate
their allegiance by fighting in the American Civil War, however. Such men
found it easier to stay out of the war in its early months when service was
voluntary. Even then, there was a good deal of community pressure—
sometimes violent pressure—to join up, even for men of foreign birth.
But it was with national conscription, instituted in the Confederacy in
April 1862 and the Union in March 1863, that the role of foreign-born
men began to raise fundamental questions about the nature of allegiance.
In the Confederacy, the problem was exacerbated by the language of
the conscription legislation, which targeted “white men who are resi-
dents of the Confederate States.” The definition of that term “resident”
quickly became an object of controversy. Confederate officials interpreted
it broadly, taking it to mean any man who had acquired domicile in the
Confederate States, regardless of whether or not he had formally natural-
ized. (“Domicile” was itself a contested legal term, but was normally used
in cases where a man had demonstrated some intention of remaining in a
new country by performing certain acts such as voting, owning property,
or marrying.) But many British-born men objected, arguing that because
they were not Confederate citizens, they were not liable for conscription.
These men complained to their consuls, who, in turn, involved the British
foreign office. Britain’s official position was that only formal naturaliza-
tion could render a man liable for conscription. According to the tenet
of perpetual allegiance, Britain should have gone even further than that;
should have denied the Confederacy’s right to treat as a citizen any man
who had been born a British subject. But such a stance was, thanks to the
scale of transatlantic migration, simply untenable by the 1860s. So, British
 THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR AND THE TRANSATLANTIC TRIUMPH... 39

representatives merely insisted that Britons who had not naturalized as

American or Confederate citizens ought to be exempt. At the beginning,
Confederate officials were fairly compliant, releasing bona fide British sub-
jects. But as the war went on, and as the Confederacy’s need for man-
power became ever more desperate, Confederate frustrations mounted,
and enrollment officials became less and less willing to release foreign con-
scripts. Ultimately, efforts to protect British subjects from the draft, in the
context of a general deterioration of Anglo-Confederate relations, led to
the expulsion of consuls from Confederate territory in 1863.
In the Union, the underlying issues—how to determine the allegiance
and, therefore, the military responsibilities of immigrants—were similar.
But the outcome was different. This was partly because the language of
the Union’s conscription legislation was clearer. It avoided the confusion
of the Confederacy’s “resident” terminology, and instead described those
liable for the draft as “all able-bodied male citizens of the United States,
and persons of foreign birth who shall have declared on oath their inten-
tion to become citizens.” There were still disputes about the liability of
certain individuals for the draft, but in the Union these disputes were sim-
pler because they did not also involve the meaning of nebulous legal terms
like “resident” and “domicile.” The other major difference stemmed from
the status of the United States as a recognized nation-state that already
commanded the respect of the international community. Because foreign
consuls enjoyed stable and official relations with Washington, in a way that
they decidedly did not with Richmond, the two sides were generally able
to reach agreement. The US government never came close to expelling
foreign consuls for interfering with the process of conscription.13
Still, during the American Civil War, the tables were turned. As the
Union and Confederate governments mobilized for all-out war, they
needed to enlist as many men as they could, wherever those men happened
to have been born. Now it was European countries protecting their sub-
jects and citizens from American service. Even during the war, though, the
old problem of naturalized US citizens being forced into European armies
persisted. Thus Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 message to Congress, as well as
addressing Union enlistment of foreign-born men, also dealt with those
foreigners who “become citizens of the United States for the sole purpose
of evading duties imposed by the laws of their native countries,” and who
then returned to their home countries under the protection of US citizen-
ship. Secretary of State William Seward, likewise, recognized the irony of
ongoing US efforts to protect naturalized citizens from service in Europe
40 P. QUIGLEY

while requiring the service of certain foreign-born men for the Union war
effort. The situation descended almost into farce when some foreign-born
naturalized citizens fled to their native countries in order to avoid Union
service—only to then appeal to the US government to protect them from
military duties back home. This was no longer a unidirectional problem.14
While the war was going on, of course, America’s energies were directed
inward. This was not the time to be actively pressuring other countries to
adopt the American model of citizenship. In a May 1862 letter conveying
his gratitude to Prussia for releasing two US citizens from military service,
William Seward expressed the hope that once the war was over, “and Prussia
shall have gotten relief from her present anxieties, as I trust will be the
case, we shall try to come to some definite and harmonious understand-
ing with her upon this vexed subject of conflict between our naturalization
and her military laws.” But as he explained in another letter later that year,
now was not the time; the Civil War was causing the United States and
its citizens to be treated with less respect around the world than before.
American merchants, for example, were being mistreated in Latin America.
And German-born men who had naturalized as American citizens contin-
ued to be drafted when they returned to their native states. “The reason for
all this,” he explained, “is plain enough. We are divided and at war among
ourselves…. All the world knows, even if we do not, that we cannot wage
this war, on our part, with effect, and, at the same time, unnecessarily and
rashly engage in wars with other nations which may deny us justice.”15 For
the moment, the United States simply lacked authority on the world stage.
All signs pointed to a renewed campaign to extend the American
principle of volitional citizenship across the Atlantic, once the war was
over—and once Prussia, one of the key European players, had resolved
its own conflicts. President Andrew Johnson certainly hoped so, raising
the issue in his annual messages of 1866 and 1867. In 1866, he stated
the problem clearly: “This government has claimed for all persons not
convicted, or accused, or suspected of crime, an absolute political right
of self-expatriation, and a choice of new national allegiance. Most of
the European states have dissented from this principle.” In 1867, too,
Johnson urged Congress that the apparent stabilization of politics in the
German states had “induced me to renew the effort to obtain a just and
prompt settlement of the long-vexed question concerning the claims of
foreign states for military service from their subjects naturalized in the
United States.” The United States, in Johnson’s opinion, ought to solidify
its commitment to volitional citizenship once and for all.16
 THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR AND THE TRANSATLANTIC TRIUMPH... 41

The will to act gained strength from two sources of mounting frustra-
tion in the late 1860s: first, Britain’s mistreatment of Irish-born Fenians
who claimed US citizenship status but were treated as British traitors; and
second, German states’ ongoing demands for military service. The latter
issue prompted the New York Times to reflect in 1866 on the evolution of
America’s power on the world stage. “In those evil days when secession
was brewing,” the Times explained, “the United States did not occupy
such a proud position among the nations of the world as they do today.
A remonstrance from either one of our Ministers abroad was treated
respectfully and answered courteously, but nothing further came of it.” But
now, thanks to America’s post-war strength, the US minister had already
secured the concession that any Prussian who moved to the United States
as a minor and remained there for at least ten years would not be held
liable to service. The Times saw this as part of a longer trend. In the War
of 1812, “we knocked the bottom out of the old British doctrine of ‘once
a subject, always a subject,’” and that same principle was still worth fight-
ing for now. Success was coming ever closer, in the Times’ estimation.17
William H. Seward, still Secretary of State, was determined to press the
American advantage. Writing to the American minister in Prussia, Joseph
A. Wright, in September 1866, Seward asked him to “suggest informally
to Count Bismarck the inquiry, whether it would not be deemed con-
sistent now with the dignity and greatness of Prussia to recognize the
principle of naturalization as a natural and inherent right of manhood.”
He found it difficult to believe that Prussia really needed the service of
former subjects. Furthermore, he suggested that by championing the
right of naturalization, Prussia could join the United States at the fore-
front of historical progress. As he put it, nothing would “place Prussia on
an elevation so high among the modern nations as the adoption of that
principle which lies at the basis of the American republic.” The following
year, after the historian George Bancroft replaced Wright, Seward urged
Bancroft to pick up where his predecessor had left off. “The question,”
Seward explained, “is one which seems to have been ripening for very
serious discussion when the breaking out of the civil war in this country
obliged us to forego every form of debate which was likely to produce
hostility or even irritation abroad.” Now that both countries were at
peace, Seward urged Bancroft to move forward.18
At the same time, the long-standing dispute with Britain was enter-
ing a new, more heated phase as the Irish-American Fenian movement
challenged British authority in Ireland. The British authorities reacted
42 P. QUIGLEY

vigorously, suspending habeas corpus and charging suspects with trea-

son. Because so many of those arrested were (or, at least, claimed to be)
naturalized American citizens, this became a diplomatic issue between
Britain and the United States, repeating the problems of 1848. American
authorities demanded that naturalized US citizens, regardless of their
birthplace, be treated as foreigners by British courts and allowed the
assistance of US consuls. Britain, however, maintained that US natural-
ization was meaningless and that any man born a British subject remained
so for life. Once again, the right of expatriation was pitted against the
tradition of indelible allegiance.19
Although the basic disagreement stretched back decades, the specific
form it took in the late 1860s was influenced by the recent experience of
the American Civil War. Fresh from victory in the Civil War, the United
States brought a new sense of its national power on the world stage to its
dealings with Britain, just as it was doing in its negotiations with Prussia.
Furthermore, because so many naturalized Irish-Americans had fought for
the Union, American officials felt a powerful sense of obligation to repay
their military service. The connection was obvious since the Fenian leader-
ship had grown to maturity in the ranks of the Union army. In a March
1866 letter to Charles Francis Adams, Seward insisted that the American
stance of equal rights for naturalized citizens was even more important
now because so many of those new citizens had demonstrated their alle-
giance to the United States in wartime—those who “who have borne arms
in the defence of the United States in a war with public enemies.” Their
loyalty had been proved with their blood, and the US government would
not desert them now. Union service came up often in the discussion of
individual cases, and was invariably deployed as an additional reason for
the US government to protect naturalized citizens abroad.20
Concurrent clashes with both Prussia and Britain brought forth a
groundswell of American opinion in support of the rights of naturalized
citizens abroad. In the North American Review, John T. Morse captured
the dominant sentiment that this conflict was, at root, a battle between
the New World and the Old, between the future and the past. The right
of expatriation ought to be absolute. Many politicians made the same
case. Commenting on the Fenian cases, for example, Illinois congress-
man Norman Judd asserted that these issues were not specific to Irish-
Americans or any other single group; they represented a fundamental
principle, “a question of nationality.” Naturalized citizens deserved pre-
cisely the same protections as native-born citizens, whether at home or
 THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR AND THE TRANSATLANTIC TRIUMPH... 43

abroad; “there is no conditional citizenship.”21 Congress finally adopted

this principle with the Expatriation Act of July 1868. The act began with
the unequivocal statement that “the right of expatriation is a natural and
inherent right of all people, indispensable to the enjoyment of the rights
of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and went on to guarantee
naturalized citizens equal status and protection. The 1868 law enshrined
the right of expatriation—and therefore the principle of volitional
citizenship—in US law.22
By this point, American efforts to export the principle across the Atlantic
had begun to bear fruit. George Bancroft, American minister in Berlin,
persuaded the North German Confederation to sign a treaty affirming
the right of naturalization. This was the first in a series of similar agree-
ments, known as the Bancroft Treaties, which the United States signed
with other German states (Bavaria, Baden, Wurttemberg, and Hesse, all in
1868); other European countries (Belgium, 1868; Norway and Sweden,
1869); and Latin American nations (Mexico in 1868 and Ecuador in
1872). Underpinned by the 1868 Expatriation Act, these accords signaled
not only that Americans were now fully committed to the principle of
volitional allegiance but also that they were successfully convincing other
members of the Atlantic community to subscribe to it.23
The triumph of volitional citizenship would not be complete, how-
ever, until it was agreed to by Great Britain, the United States’s historic
nemesis in matters of allegiance. Throughout the late 1860s, the United
States maintained pressure on Britain to reform its naturalization laws.24
In a parliamentary debate of March 20, 1868, the liberal M.P. William
Forster insisted that it was time for Britain to stop defending the unten-
able doctrine of perpetual allegiance. As he pointed out, British officials
had in practice already stopped adhering to the full implications of the
doctrine, “and a curious proof of the fact was furnished during the course
of the late American civil war. Thousands upon thousands of English
and Irish emigrants in America endeavored to claim exemption from the
conscription … but we found it impossible to assert their right to exemp-
tion, after they had taken any step towards renouncing their allegiance to
the English Crown. Consequently we gave up all idea of affording them
protection, but we still claimed to regard them as subjects of the Queen.”
Forster set these events within the longer context of the War of 1812, the
diplomatic discussions of the antebellum era, and the more recent Fenian
issue. Forster’s observation about the impact of the American Civil War
was echoed in the same debate by Sir Robert Collier, who agreed that
44 P. QUIGLEY

there simply had to be a legal way for a man to transfer his allegiance in
this age of mass migrations. “During the American civil war,” he said,
“it was found practically impossible to give protection to all persons who
claimed to be British subjects, but had for years acted as citizens of their
adopted country.” Collier was sure that “this principle of action ought to
receive due recognition” in the current debate.25
The government’s response to such calls was to create a Royal
Commission, in May 1868, charged with investigating the current sys-
tem of naturalization. In 1869, the commission issued a 156-page report
which reviewed the laws of naturalization in various countries and the
controversies the issue had generated. The evidence ranged widely,
from the 1792–1815 Anglo-American impressment controversies to
US-Prussian conscription disputes in the 1840s and 1850s. One section
covered the American Civil War, detailing conscription disputes between
foreign governments and both the Union and the Confederacy. Although
these Civil War disputes were not as important as the other factors, they
clearly formed a significant context for the Commission’s deliberations.
The report recommended that Britain ought to follow the United States,
and now several German states, in accepting the right of expatriation.
Previously, British governments had upheld indelible allegiance partly
because of the need to impress military labor. But that practice had now
died. Furthermore, the principle of indelible allegiance was simply unten-
able in the 1860s, thanks to the sheer scale of migration, particularly from
Europe to the United States. In sum, the Commission presented the only
sensible course as the adoption of an American-style right of expatriation
from one country and voluntary naturalization in another.26 Although
the discussion on how to implement this recommendation dragged on, in
May of 1870 Great Britain finally passed a Naturalization Act and signed
a concomitant naturalization treaty with the United States.
The transatlantic triumph of volitional citizenship was essentially com-
plete. This was the culmination of a long story, stretching from the 1770s
to the 1870s. It was driven by the mass migrations of the nineteenth cen-
tury, which forced governments on both sides of the Atlantic to answer
difficult questions about migration and allegiance, combined with the
ideology of the age of revolutions, which rested on the new concept of
volitional citizenship. The issue became particularly controversial during
the wars fought by a variety of Atlantic World powers during the long
nineteenth century; wars between modern nation-states that demanded
the absolute allegiance of their citizens and subjects. Had there been no
 THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR AND THE TRANSATLANTIC TRIUMPH... 45

Civil War in the United States, it is likely that a roughly similar outcome
would have been achieved at roughly the same time.
But the American Civil War did happen, and its occurrence had an
important impact on the way the debate over allegiance culminated. The
Civil War implicated both the Union and Confederate governments in
exactly the same kinds of disputes that had long crystallized the prob-
lems of allegiance—only now, instead of complaining about American
citizens being held for military service overseas, they were dealing with
the protests of foreign governments about American conscription poli-
cies. This turning of the tables rendered foreign enlistment a multidi-
rectional problem, giving governments on both sides of the Atlantic
more reason to work toward a resolution. Furthermore, in strengthening
America’s international position, victory in the Civil War emboldened
officials such as William Seward to champion volitional citizenship more
forcefully in negotiations with Prussia and Great Britain. American deter-
mination to protect its naturalized citizens from Britain was boosted even
further because so many Irish-Americans had proved their US loyalty as
Union soldiers. Within a much broader public debate over the meaning
of citizenship that was prompted by Union victory and emancipation,
Americans were more likely than ever to be prepared to fight for the prin-
ciple that citizenship—including the benefits of protection against for-
eign governments—was an equal, uniform category which applied to all
American citizens, without distinction of race or of birthplace. Civil War
America’s redefinition of citizenship went beyond the Reconstruction
amendments to include expatriation and naturalization policies at home
and abroad; like so many aspects of Civil War history, it can only be
understood as a transnational phenomenon.

NOTES
1. Andreas Fahrmeir, Citizenship: The Rise and Fall of a Modern
Concept (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); Rogers
Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); James
H. Kettner, The Development of American Citizenship, 1608–1870
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978); Rogers
Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1997); T. H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social
Class, reprint (London: Pluto Press, 1992); Catherine Hall, Keith
46 P. QUIGLEY

McClelland, and Jane Rendall, Defining the Victorian Nation:

Class, Race, Gender and the British Reform Act of 1867 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press 2000).
2. For a helpful discussion of transnational history, see “AHR
Conversation: On Transnational History,” American Historical
Review 111(2006): 1440–1464.
3. Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood, 46.
4. Robert H. Wiebe, Who We Are: A History of Popular Nationalism
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); John C.  Torpey,
The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
5. Douglas Bradburn, The Citizenship Revolution: Politics and the
Creation of the American Union, 1774–1804 (Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press 2009), 106.
6. Denver Brunsman, “Subjects vs. Citizens: Impressment and
Identity in the Anglo-American Atlantic,” Journal of the Early
Republic 30 (2010): 557–586.
7. Bradburn, The Citizenship Revolution, 104–123.
8. U.S.  Congress, Senate, Messages of the President of the United States:
Communicating, in Compliance with Resolutions of the Senate,
Information Relative to the Compulsory Enlistment of American Citizens
in the Army of Prussia, &c, 1860, 36th Cong., 1st sess., Ex. Doc. 38, 133.
9. James Buchanan to George Bancroft, October 28, 1848, in
U.S.  Congress, House of Representatives, American Citizens
Imprisoned in Ireland. Message from the President of the United
States, 30th Cong., 2nd sess., Ex. Doc. 19, 26.
10. Francis Wharton, A Digest of the International Law of the United
States (Washington, 1887), 385–89. On antebellum American atti-
tudes toward expatriation and naturalization, see Christian
G.  Samito, Becoming American under Fire: Irish Americans,
African Americans, and the Politics of Citizenship during the Civil
War Era (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 175–179;
I-Mien Tsiang, The Question of Expatriation in American Prior to
1907 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1942), 71–82.
11. Samito, Becoming American under Fire; Susannah J.  Ural, Civil
War Citizens: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity in America’s Bloodiest
Conflict (New York: New  York University Press, 2010); William
Burton, Melting Pot Soldiers: The Union’s Ethnic Regiments (New
York: Fordham University Press, 1998).
 THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR AND THE TRANSATLANTIC TRIUMPH... 47

12. Daniel Moran, and Arthur Waldron, eds., The People in Arms:
Military Myth and National Mobilization Since the French
Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003);
Hilda Sábato, “On Political Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century
Latin America,” The American Historical Review 106, (2001):
1290–1315.
13. Paul Quigley, “Civil War Conscription and the International
Boundaries of Citizenship,” Journal of the Civil War Era, 4 (2014):
373–397.
14. Report of the Royal Commissioners for Inquiring Into the Laws of
Naturalization and Allegiance (London, 1869), 41; “President’s
Message,” New York Times, December 10, 1863; William Seward
to John Lothrop Motley, April 21, 1863, in Wharton, A Digest of
the International Law of the United States, 389–390; Samito,
Becoming American under Fire, 178–179.
15. William Seward to Norman B.  Judd, May 6, 1862, and William
Seward to Edward J.  Morris, September 19, 1862, both in
U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Message of the President
of the United States to the Two Houses of Congress at the
Commencement of the Third Session of the Thirty-seventh
Congress, 37th Cong., 3rd sess., Ex. Doc 1, 543–544, 784–785.
16. Executive Documents Printed by Order of the House of
Representatives, during the Second Session of the thirty-ninth
Congress, 1866-’67, Volume I (Washington, 1867), 13–14; Papers
Relating to Foreign Affairs: Accompanying the Annual Message of
the President to the Second Session Fortieth Congress, Part 1
(Washington, 1868), 21.
17. “Naturalized American Citizens in Germany—The Action of Our
Government,” New York Times, September 21, 1866. See also
“American Citizens Abroad,” New York Times, September 13, 1865;
F. W. Seward to Joseph A. Wright, September 22, 1866, Executive
Documents Printed by Order of the House of Representatives, 45–46;
W. Hunter to Joseph A. Wright, ibid., 50.
18. William Seward to Joseph A. Wright, September 24, 1866; William
Seward to George Bancroft, August 22, 1867, both in Executive
Documents Printed by Order of the House of Representatives, 46–47,
583–584.
19. Charles F.  Adams to William H.  Seward, February 22, 1866,
Executive Documents Printed by Order of the House of Representatives,
48 P. QUIGLEY

69; Brian Jenkins, Fenians and Anglo-American Relations During

Reconstruction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969).
20. William H. Seward to Charles F. Adams, March 22, 1866, Executive
Documents Printed by Order of the House of Representatives, 86–88;
Seward to Adams, July 24, 1866, ibid., 153–154; Seward to
Adams, September 24, 1867, Executive Documents Printed by
Order of the House of Representatives, during the second session of the
fortieth Congress, 1867-’68 (Washington 1868), 152.
21. John T.  Morse, “Expatriation and Naturalization,” The North
American Review 106 (1868): 612–29; Norman B. Judd, Speech of
Hon. Norman B. Judd, of Illinois, on the rights of American citizens
abroad delivered in the House of Representatives, December 2, 1867
(Washington, 1867), 4; Shelby M. Cullom, Speech of Hon. Shelby
M. Cullom, of Illinois, on Rights of Naturalized American Citizens;
Delivered in the House of Representatives, January 8, 1868
(Washington: Rives and Bailey, 1868); Samito, Becoming American
under Fire, 199–205.
22. Quoted in Tsiang, The Question of Expatriation in America, 87–88.
See also Kettner, Development of American Citizenship, 345;
Smith, Civic Ideals, 313.
23. Tsiang, Question of Expatriation, 88–90.
24. Jenkins, Fenians and Anglo-American Relations, 248–281.
25. 190 Parl. Deb. (3rd ser.) (1868), 1983–1996.
26. Report of the Royal Commissioners. See also Sir Alexander Cockburn,
Nationality: Or, The Law Relating to Subjects and Aliens (London:
W. Ridgeway, 1869).
 CHAPTER 4

Lincoln as the Great Educator:

Opinion and Educative Liberalism
in the Civil War Era

Leslie Butler

In Edinburgh, Scotland in 1893, a monument honoring Scotsmen who

fought for the Union Army was unveiled in the Old Calton Cemetery. At
the center of this transatlantic celebration were two bronze figures situ-
ated atop a plinth of red granite: on one level, a former slave extends a
hand upward toward a large and imposing Abraham Lincoln, who stands
looming far above. The familiar pairing of a kneeling slave and a standing
president resembled Thomas Ball’s Freedman’s Memorial in Washington,
DC, which had earlier given iconographic representation to the under-
standing of Lincoln as the “Great Emancipator.” Much else about this
monument and its unveiling had the ring of the familiarity, from the
young American woman depicting Columbia dressed in a flowing white
gown to the toasts to “Saxon freedom” during this decade of Anglo-
American rapprochement.1
Yet one curious element stands out today. The square base of the
Lincoln statue bears four words, one inscribed on each of its sides: Union,
Emancipation, Suffrage, and Education. The first two of these are entirely
predictable, and the third makes sense given Lincoln’s strong commitment

L. Butler ( )
Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, United States

© The Author(s) 2016 49

J. Nagler et al. (eds.), The Transnational Significance of the
American Civil War, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40268-0_4
50 L. BUTLER

to popular government, even if it was not meant to acknowledge his

gradual move toward at least partial black suffrage. The fourth word, how-
ever, may give us pause. The sculptor, Union veteran George Bissell, left
no explanation of what he intended by it. As is well known, Lincoln grew
up in the raw, frontier environment of Kentucky and Indiana and received
little more than a year of formal education, though he learned to “read,
write, and cipher to the Rule of Three,” as he later recalled. Yet, as is also
well known, he dedicated himself to overcoming this disadvantage through
an intense and continual quest for self-education and self-improvement.
Perhaps the sculptor sought to capture this crucial aspect of Lincoln’s
rise, which seemed to many—both in the United States and abroad—to
embody America’s democratic promise.2
Regardless of what those responsible at the time intended, we might
today use the Edinburgh monument as a way to recapture a crucial
aspect of Lincoln’s leadership—and of the Civil War’s larger meaning—
that British and American liberals cherished. Considering Lincoln as the
Instructor-in-Chief, as well as the Commander-in-Chief helps us to recover
the emphasis on educative opinion-molding that shaped how nineteenth-
century liberals approached popular government. Such a view of Lincoln
makes sense, given his celebrated efforts to attach meaning to the con-
flict through his remarkable speeches and public letters. The American
Consul in Edinburgh, Wallace Bruce, a lawyer and a minor literary man,
caught some of this idea in a poem he read at the monument’s unveiling.
“Inspired to set in simple speech / The words that sway a people’s heart,
/ Prophetic sentences that reach / Beyond the realm and scope of art.”
But we might go further still and consider how liberals on both sides of
the Atlantic perceived the Civil War as an educative moment of sorts, as an
opportunity to instruct the American nation about its highest ideals and
to broadcast those ideals to a wider world heavily invested in their achieve-
ment. It was, in short, as one Union publicist insisted, a “war for liberal
ideas and for the establishment of liberal principles.”3
Using the Edinburgh monument as its point of departure, this chap-
ter will, first, establish the centrality of public opinion to a strand of
nineteenth-century liberalism we might call “educative liberalism.” This
strand was articulated most clearly by a group of British and American
writers who, in both aspirational and anxious ways, insisted that an era of
expanding electorates must also be an era of expanding access to enlight-
ened political discussion that would aid the formation of public opinion.
Second, the chapter will explore how these liberals came to see the Civil
 LINCOLN AS THE GREAT EDUCATOR: OPINION AND EDUCATIVE LIBERALISM... 51

War, and Lincoln’s leadership during it, as a propitious opportunity to

achieve their vision, both by overcoming the ignorant illiberality of slavery
and by clarifying the ideal of educated popular government.
***
“Our government rests in public opinion,” Lincoln observed to fellow
Illinois Republicans in 1856. “Whoever can change public opinion, can
change the government.” By the time Lincoln made this observation, the
interplay between popular government and public opinion was already a
well-worn convention. The people could exercise their sovereignty not
only in how they voted (which was a more regular activity in their world
than it is in ours) but through a boisterous print culture that was open to
those outside the electoral sphere as well. As Lincoln and other elected
officials knew, leaders would have to defer to the prevailing opinion in
everyday acts of governing, and only at their peril would they violate the
will of the majority, as expressed in the ordinary back-and-forth of mass-
based political debate and deliberation.4
The notion of “public opinion” was a product of the eighteenth cen-
tury, linked to the rise of that autonomous “public sphere” that Jürgen
Habermas and others have so influentially charted.5 The quintessentially
American sense in which Lincoln deployed this notion was of more recent
vintage, dating from the early nineteenth century, when its increasing
power can be linked to key developments. Of particular importance were
a series of material factors such as the growing ubiquity of newspapers,
which circulated far more rapidly as breathtaking advances in printing,
transportation, and, finally, telegraphy proceeded, and an increase in lit-
eracy, which in the United States had already reached unprecedentedly
high rates. British and European visitors to the United States repeatedly
commented on the newspaper-reading habits of the Americans, but these
developments were felt at home as well. The mid-nineteenth century wit-
nessed a steady expansion and liberalization of the press in Britain, as leg-
islative measures kept pace with technological change. Efforts to eliminate
“taxes on knowledge” began in the 1830s and culminated with the repeal
of the remaining stamp tax in 1855 and the abolition of the paper duty in
1861. Liberals pushed for and applauded these Parliamentary moves that
at last “set the press free” and augured a peaceful “revolution.”6
Americans’ turn to universal white manhood suffrage and a raucous
party system gave the concept, and the process of locating public opinion,
more democratic associations than in other countries. John Neal, who
wrote for both the British and the American press, termed newspapers,
52 L. BUTLER

most of which were attached to one or another of the mass-based parties,

“the mightiest engine of our day.” This 1843 comment was at once gran-
diose and utterly conventional. What were “armies and treasuries, navies
and forts, and magazines and foundries, or senate-chambers and laws, in
comparison with newspapers… the generators of public opinion?” Yet if
the concept of government by opinion flourished most fully in the United
States, it achieved a central place in nineteenth-century British liberal-
ism as well. As Elaine Hadley has recently argued, liberalism was the first
British political movement “to depend more on people than property, and
on opinion rather than interest.”7
Further, public opinion was never a strictly national concern. As was
the case with the earlier cosmopolitan notion of a “republic of letters,”
observers on both sides of the Atlantic grew increasingly sensitive to
“world opinion” throughout the early decades of the nineteenth century.
What Thomas Jefferson had called a “decent respect to the opinions of
mankind” in the opening of the Declaration of Independence became
a fixture for nineteenth-century liberals, who closely followed political
and intellectual developments in other countries and often invoked them
to lend legitimacy to their own efforts. As C.A.  Bayly has argued, the
nineteenth century simultaneously witnessed the emergence of modern
nation-state and the birth of an “international civil society’” that formed
a counterpart to the dynamic economic globalization of these years and
which “was constituted by a set of networks of information and political
advocacy which, though less obvious than the rising national and imperial
state, was no less important.’” A transnational, world opinion assumed
perhaps its most striking form in the case of abolitionism, though there
were certainly other reform movements that took a consciously cosmopol-
itan stance toward global progress. It was this world opinion that Lincoln
had in mind when he referred to “the liberal party throughout the world”
in his speech at Peoria.8
Yet as scholars have long made clear, “government by opinion” was not
an uncomplicated or universally positive concept for nineteenth-century
liberals. Thoughtful commentators such as Alexis de Tocqueville, John
Stuart Mill, and numerous others (including Lincoln himself) worried about
the possible volatility, amorality, and even illiberality of public opinion. As
a central fact of democratic life in America, public opinion was a particu-
larly worrisome force there. Most pertinent here was Tocqueville’s strongly
articulated fear of tyrannical majorities who could exercise their despotism
through opinion, and did so more effectively than through overt forms
 LINCOLN AS THE GREAT EDUCATOR: OPINION AND EDUCATIVE LIBERALISM... 53

of coercion. With such anxieties in mind, and like James Madison before
them, nineteenth-century liberals sought not simply to enact the voice of
the people but to play a role in shaping that voice along liberal lines, thereby
hoping to achieve a sort of “educative” democracy in which opinion-shapers
like themselves would play a central role. “Mass” desires would, in sum,
not be allowed to develop on their own but would be brought in line with
“enlightened” principles of government, morality, and economy. Building
upon the various modes of antislavery mobilization, British liberals showed
the powerful force of public opinion by organizing the mass-based cam-
paigns for Catholic emancipation, and for repeal of the Corn Laws and
“taxes on knowledge.”9
Viewed from the vantage point of American reformers, the campaigns
of liberal Britons was worthy of emulation. Here was model of educative
outreach that brought about liberal reform with considerable dispatch.
Why were similar successes seemingly beyond the capacity of American
political culture? American liberals looked upon their own political culture
and struggled for an explanation. They found a powerful culprit in the
enormous political and economic power of American slavery, which, in
their minds, perverted and corrupted all attempts at liberal cognition.
Slavery was an affront to liberals, most obviously as the institution vio-
lated the fundamental norm of individual autonomy upon which liberal-
ism rested. What concerns us here, however, is how slavery threatened the
liberal vision of educative politics. It did so by denying the possibility of
education (even literacy) to the slaves, along with their very humanity. But
the institution of slavery also suppressed that free exchange of ideas and
information that was central to the work of opinion-shaping and govern-
ment by opinion. Proslavery attempts to curtail discussion through the
Congressional gag rule and censorship of antislavery literature not only
stymied the work of antislavery. It showed how a slave power increas-
ingly paranoid about the direction of world opinion might rouse the
“worse angels” of American public life more generally. Stoking racist para-
noia, atavistic fears of miscegenation, and tapping into a deep tradition
of counter-subversion, politicians like Stephen Douglas seemed all-too-
effective in overturning reason and marginalizing transnational patterns of
progressive development.10
Proslavery politicians’ seeming hostility to reasoned debate resulted from
their besieged position as defenders of slavery during a global age of eman-
cipation. The attacks of radical abolitionists in the free states were in many
ways less threatening to slave interests than culturally important British
54 L. BUTLER

opinion or the moderate opinion of more conservative white Northerners.

Newspapers, pamphlets, periodicals, and people transmitting the global
emancipationist consensus moved easily back and forth across the Atlantic,
as countless scholars have shown. In some ways, it was that very move-
ment that made the emerging antislavery sentiment so threatening. When
Charles Dickens included in his 1842 American Notes reprintings from
Theodore Weld’s Slavery As It Is, he assured the widest possible aware-
ness of damning material reprinted from southern newspapers originally
intended merely for local readership. Attempting to shelter the slave states
from global opinion was a Sisyphean task, as the rage over Uncle Tom’s
Cabin in the 1850s demonstrated. Unable to insulate American slavery
from assault, many proslavery spokesmen seemed willing instead to dilute
the capacity of the public to reckon with global norms.11
For liberals, the proslavery penchant for violence over discussion was
best encapsulated in the 1837 murder of Elijah Lovejoy, who was both an
abolitionist and editor. Lovejoy’s printing press had been destroyed mul-
tiple times in St. Louis, Missouri, so he had moved across the Mississippi
River to the free state of Illinois, where he continued to publish his attacks
on slavery. Shortly before his death, he gave a speech where he expressed
the difficulty, but also the duty, of holding opinions contrary to the mass
of his fellow citizens, thereby helping to correct what he perceived as
their mistake. Lovejoy’s murder was a galvanizing moment for liberals on
both sides of the Atlantic, brought home to British audiences by Harriet
Martineau in her influential article for the Westminster Review titled “The
Martyr Age.” Lovejoy’s murder also drew compelling responses from two
men who would become particularly astute students of public opinion in
the United States: Wendell Phillips and Abraham Lincoln.12
Lincoln’s career, especially after his reentry into politics in 1854,
embodied just this kind of educative opinion-molding, which might
be reasonably understood as the key to his political thought. Richard
Carwardine has ably detailed how Lincoln early in his career departed
from the idea of elected leaders as mere mouthpieces or reflectors of pub-
lic opinion to an understanding that opinion was somewhat “plastic”
and capable of being molded and, particularly, improved. Political lead-
ers—along with ministers, teachers, lecturers, and writers—had a moral
responsibility to work toward the “education and redirection” of popular
opinion. Lincoln’s emphasis on the role of opinion can be seen in his epic
efforts to engage Stephen Douglas and the citizenry in debate throughout
the state of Illinois in 1858. In the substance of these speeches, for example
 LINCOLN AS THE GREAT EDUCATOR: OPINION AND EDUCATIVE LIBERALISM... 55

in Ottawa, he explicitly articulated his view of government by opinion.

“Public sentiment is everything,” he said. “With public sentiment, noth-
ing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. Consequently he who moulds
public sentiment, goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces
decisions. He makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be
executed.” As David Zarefsky has argued, Lincoln’s belief in the power
of opinion is precisely why he found Douglas’s complicity with proslavery
forces so threatening. Once relax the North’s moral abhorrence of slavery,
and the efforts of moderate antislavery politicians like himself to prevent
its extension would be impossible.13
***
Thus, Lincoln’s election in 1860, and the Civil War to which it ulti-
mately led, represented an auspicious moment, though of course most
Anglo-American liberals did not then know what an exemplar of opinion-
shaping they had in Lincoln. Yet many in the North and in the UK greeted
the commencement of hostilities as a clarifying opportunity nonetheless.
In the early months of the war, amidst naïve assumptions that the con-
flict would be short and decisive, liberals rejoiced at the promise the war
offered of “emancipating the public opinion of the North,” as the Atlantic
Monthly put in 1861, by freeing it from the stifling influence of the slave
power. For the first time since the founding, slaveholders would be unable
to erect barriers to robust discussion, which was the “very life of free insti-
tutions, the fruitful mother of all political and moral enlightenment.”14
Foreign liberals also recognized how the American war might put
American public life on sounder footing. Though skeptical about democ-
racy as amoral majoritarianism in general, the French liberal Comte Agénor
de Gasparin recognized that America had suffered from an “intellectual
despotism,” as slavery “pervert[ed] the working of democratic institu-
tions.” He believed the American crisis offered a chance to “regenerate
the institutions of the United States” by removing the obstacle that slav-
ery had posed to the free play of “intelligence, conscience, and convic-
tions.” The British liberal statesman John Bright understood the conflict
in similar terms. The war, he informed his fellow Britons, did not center
on boundaries, or tariffs, or parties, or questions of supremacy. It was, at
heart, a battle over “freedom or slavery, education or ignorance.”15
After an initial flurry of enthusiasm, it seemed clear that the mass mobi-
lization for war would require the organization of opinion and thought
no less than that of economic and material resources. The opinion-
shaping undertaken by Union liberals began with established journals
56 L. BUTLER

and newspapers of the Republican Party apparatus. But war quickly saw
new initiatives arise in what Charles Eliot Norton termed a campaign “to
influence and direct public opinion.” Well-funded informational activities
coordinated by the New York City-based Loyal Publication Society and
the Boston-based New England Loyal Publication Society worked to place
the wartime struggle in a transnational perspective and to frame the issues
at stake in the American conflict in the widest possible terms. The effort
entailed commissioning and circulating pamphlets that expounded sound
Unionist opinion and sending out broadsides full of articles from met-
ropolitan periodicals to hundreds of small-town papers across the coun-
try, especially in Midwestern and border states. By May of 1863, Charles
Eliot Norton reported to the British Liberal MP John Bright that the
New England society was providing “nearly 1000 newspapers in the Loyal
States with three or four [broadsides] weekly.”16
This sophisticated propaganda effort was done in the name of the
Union, and in support of America’s role as the “last best hope” of pop-
ular government. Yet its aim, as Adam I.P.  Smith has established, went
beyond Unionism in explicitly supporting (even as it sought to further
radicalize) an administration elected on a Republican Party platform. This
“anti-party partisanship” sought the largest constituency possible through
what we might call niche marketing, in which special appeals were made,
as Frank Freidel has summarized, to “Midwesterners, New Englanders,
New Yorkers; farmers, merchant, and bankers; Catholics and Protestants;
people proud of their American ancestry, and recent German, Irish, and
French immigrants,” as well as white women and free black men and
women. Each of these groups was asked to sustain the government; a
recurrent theme was the peril of placing a Democratic opposition of ques-
tionable loyalty in any meaningful position of power.17
It may seem odd that nineteenth-century liberals considered war,
which most modern experience has taught us to consider as inimical to
deliberation, as an educative opportunity. But examining liberal responses
during the early 1860s reveals that it was not war in general, but this
war for a “more perfect Union” in particular, that made liberals sense a
propitious occasion for instruction and edification. For most Union activ-
ists and liberal foreign observers, the conflict could not have been more
pivotal, as John Stuart Mill recalled in his Autobiography, published eight
years after the war ended. “My strongest feelings were engaged in this
struggle,” he wrote, “which, I felt from the beginning, was destined to
be a turning point, for good or evil, of the course of human affairs for an
 LINCOLN AS THE GREAT EDUCATOR: OPINION AND EDUCATIVE LIBERALISM... 57

indefinite duration.” Liberals at home and abroad saw the war as decisive
battle between freedom and democracy on the one side and slavery and
aristocracy on the other. As the Oxford historian Goldwin Smith put it in
a letter to an American friend, the war was “the most momentous perhaps,
in the issues it involves, for which the blood of man was ever shed.” In this
way, the Civil War might be understood as functioning, analogically, for
liberal world opinion as a “Good War” following a far more ambiguous
war in Crimea.18
This irony of viewing war as a hospitable opportunity for cognition and
deliberation was not entirely lost on Unionist liberals, who found them-
selves going to some lengths to explain away the tension between vio-
lence and reason. They had gained some experience in this regard as they
responded with electrified fascination to John Brown’s daring yet doomed
raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859. One of the ways around their ambivalence
in Brown’s case was to condemn his action as lawless and extreme, but to
praise his character and “bearing,” as he stood trial in Virginia. Liberals
tried to follow a similar strategy during the war, though as months turned
into years, and the losses piled up, there was no denying the bloodshed
and death. Writing in the fall of 1862, in the bloody wake of Antietam,
George William Curtis reminded his readers in Harper’s Monthly 1862
that “however inevitable, however consecrated by its purpose,” the war
might be, it “is still the remedy of brute force. It is still barbarous and
repugnant to every man who would rather owe the amelioration of the
race to moral and intellectual rather than to purely physical forces.”19
But a much larger question or problematic loomed with the pressures
war put on opinion-molding. When did molding of opinion, with all the
educative and instructive connotations liberals attached to that phrase,
lapse into mere propaganda? Was it possible to live up to liberal ideals of
“government by opinion” in a moment when government was maintain-
ing its extensive power through far more coercive means? In this broader
context, it was the strikingly moderate and reasoned nature of the liber-
als’ pro-Union pamphlet campaign that stands out. Such at least was the
judgment of Frank Freidel, who wrote about these efforts during the
early months of WWII, and of Philip Paludan, who addressed such efforts
at the end of the twentieth century. From our own vantage point in the
first decades of the twentieth-first century, this relative restraint seems all
the more remarkable.20
Norton established the parameters of liberal opinion-making of the
1860s in correspondence with other editors. Like most of his associates,
58 L. BUTLER

he strongly desired the reelection of Lincoln, but he refused to disseminate

Loyal Publication Society broadsides in support of the president person-
ally, lest his commitment to democracy and the democratic process seem
weaker than his party advocacy. “It is of more importance to promote the
spread of sound opinion & just feeling concerning the principles involved
in our great struggle,” he told a new acquaintance and correspondent
from Indiana. If, by sticking to principle, he could “strengthen the love
of liberty” and “promote the spread of true ideas of democracy, & con-
fidence in the democratic principle,” then “indirectly” he would weaken
“the power of McClellanism, of Vallandighamism, of Fremontism” and
strengthen “the position of Mr. Lincoln as our best representative of these
ideas.” James Russell Lowell agreed with Norton and, in speaking of
Lincoln, he might have been speaking of himself when he remarked that
“to be moderate and unimpassioned in revolutionary times … may not be
a romantic quality, but it is a rare one, and goes with those massive under-
standings on which a solid structure of achievement may be reared.”21
While opinion-shaping efforts sought to instruct soldiers on the front
and rally a divided population at home, no less crucial was the transat-
lantic loop of opinion that sought to burnish the image of the Union
abroad and, in turn, legitimate its struggle domestically. Unionist liberals
were keen on providing British and French counterparts with evidence
of correct and sound northern opinion. But they also desperately sought
foreign opinion to republish back home as proof of supportive world
opinion. Evidence of the effort to shape opinion abroad abounds in the
personal correspondence of American liberals and also in the fact that
liberals in New  York City subscribed funds to send the first forty-four
volumes of the Loyal Publication Society, as well as the Rebellion Record
edited by Frank Moore, to some fifty statesmen, intellectuals, editors, and
libraries across Europe. This group included Mill and Gasparin, as well
as John Bright, Richard Cobden, John Stuart Mill, Edouard Laboulaye,
and Henri Martin.22
British and French liberals were quite aware of the need for educative
intervention in their own countries, and the effort to shape understand-
ing of world events was done in an explicitly pedagogical mode. Comte
de Gasparin noted that there were “more men in Europe than are imag-
ined” who actually desired the splintering of the United States and “who
would not fear, should opportunity offer, to encourage the resistance of
the South, and contribute to the prolongation of the civil war.” The best
way to combat such “menacing” opinion, he insisted, was through just
 LINCOLN AS THE GREAT EDUCATOR: OPINION AND EDUCATIVE LIBERALISM... 59

the sort of educational campaign liberals cherished. Liberal friends of the

Union would succeed “by enlightening minds, by treating of questions
little understood, by recalling imperfectly known facts. Public opinion is
our force; it has sufficed, it will suffice.”23
John Stuart Mill was an especially important figure not only because
of his early and widely reprinted “The Contest in America” but also
through the extensive transatlantic correspondence that established him
as a central node in an ever-growing network. In dozens of letters to
American, British, and French correspondents, Mill broadcast his read-
ing of European opinion, his awareness of reliable liberals (often reveal-
ing the authors of anonymously written pro-Union articles in the British
press), and his estimation of sound newspapers and journals. John Bright
summed up why liberals outside America felt so invested in this strug-
gle. When “slavery is destroyed” and “the Union is cemented afresh,” he
told his audience in late 1863, “Europe and England may learn that an
instructed democracy is the surest foundation of government, and that
education and freedom are the only sources of true greatness and true
happiness among any people.”24
***
Let us return now to the notion of Lincoln as the Instructor-in-Chief or
the “Great Educator.” Lincoln, as we know, was acutely sensitive to public
opinion and its powerful role in popular government. Lincoln’s under-
standing of this responsibility differed considerably from abolitionists such
as Wendell Phillips or William Lloyd Garrison, who sought to provoke and
shock public opinion out of its complacent and amoral torpor. Lincoln
instead, with few exceptions, relied on a lawyerly articulation of issues and
an appeal to the moral sense and judgment of his audience. The Lincoln-
Douglas debates in the summer of 1858 exemplified this approach (which
Carwardine has termed a “consciousness-raising approach”), as did his
speech at Cooper Union and his First Inaugural Address.25
But the war, of course, brought with it a new urgency and a new set of
political, not to mention military, imperatives that tried Lincoln’s convic-
tion that “sober judgment” must prevail over “wild and furious passions”
and that “evil cannot stand discussion.” The latter of these convictions
proved the most difficult to uphold, as he found it necessary to curtail
complete freedom of speech over the course of the war.26 But in the case
of the former, Lincoln’s rhetoric—as witnessed in his public addresses and
letters alike—reads today like the very model of educative opinion-shaping
statesmanship. Even Philip Paludan’s consideration of Lincoln as a master
60 L. BUTLER

propagandist, a word he strives to use neutrally, ends by acknowledging

that he was a “good propagandist” whose efforts tended toward the posi-
tive and clear elucidation of American ideals. By avoiding appeals to fear
or, at the end of the war, to vengeance or hatred, Lincoln demonstrated a
faith (clichéd as it might be by now) in the nation’s capacity to call upon
its “better angels.”27
While twentieth- and twentieth-first-century scholars generally agree
on the educative and even aspirational nature of Lincoln’s rhetoric, what
is perhaps more interesting is how contemporary liberals viewed it. Many,
especially Eastern, liberals and radicals had to overcome enormous doubts
about Lincoln before they could recognize his skill as the Instructor-in-
Chief. But estimation of Lincoln began to rise once he made emancipation
a war aim, and it only continued to rise in the following years as Lincoln
used his letters and addresses to explain his administration’s policies to the
public and to attach meaning to the carnage and sacrifice that surrounded
them. Charles Eliot Norton spoke of Lincoln’s public letters as “successive
victories” that were every bit as important as the military triumphs of the
Union armies. They joined that “rarest class of political documents, argu-
ments seriously addressed by one in power to the conscience and reason
of the citizens of the commonwealth.”
A few months later, the poet and editor of the North American Review
James Russell Lowell contributed his own remarkable analysis of Lincoln’s
power of communication. Lowell was struck by the dialectical relationship
Lincoln seemed to have with the public’s mind: he so “gently” guided it
that he almost appeared to follow it. Lincoln, who appreciated the arti-
cle and wrote the editors of the NAR to thank them for it, might have
pointed to the weekly open receptions he held at the White House, what
he termed his “public-opinion baths,” as the source of his closeness to
opinion. But Lowell continued to analyze the communicative genius of
Lincoln in terms that liberals on both sides of the Atlantic would have
approved. The president “put himself on a level with those he addressed,
not by going down to them, but only by taking it for granted that they
had brains and would come up to a common ground of reason.” He was
none other than a “true democrat,” a leader “who grounded himself on
the assumption that a democracy can think.”28
This view of Lincoln as the Great Educator was subtly on display in the
iconography of the Edinburgh monument, which suggests how educative
politics was woven into the larger themes of the Lincoln presidency. While
the statue of the former slave reaches up to Lincoln with his right arm,
 LINCOLN AS THE GREAT EDUCATOR: OPINION AND EDUCATIVE LIBERALISM... 61

in his left hand he holds a book. From this detail emerges an important
lesson about the “Lincolnian” strand of educative statesmanship that the
monument conveys. What was at stake was not simply Lincoln’s self-willed
rise through an immersion in books nor an effort during his presidency to
impart wisdom and principled leadership to the nation at large. Lincoln
the “Great Educator” stood at the heart of an educative complex, which
sought to inculcate a habit of mind that would sustain principled civic
participation in a reborn republic.
The central role of freedmen in this educative vision offered a symbol of
what liberals during the war saw as a dual democratic promise—the pair-
ing of emancipation and education that was left tragically underachieved
by the time this statue was unveiled. The familiar “what if Lincoln lived”
counter-factual enigma might dramatize some of the elements of this
tragedy. In his book on Lincoln and slavery, Eric Foner posed some of
the vital questions as to how Lincoln might have directed Reconstruction
differently than Andrew Johnson. Foner imagines how a second-term
Lincoln presidency might have maintained unity in the Republican party,
might have insisted on protecting basic civil rights (including at least lim-
ited suffrage) for the freedmen, and might have (through Republican
unity) persuaded former Confederates to act with a resolve and fairness
that would have acknowledged those rights.29 To this list of “what-ifs”
we might add an imagining of how this especially gifted “Instructor-in-
Chief ” would have asked his country to think more deeply about the goals
of Reconstruction. Having seen his way through war, Lincoln’s challenge
would have been to shape an American public opinion, in the light of
global developments, about American democracy itself. If successful, he
might have spurred Americans to consider how the country’s “new birth
of freedom” be made both just and enduring.

NOTES
1. The New York Times reported on the unveiling, even including a
drawing of the monument, on August 23, 1893. For a fuller dis-
cussion of the origin, financing, and unveiling of the monument,
see The Lincoln Monument, in Memory of Scottish-American
Soldiers, Unveiled in Edinburgh (Edinburgh: William Blackwood
and Sons, 1893).
2. Much recent work has detailed Lincoln’s self-education and intel-
lectual development. See, for example, Douglas Wilson, Lincoln’s
62 L. BUTLER

Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words (New York, NY:
Knopf, 2006); Fred Kaplan, Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer
(New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2008); Allen C. Guelzo, Abraham
Lincoln as a Man of Ideas (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois
University Press, 2009).
3. Wallace Bruce’s poem, “Columbia’s Garland,” in The Lincoln
Monument, 20–23; Charles Eliot Norton, quoted in Leslie Butler,
Critical Americans: Victorian Intellectuals and Transatlantic
Liberal Reform (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2007), 4. I recognize that “liberal” is a vague term, especially in
the nineteenth-century United States where, according to some
definitions, nearly everyone could be considered a liberal. The case
is rather clearer in Britain and Europe, where self-defined liberal
movements—committed to individual liberty, representative gov-
ernment, freedom of religion, free speech, and free markets—
emerged in first half of the nineteenth century. I am using the term
in regard to Americans rather loosely in this paper to include those
whose belief in liberty led them to become antislavery, even if not
necessarily abolitionists.
4. Lincoln, “Portion of Speech at Republican Banquet in Chicago,
Illinois,” in Roy Basler, ed., Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln
(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1953–1955) 2: 384.
5. For some crucial modifications to Habermas’s model of the “bour-
geois public sphere,” see James Van Horn Melton, The Rise of the
Public in Enlightenment Europe (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2001). Other detailed histories of public opinion can be
found in J.A.W. Gunn, “Public Opinion,” in Terrence Ball, James
Farr, and Russell Hanson, eds. Political Innovation and Conceptual
Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989),
247–266; Colleen A.  Sheehan, James Madison and the Spirit of
Republican Self-Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2009); Mark Schmeller, “The Political Economy of Opinion:
Public Credit and Concepts of Public Opinion in the Age of
Federalism,” Journal of the Early Republic 29 (Spring 2009):
35–61.
6. On transformations in transportation and communication technol-
ogy, see Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The
Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2007). Quotations from (“set the press free”)
LINCOLN AS THE GREAT EDUCATOR: OPINION AND EDUCATIVE LIBERALISM... 63

Richard Cobden to Catherine Cobden, March 15, 1855, in The

Letters of Richard Cobden (New York: Oxford University Press,
2012), 3:111 and (“revolution”) William Hargreaves to John
Bigelow, June 5, 1861, in John Bigelow, Retrospections of an Active
Life: 1817–1863 (New York: Baker and Taylor, 1909), vol. 1, 357.
On the “taxes of knowledge” debate, see Mark Hampton, Visions
of the Press in Britain, 1850–1950 (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 2004), chapter 2.
7. John Neal, “Newspapers,” The Pioneer (February, 1843): 61. In
Britain, where only one in six men could vote after the Reform Act of
1832, the concept was limited to an educated middle class. See, Dror
Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of
Class in Britain, 1780–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995) and Elaine Hadley, Living Liberalism: Practical
Citizenship in Mid-Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2010).
8. Lincoln, “Speech at Peoria,” October 16, 1854, in Collected Works
of Abraham Lincoln, Roy P. Basler, ed. (New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press, 1953–1955), 2:276; Christopher Alan Bayly, The
Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and
Comparisons (Malden: Wiley Blackwell, 2004), 118. See also
Frederick Cooper, “Networks, Moral Discourse and History,” in
Intervention and Transnationalism in Africa: Global-Local
Networks of Power, eds. Thomas Callaghy, Ronald Kassimer, and
Robert Latham (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
For the self-conscious transnationality of abolitionists, see W. Caleb
McDaniel, The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery:
Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 2013).
9. Sheehan offers a brilliant analysis of Madison’s theory of govern-
ment by opinion in, James Madison and the Spirit of Republican
Self-Government. On liberal anxieties about democratic opinion,
see Alan S. Kahan, Aristocratic Liberalism: The Social and Political
Thought of Burkhardt, Tocqueville, and Mill (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1992). On abolitionist fears of democratic
timidity and conformity, see McDaniel, Problem of Democracy,
chapter 4.
10. Of course, antislavery forces, including Lincoln, also gravitated at
times toward conspiratorial thinking, as seen in David Brion
64 L. BUTLER

Davis, The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1986) and Lincoln’s “House
Divided” speech.
11. For a brilliant discussion of the transatlantic reprintings in American
Notes, see Amanda Claybaugh, The Novel of Purpose: Literature
and Social Reform in the Anglo-American World (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2007).
12. Martineau’s “Martyr Age” was first published in the Westminster
for December, 1838, and then, the following year, as a standalone
book. Wendell Phillips’s first abolitionist speech was on “The
Murder of Lovejoy.” As Caleb McDaniel details, Phillips grappled
seriously with Tocqueville’s critique of tyrannical majorities in a
democracy, drawing on wrenching firsthand experience. See
McDaniel, Problem of Democracy, chapter 4. Lincoln’s Lyceum
Address, given before the Springfield Young Men’s Lyceum just six
weeks after Lovejoy’s murder, warned of the rising danger of “mob
rule.” Lincoln would also have considered the efforts of abolition-
ist provocateurs to stir up an enraged opinion threatening to his
ideal of “sober judgment.”
13. The Complete Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858, ed. Paul M. Angle
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 128. David
Zarefsky’s sharp analysis of Lincoln’s political persuasion can be
found in, “‘Public Sentiment is Everything’: Lincoln’s View of
Political Persuasion,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association
15 (1994): 23–40. See also Richard Carwardine, Lincoln: A Life of
Purpose and Power (New York: Knopf, 2006).
14. “The Pickens-and-Stealins’ Rebellion,” Atlantic Monthly 7 (1861):
763.
15. Count Agénor de Gasparin, The Uprising of a Great People, trans.
Mary Booth (New York, Charles Scribner, 1862); John Bright,
“America and England. Speech at Saint James Hall, March 25,
1863,” in Bright, Speeches on the Public Affairs of the Last Twenty
Years (London: John Camden Hotten, 1869), 169.
16. Charles Eliot Norton to John Bright, May 8, 1863, John Bright
Papers, British Library. See also Frank Freidel, “The Loyal
Publication Society: A Pro-Union Propaganda Agency,” Mississippi
Valley Historical Review 29 (1939): 359–376. George Winston
Smith, “Broadsides for Freedom: Civil War Propaganda in New
England,” New England Quarterly 21 (1948): 291–312; and
LINCOLN AS THE GREAT EDUCATOR: OPINION AND EDUCATIVE LIBERALISM... 65

Charles Eliot Norton, James B. Thayer, and William Endicott Jr.,

Report of the Executive Committee of the N.E.L.P.S.
17. Adam I.P.  Smith, No Party Now: Politics in the Civil War North
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Freidel, “The Loyal
Publication Society,” 364.
18. Goldwin Smith to Charles Eliot Norton, quoted in Butler, Critical
Americans, 83.
19. Curtis, “Editor’s Easy Chair,” Harpers’ New Monthly Magazine 25
(1862): 709.
20. Frank Freidel, “The Loyal Publication Society”; Paludan, “‘The
Better Angels of Our Nature’: Lincoln, Propaganda, and Public
Opinion in the North During the Civil War,” in Stig Förster and
Jorg Nagler, eds., On the Road to Total War: The American Civil
War and the German Wars of Unification, 1861–1871 (Cambridge,
2001), 357–377. Freidel states the LPS’s output, under the leader-
ship of Francis Lieber, was “noteworthy on the whole for [its] logi-
cal approach and careful moderation.”
21. Charles Eliot Norton to Jonathan Baxter Harrison, March 20,
1864, in Norton Papers; JRL, “McClellan or Lincoln,” in Writings
of JRL 5: 173.
22. Freidel, “The Loyal Publication Society,” 373. One intriguing
demonstration of the transatlantic circuit of opinion comes from
an LPS pamphlet. William Alexander’s Elements of Discord in
Secessia sought to convince its Union readership of the low morale
in the Confederacy. Its proof claimed to depend on evidence
gleaned from southern newspapers attained from abroad. William
Alexander, Elements of Discord in Secessia (New York, NY:
W.C. Bryan, 1863).
23. Count Agénor de Gasparin, America Before Europe: Principles
and Interests, trans. Mary L.  Booth (New York: Charles
Scribner, 1862).
24. Mill’s “The Contest in America” was originally published in
Fraser’s (February, 1862). It was reprinted in Harper’s Monthly as
well as separately as a pamphlet. His correspondence, published in
the vast Collected Works, reveals his place as an essential node in the
larger transnational network of liberal opinion. John Bright,
“Conclusion of a Speech at a Meeting at Rochdale, November 24,
1863,” in Speeches of John Bright, M.P., on the American Question
(Boston: Little Brown, 1865), 259.
66 L. BUTLER

25. Carwardine, Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power; Zarefsky,

“‘Public Sentiment is Everything.’”
26. Lincoln quotations can be found in Carwardine, Lincoln: A Life of
Purpose and Power. On the topic of Lincoln’s suspension of habeas
corpus, see Mark E. Neely Jr., The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln
and Civil Liberties (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
Philip S.  Paludan offered a different, less severe, reading of
Lincoln’s letter to Erastus Corning in his article “‘The Better
Angels of our Nature.’” Neely responded to Paludan’s critique in
“The Constitution and Civil Liberties Under Lincoln,” in Our
Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and his World, ed. Eric Foner
(New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2008), 37–61.
27. Paludan, “‘The Better Angels of our Nature.’” Paludan undercuts
his insistence that he uses “propaganda” in a neutral, not negative,
sense by beginning the article with a quotation from Walter
Lippmann, who learned the craft firsthand during WWI. Further,
the article oddly claims that historians have trouble viewing Lincoln
as a propagandist because, in part, of Lincoln’s “deception on this
point.” Lincoln’s views on the necessity as well as duty of educat-
ing, and thereby morally improving, opinion seem not just clear
but consistent over his entire political career.
28. Norton and Lowell both quoted in Butler, Critical Americans,
60–61, 62. Lincoln wrote the publishers of the North American
Review, the January 1864 number of which Lowell’s article had
appeared in, both to thank them for the kind words and to correct
a slight misstatement of Lincoln’s theory of secession. On the
global response to Lincoln, see the essays in Richard Carwardine,
and Jay Sexton, eds., The Global Lincoln (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011).
29. Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American
Slavery (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010).
 PART II

Transnational Political Economy

and Finance
 CHAPTER 5

Southern Wealth, Global Profits: Cotton,

Economic Culture, and the Coming
of the Civil War

Brian Schoen

A growing literature has discussed the transnational effects of the US Civil

War on topics ranging from military history to the complicated diplomatic
crises that the war created in Europe to its jarring effects on the global
economy. We do well also to think about how the transnational land-
scape framed the way that contemporaries understood the chaotic events
leading up to secession and the North’s decision to prevent it. Globally,
struggles to achieve nationhood through independence or unification and
the expansion of individual rights helped define the era around which
citizens of the United States led themselves into war. That battle—it
appeared at the time—had advanced but remained unstable in the Western
Hemisphere and had lost steam in Old Europe with the failure of the
1848 revolutions.1 Few westerners thought much about what the desires
or prospects of nationhood were for African or Asian peoples living under
the shadow of European imperialism, though events in those continents
did not escape their observation, nor should they ours.

B. Schoen ( )
Ohio University, Athens, OH, United States

© The Author(s) 2016 69

J. Nagler et al. (eds.), The Transnational Significance of the
American Civil War, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40268-0_5
70 B. SCHOEN

A second transnational feature of the Civil War era, and one that
significantly informed the first, was the rapid acceleration of economic glo-
balization. A worldwide transportation revolution and continued European
expansion into the Pacific and Africa had transformed—though not
completely—an Atlantic-based system into a truly global one. This global
reality forced politicians and, in market-oriented democracies, the public to
calculate their personal, localized, and national interests within a broader
context. This is not to say that their perceptions of economic interests or
global commerce accurately reflected complicated realities. Indeed, the diz-
zying expansion and quickening of communication, including a vibrant
transatlantic print culture, ensured that realities and meanings remained
contested, a point too often undervalued by economic historians.2
One thing that nearly all western observers (and subsequent economic
historians) agreed on, however, was that the cotton trade represented a
critical aspect of the mid-nineteenth-century world economy.3 Within that
business the United States stood uniquely poised—possessing the land,
labor, political independence, and technology to turn cotton seeds into
finished cloth, thus completing the economic cycle from producer to
consumer entirely within its own borders. As early as the 1790s, leading
patriots believed cotton could help bind the union together, and even on
the eve of secession self-described northern “Conservatives” joined some
southern Unionists to trumpet the crop’s union-saving potential. Yet these
efforts failed, and this essay helps explain why. First, it will show how cot-
ton-belt slaveholders’ place in global capitalism emboldened their aggres-
sive drive for independence, limited their willingness to compromise at
home, and fostered visions of geopolitical alliances with European powers.
Second, it will suggest why previously accommodating northern constitu-
encies (struggling to situate themselves within the global economy) con-
cluded by 1860 that the Cotton-ocracy required humbling. Antebellum
actors and authors triangulated the well-studied domestic battles over
slavery within ever-changing and ambiguous global developments. In that
light, secession and the start of war might be seen not merely as a prelude
to the oft-studied diplomacy of the war but in itself the culmination of
failed diplomacy. King Cotton helped lead Deep South slaveholders out of
the union but failed to deliver the peaceable separation and instantaneous
recognition abroad that its acolytes had promised.
The idea of a southern alliance with Britain seemed ludicrous in the
early 1840s. As Edward Rugemer has shown, British emancipation in
the mid-1830s elevated southern slaveholders’ fears. By 1842 President
 SOUTHERN WEALTH, GLOBAL PROFITS: COTTON, ECONOMIC CULTURE... 71

Tyler’s special emissary to Britain, Duff Green, had urged Americans to

recognize that the United States and Britain were engaged in a high-stakes
“commercial war,” whereby Britain had restricted credit and kept pro-
tective tariffs high to damage American agriculturalists and merchants.
Within a year, Green offered evidence of a deadly escalation, accusing
Britain of stoking antislavery efforts in Texas in a desperate attempt to
level the playing field to allow languishing colonial economies to better
compete with highly productive cotton plantations worked by American
slaves. As historians have frequently observed, Green, Secretary of State
John C. Calhoun, and Tyler translated such fears into a movement that,
once appropriated by the Democratic Party, culminated in Texas annexa-
tion and ultimately war with Mexico.4
These “successes” sowed bitter seeds domestically, but southern slave-
holders interpreted them as evidence of cotton’s international grandeur.
As early as 1842, Green had told Calhoun that “if England be defeated
in the present movement she has no alternative but to fall back on free
trade” and dependence on American slave-grown cotton.5 Cynically mea-
suring West Indian emancipation through trade statistics, they declared it
a failure, one punctuated with the sanctioned importation of coolie labor
in 1844.6 The closely followed collapse of an expensive British-sponsored
effort to import US seeds, technology, and overseers into the Asian sub-
continent in 1840, suggested to a once-concerned Mississippi editor that
Indian competition was merely “a bug bear got up to frighten the South.”7
Subsequent British acquiescence to both free trade and slavery’s expanded
presence in the Southwest seemed a tacit recognition of the power of
cotton and the necessity of slavery. In March 1845, the previously protec-
tionist Peel government and Parliament rebuffed calls for punitive duties
on slave-grown produce after already abolishing a low 5 percent tariff on
foreign raw cotton.8 As southern Democrats rolled back Whig policies
and passed Walker’s lower tariff in 1846, a Tory-led Parliament sacrificed
the golden calf of British protectionism: the Corn Laws that had long
discriminated against foreign grain growers.
Though several internal and external factors (including the Irish potato
famine) pointed Britain toward freer trade, US cotton interests congratu-
lated themselves and praised the power of their precious commodity to
blunt British aggression and global abolitionism. In stark contrast to earlier
hawkish rhetoric, South Carolina free trader George McDuffie joyfully
wrote to the president of the Anti-Corn Law League predicting that “the
banner of free trade shall wave in triumph over the whole world, & beneath
72 B. SCHOEN

its ample folds ‘the nations of the earth may pitch their tents in peace.’”9
The transatlantic free trade movement—which the Deep South had been at
the forefront of since the 1820s—claimed a significant victory.
More aggressive expansionists interpreted these developments as license
for even more forceful action because, as Mississippi Democrat Jacob
Thompson argued, the United States now controlled “nine-tenths of all
the cotton-growing interests throughout the world” and Britain must
“keep the peace.” That assumption informed Manifest Destiny’s propo-
nents deep into the 1850s, including filibusters greedily eyeing Cuba and
Nicaragua and a minority of white Southerners who sought to reopen the
Atlantic slave trade. These efforts, along with coastal slave states contin-
ued jailing of non-white sailors, continued to impinge Anglo-American
and Anglo-Southern relations, but on different terms.10 Supporters of such
actions, like South Carolinian Edward Bryan, believed that France and a
“Cotton Parliament” in Britain would, after making some fuss, give way—
as they had with Texas.11 Prime Minister Palmerston himself feared that
possibility, privately expressing concerns that his government not “frighten
the Cotton Lords” at home or abroad.12 Despite slavery’s reemergence as a
domestic controversy, individuals who had urged annexation reveled in the
diplomatic leverage their cotton monopoly allegedly gave them.
Anglophobia did not disappear, but détente sparked a creative reimagin-
ing of a British-American partnership, even in those regions most commit-
ted to slavery. By 1849, Lowcountry cotton planter, historian, and aspiring
diplomat William Henry Trescot proposed that the cotton trade linking the
“whitening fields” of the South, to Liverpool, and Manchester illustrated
that “the closest alliance” could exist between nations “sometimes antago-
nistic in their political theories.” The resulting cultural and economic link-
ages would make it “almost impossible to convince” someone who did so
“that these two nations could be other than one people.” Trescot urged
American politicians to cooperate—rather than compete—with the British
in Europe, and especially Asia where, he argued, “the future history of the
world must be achieved.” With tension over American expansion and slav-
ery momentarily defused, US control of raw cotton secured, and freer trade
policies in effect, American merchants and agrarians (previously fearful of
British eastern expansion) now stood well positioned to benefit from new
markets opened by British military might.13
The secession crisis of 1850–1851 and the sectional crisis led individu-
als, particularly South Carolinians like Trescot, to recalibrate that alliance
in sectional terms. His 1850 tract, The Position and Course of the South,
 SOUTHERN WEALTH, GLOBAL PROFITS: COTTON, ECONOMIC CULTURE... 73

proposed that debates over slavery had placed the North as a “foreign
power” whose consolidationist tendencies and “jealous rivalry” with
Britain threatened both the political union and the South’s economic
future. While the interests of the North and South had become “diametri-
cally opposed,” those of European powers and the South remained mutu-
ally reinforcing. In short, Europe, and particularly Britain, was the South’s
natural ally. Subsequent crises over fugitive slaves and slavery in the ter-
ritories prompted Deep South politicians to conform policy to that per-
ception. They encouraged direct trade, lowered protective tariffs further,
and perhaps most revealingly sought to overturn decades-old Navigation
Acts, which they believed had exploited the South by granting northern
merchants a monopoly on the domestic coastal trade.14
By the late 1850s, Continental Europe’s own free trade efforts along
with economic and political crises elsewhere furthered the perception of
cotton’s global power. Polk’s diplomats, including future Confederate
Commissioner A. Dudley Mann, had successfully negotiated tariff reduc-
tions and favorable commercial treaties with Belgium, several German prin-
cipalities, and Sicily.15 By the late 1850s, European reports compiled for the
Department of the Interior by Natchez resident John Claiborne, indicated
tangible evidence that the advancement of textile manufacturing in north-
central Europe and Russia had significantly cut into Britain’s near monop-
oly. In 1857, the president of the Bremen Chamber of Commerce gleefully
informed Claiborne that the cotton-wool imports traveling through that
free port to booming manufacturing areas in the Zollverein and Austria
had more than quadrupled between 1852 and 1856.16 Success there and
elsewhere meant that by 1855 Britain’s share of total global cotton spindle-
age had fallen from its near monopoly of 95 percent in 1800 to a less
comfortable dominance of 63.5 percent, with the European continent pro-
viding 27 percent and the United States, 11.17 The 1857 Sepoy Rebellion
further increased concern about British India’s ability to expand cotton
production. Britain and France lengthened the legal terms of coolie con-
tracts and sanctioned the importation of African indentured servants into
the Caribbean indicating continued labor shortages there. These develop-
ments appeared to put even more pressure on Britain to accommodate the
slave power while giving planters alternatives should they not.
This was the context for James Henry Hammond’s famous March
1858 “King Cotton” speech. According to Hammond, the Panic of 1857
had wreaked havoc on northern banking and Anglo-American financial
flows. “King Cotton” had replaced the “Bank of England” at the helm
74 B. SCHOEN

of international commerce and held the North at its mercy.18 Northern

opponents blunted the accusation by highlighting proslavery portions of
the speech; Hammond’s comparison of northern workers to the “mud-
sills” of society offered northern Republicans potent campaign material.
Yet the subsequent release of Claiborne’s widely distributed report and
international news unintentionally bolstered elements of Hammond’s anal-
ysis. In addition to the South’s relatively better situation after the Panic,
Parliament and British papers continued to debate the economic effects
of abolition.19 In April, papers printed official correspondence from the
US Minister to France noting that “judging from the tone of the pub-
lic press, and reasoning a priori, I feel quite confident that in future we
will see the fanatical denunciations of American slavery greatly moderated,
if not silenced, in France, perhaps in England.”20 In 1860, the powerful
London Times dismissed David Livingston’s discovery of cotton in central
Africa as illusory and criticized the “irritating speeches” from the “veter-
ans of the old Anti-Slavery Society” attacking American slavery as point-
less and hypocritical. There is, they concluded, no “proximate hope that
the free cotton raised in Africa will, within any reasonable time, drive out
of culture the slave-grown cotton of America.”21 Almost simultaneously,
Louis-Napoleon’s previously protectionist state announced a freer trade in
cotton goods. His treaty with England ended the prohibition on imported
textiles, and the National Assembly reduced duties on raw cotton by
58 percent (from 14.3 to 6.1 percent), tariffs previous aimed at cultivating
the crop in North African colonies.22
Each development has its own complicated history and meaning;
none signaled a reversal of Europeans’ moral opposition to slavery which
remained sincere and public.23 To southerners like Bryan, these develop-
ments suggested that in Europe “Commerce now rules. It is king; cotton
is heir-apparent, and slavery is queen dowager.”24 That these developments
took place simultaneous to Bleeding Kansas, the continuation of Northern
personal liberty laws and passage of a protectionist tariff in 1860 (vetoed
by Buchanan) further heightened their political and symbolic significance.
Though not determinative, the Deep South’s imagined natural trading
partnership and possible political alliance with Britain (and to a growing
degree, France) contributed to the secessionist movement. The promised
profits and perceived security that cotton offered steeled secessionists’
resolve and provided a powerful recruiting tool. With campaigning for 1860
well underway, famed Sea Island planter, Princeton graduate, and leading
secessionist pamphleteer John Townsend delivered a highly revisionist,
 SOUTHERN WEALTH, GLOBAL PROFITS: COTTON, ECONOMIC CULTURE... 75

and subsequently widely reprinted account of British abolition. Having

realized the “folly” of emancipation and unable to obtain raw cotton
“without depending on others for it,” John Bull now agitated “not to
abolish slavery, but to break up the Union.” This, he concluded, “strips
her rival [the North] of all his fortuitous advantages [the ability to legally
plunder the Cotton South], and so secures to herself an unbounded ascen-
dency… in commerce and manufacturers.”25 Though wrong-headed,
Trescot was not alone in thinking Britain secretly wanted disunion. On
January 1, 1861, the Russian Ambassador to London reported home that,
“the English Government, at the bottom of its heart, desires the separa-
tion of North America into two republics, which will watch each other
jealously and counterbalance one the other. Then England, on terms of
peace and commerce with both, would have nothing to fear from either;
for she would dominate them, restraining them by their rival ambitions.”26
Cotton South secessionists accepted that premise, but believed, if pressed,
Britain would side with them.
So did New  York editor Thomas Kettell, whose recently published
Southern Wealth and Northern Profits provided external and unintended
support for secessionists’ analysis. Kettell—founder of the United States
Economist and writer for Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine—hoped to con-
vince northerners to defeat Free Soil Republicanism by highlighting the
degree to which northern wealth derived from the southern trade. He
estimated that the North annually extracted $105 million from the South.
Quoting extensively and selectively from London Times anti-abolitionist
articles and Parliamentary debates, he argued that Britain had accepted
dependence on slave-grown cotton and stood ready to reap the benefits
should Northern voters fail to prevent secession.27 The argument reso-
nated throughout northern Democratic circles and among other self-
proclaimed Conservatives working to defeat Republicans. To Deep South
disunionists, however, his text validated cotton’s international power and
providing statistical evidence that northerners had turned cotton’s wealth
toward their own greedy ends.
To be clear, the suspect but broadly held assumption that the North
had unfairly profited from the Union did not cause secession. The litany
of real and perceived grievances trotted out like the navigation act, tariffs,
a disproportionate share of internal improvements to the North, and the
like were, as Georgia secessionist Thomas R. R. Cobb emphasized, more
“temporary in their nature,” than the issue of slavery dividing the union.28
If we must identify a single cause, slavery is it. Fortunately, we don’t, and
76 B. SCHOEN

more interesting is how this deeply ingrained and internationally informed

victim mentality offered a lens through which Deep South residents inter-
preted the rise of antislavery Republicanism. That a party could unite oth-
erwise disparate northerners behind an antislavery platform—despite the
benefits slave-grown commodities had provided the North—indicated to
southern politicians that future actions would be governed by uncompro-
mising, quasi-religious antislavery “fanaticism” rather than compromising,
interest-based politics.29
Conversely, exchanges with cautious European officials suggested
that supposedly cotton-dependent European powers would let interest
rather than morality or antisouthern sentiment dictate policy. Just days
before South Carolina’s secession, Robert Barnwell Rhett believed he
had received those assurances from British Consul to Charleston Robert
Bunch. After indicating that the “the wishes and hopes of the Southern
States centred in England; that they would prefer an Alliance with Her
to one with any other Power,” Rhett pointedly asked whether Britain
would receive vessels flying the colors of a “confederacy of the Cotton
States.” Bunch replied, that “there seemed to be no reasons why his ideas
should not be carried into practice,” especially if the new government
would “open their Coasting trade to British ships.” Furthermore, “as
regarded the question of Domestick Slavery,” Bunch “really saw no reason
to apprehend an interference with it on their part, as it was a matter with
which they had no direct concern” beyond hoping that their own moral
example might “Act favourably upon the South.” Bunch rejected that the
African slave trade would be permitted to be reopened, prompting Rhett
to revealingly threaten that “he had no doubt that France and Germany
would gladly avoid the question of the revival of the Slave Trade… in
which case, England would be left behind.”30 Exchanges with Consul
William Mure in New Orleans and Edmund Molyneaux in Savannah
(places where secession was not guaranteed) also indicated that Britain
would “recognize any ‘de facto’ Government, especially with a people,
with whom it was her interest to cultivate the most intimate commercial
relations.”31 Statements from the highest-ranking officials in the South
and other personal exchanges help explain the confidence of Cotton South
leaders assembling in Montgomery in early February 1861.
This all appeared rather baffling, and traitorous, to Northerners who
believed they had been remarkably accommodating to King Cotton and
his Queen dowager. Electioneering and secessionists’ march toward
disunion led to an extended debate over the scope of cotton’s power.
 SOUTHERN WEALTH, GLOBAL PROFITS: COTTON, ECONOMIC CULTURE... 77

A majority of Northerners eventually determined (especially after the

Cotton States seceded) that King Cotton needed dethroning for north-
ern and southern nonslaveholders to achieve America’s god-sanctioned
destiny. Though they had a deepening well of antislavery images to offer
the Northern public, defeat in 1856 had taught them the limits of that
strategy.32 At their Chicago convention Republicans worried less about
denouncing slaveholders than showing how their political-economic
choices had adversely affected Northerners. They constructed a broad-
based platform that successfully highlighted the Democracy’s “measure-
less subserviency to the exactions of a sectional interest,” and especially
to the Cotton South’s laissez-faire agenda. Without eliminating antislav-
ery positions, Republicans highlighted their support for a new river and
harbor bill, a Pacific railroad, and free homesteading in the West. They
proposed “duties upon imports” aimed at securing to “the workingmen
liberal wages, to agriculture remunerating prices, to mechanics and manu-
factures an adequate reward for their skill, labor and enterprise, and to
the nation commercial prosperity and independence.”33 In some form or
other, Southern Democratic leaders or their northern “doughface” presi-
dent had blocked or prevented the implementation of these policies.
As the campaign entered its final months, northern Democrats like
Kettell and former “Cotton Whigs”-turned-Constitutional Unionists like
Bostonians Amos Lawrence and Edward Everett used well-worn argu-
ments of cotton’s power to sway voters, especially in the critical states of
New York and Pennsylvania.34 Republicans, in turn, mounted increasingly
aggressive attacks not only on the slavocracy’s abuse of northern whites’
rights, but on the supposition that further homage was owed to a cotton-
centered world view seen by one observer as the “textbook and creed of
the mad movement of the South.”35 Just days before the election, William
Seward told a packed house at New York’s Palace Garden that their ascen-
dance to the forefront of world commerce had been government-aided
but fairly and naturally won. Appealing to Yankee pride, Seward urged the
superiority of free labor and derided threats of southern non-importation
and secession as unbecoming efforts to force northern voters “to bend
and bow” before the cotton interest. Reacting to such “terror and men-
ace,” he warned, would suggest that New York was “a province of Virginia
or of Carolina” rather than the “metropolis of the Country” destined to
be “the metropolis of the Continent.”36 Seward’s speech drew thunderous
applause from his Republican audience, though likely played less well with
the city’s Democratic majority.
78 B. SCHOEN

Elsewhere critiques of continued submission to the cotton-led “Slave

Power” found an increasingly favorable hearing, though for different rea-
sons. In New England, the Whig Party’s dissolution left once-dominant
Cotton Whigs without a clear national political partner, a fact that sig-
nificantly hindered the appeal of Constitutional Unionists. “Conscience
Whigs” enthusiastically joined the Free Soil Republican party with some
abolitionists claiming that Boston’s Pacific trade could offer cotton pro-
duced by free labor that would finally liberate the region’s textile manu-
facturers from the Slave Power. In the developing Midwest, weakening
commercial ties to the Deep South made cotton planters appear more
like political obstructionists than economic partners. They are more
concerned, Minnesota Representative William Windom suggested, with
“thrusting the slave question upon us” than passing nationally beneficial
policies. Especially by thwarting a free homestead, the slaveholding South
had prevented the nation from fulfilling the “early theory of the found-
ers of this Republic… that it should be an asylum for the oppressed of all
nations.”37 Wheat farmers had also grown tired of hearing about cotton’s
alleged superiority.38
To a considerable degree, however, the central battle over King
Cotton’s place in the North transpired in Pennsylvania, an economic,
socially, religiously, and politically diverse state critical to Republican vic-
tory but reliant on southern cotton and moderate on slavery.39 Despite
the presence of free blacks and antislavery Quaker and German communi-
ties, early Republicans inroads into the two largest cities, Philadelphia and
Pittsburgh, had been based more on carefully crafted perceptions of that
party’s nativism than a deep commitment to the antislavery cause.40 The
deep effects of the Panic of 1857, however, had highlighted the region’s
economic vulnerability and resurrected issues such as protectionism.
Leading the charge was the well-connected political economist and publi-
cist Henry Carey, whose own assessment of world and national economies
informed his approach to the crisis.
While the South’s Cotton Barons celebrated international free trade,
the Anglophobic Carey perceived it—presently constructed—as a tool for
advancing British global hegemony toward immoral ends. Free trade had
perpetuated “slavery,” not just in the United States but also in the impov-
erished mill towns of Britain and Scotland, in a deindustrialized India, and
in others nations like Portugal and Turkey that had succumbed to British
free trade imperialism.41 The Democrat-led pursuit of global commerce
was “a policy leading inevitably to poverty, despair, and death” and ulti-
 SOUTHERN WEALTH, GLOBAL PROFITS: COTTON, ECONOMIC CULTURE... 79

mately “the downfall of the system established by the men who achieved
the Revolution, and who made the Constitution of 1789.” Instead,
Carey believed the ideal national economy consisted of regional zones
whereby “internal commerce” between closely situated agriculturalists
and industrialists would enhance regional production and minimize the
wasted “expense” of transportation, insurance, and large armies and navies
required by reliance on international trade.42
Carey’s model of what Nicholas and Peter Onuf have called “protec-
tive nationalism” drew inspiration from Russia, Denmark, and especially,
the Zollverein Union; his writings would eventually become textbooks
for Italian and French economic nationalists. Associational life as he saw
practiced there and in the Northeastern United States, coupled with state-
level trade protection would preserve the nation from a violent Atlantic
and resolve the United States’s domestic strife. Carey disliked slavery
but rejected overtures to assist Hinton Helper and other abolitionists on
grounds that the only solution would be a natural one facilitated by tar-
iff-aided southern industrialization. By the late 1850s, he had translated
the protectionist sympathies expressed by Upper South Whigs, especially
Kentuckian John Crittenden and future Presidential candidate Tennessean
John Bell, into false hope that protection would garner broad Southern
support and rescue the union from slavery-related debates.43
By mid-1860, the unrealistic nature of that hope had become increas-
ingly clear. Cotton South’s Democrats felt no compulsion to sacrifice their
support for free trade in order to guarantee greater protections for slavery.
In 1859 as a contest over the House speakership raged, southern Democrat
rejected, what one described as a Pennsylvania Republican compromise
whereby Republicans “will not say anything more than they have said on
the slavery question if you will give them a protective tariff.”44 In 1860,
Republicans successfully joined “Americans”—including some from the
Upper South—to pass the first version of the Morrill tariff. To a man
delegates from the Deep South opposed the measure and Buchannan’s
veto killed it.45 Those developments—and Carey’s wild enthusiasm for
the Chicago Platform’s call for a more balanced economy and higher
duties—pushed him and other “Keystone” state residents to reject further
slaveholder appeals or to accept overtures from solicitous Constitutional
Unionists.46 Philadelphia precincts may have remained Democratic, but
the state as a whole went to Lincoln by a comfortable margin of nearly
60,000 votes, an indicator to astute observers—North and South—that
Lincoln would be the next President.
80 B. SCHOEN

The subsequent secession of Cotton States intensified Northern anti-

King Cotton feelings, particularly in greater Philadelphia. In January
1861, a close friend of Carey, protectionist Stephen Colwell, released
his Five Cotton States and New York challenging the secessionist assump-
tion that the Union had outlived its usefulness and specifically target-
ing Hammond’s two-year-old speech. These King Cotton arguments
were “the kind of gas which propels the wheels of revolution in South
Carolina.” “Perfectly intoxicated with their power and the grandeur of
King Cotton,” the disunionists, “having vanquished the Bank of England
and President Buchanan, [is] now considering what he will do with
New  York and the North.”47 Though betraying considerable concern,
Colwell built a case that New  York’s local business and industry had
proven more critical to regional prosperity and national wealth than cot-
ton. In fact, the complicated cotton trade, he suggested, had been built
on ultimately faulty credit flows that secession would cause to collapse.
Cotton planters would rue the day that the “treachery of politicians and
treason of men in high places” had brought the country to the “eve
of that greatest of human calamities, a civil war.”48 Shortly afterward,
Samuel Powell’s chapter-by-chapter refutation of Kettell’s tract similarly
highlighted the South’s dependence on the North. He told his audi-
ence that they should be deeply offended by the “false conclusion” that
members of “one of the mightiest nations upon earth,” could be “per-
secuted with the proposition that all their wealth, all their industry, all
their power, emanates and has been wrongly forced from them from a
department containing twelve millions in all, but in which four millions
of negro slaves alone, have accomplished the gain and wealth.” Besides, he
concluded, flax would be a cheap replacement for cotton.49
Ardent Republicans and Unionists, Powell, Seward, and Colwell for-
warded a nation-centered political economy that trumpeted the superi-
ority of free labor and industrial and commercial development and the
necessity of preserving the Union. Again and again, northern Republicans
appealed to their constituents’ honor and independence urging them to
stand firm in the face of what the Philadelphia Inquirer called the “Cotton
Conspiracy’s” “exclusive and chivalric warfare,” which was premised “not
on the negro per se” but on “the negro, regarded only as a producer of
Cotton.”50 Among “the compelling motive dictating secession, on the part
of the Cotton States,” another paper noted, was “the desire to inaugurate
anew the slave trade… the great desideratum of the planting States.”51
Emphasizing that divisive issue (within the South) and distinguishing
 SOUTHERN WEALTH, GLOBAL PROFITS: COTTON, ECONOMIC CULTURE... 81

between cotton and non-cotton states remained especially useful as politi-

cians feverishly worked to convince the Upper Slave States to rebuff the
advances of Confederate commissioners.
Anti-Cotton states appeals, however, consisted of more than exercises in
“othering” their slaveholding opponents; they also sought to demonstrate
the material effects of allowing secession to transpire. Westerners ominously
viewed the fortification of the Mississippi River and Louisiana’s purported
threat to collect duties on ships navigating it—even after the Montgomery
Convention had guaranteed free navigation “in times of peace,” a qualifica-
tion that western papers duly noted. Such violations of westerners’ “rights,”
the Chicago Daily Tribune asserted, would not be tolerated and would lead
“to the extremity of blotting Louisiana out of the map.”52 Holding out faith
in the Upper Slave States and finding it hard to believe that they had not fully
complied with reasonable slaveholders’ demands, some Northeasterners
used the Cotton South’s long tradition of threatening non-importation to
suggest that secession had been calculated primarily to remake the Atlantic
trading system and harm Northern merchants and manufacturers. Papers
from all regions decried the seizure of ports, post offices, and forts as “illegal
violence” at best and “levying war” and “high treason” at worst.53
The Confederate provisional government’s policies and Jefferson
Davis’s mid-February inaugural address reinforced these suspicions. The
creation of a “national” army and navy and a pledging of “firm resolve
to appeal to arms” if not granted recognition heightened anger. Davis’s
promises of free trade coupled with the Confederate Constitution’s much-
heralded rejection of tariff protection seemed a calculated attempt to
undercut northern merchants, now burdened with higher tariffs.54 At the
same time, the provisional and final Constitution more easily permitted
export duties brought charges of hypocrisy for what one commentator
described as a “China duty.”55 The Confederacy’s move to begin collect-
ing revenue—and the Union’s challenge of doing so—generated greater
anxiety. There would be “no money to carry on the government,” the
New  York Evening Post fretted, and European powers would, especially
after the Morrill Tariff became law, take advantage of freer trade through
the Confederacy to undercut Northern merchants and manufacturers even
in loyal states.56 Northern fears elevated with news that Southern states
were sending emissaries to Europe seeking direct trade and diplomatic
recognition; rumors that France and Britain had already pledged their
support further heightened alarm. Even cautious diplomats like Britain’s
Richard Lyons could have their silence misinterpreted as approbation.57
82 B. SCHOEN

As two US administrations, the Upper South states, and European

officials grappled to shape a response to secession, transatlantic dynamics
heightened the uncertainty. Northern Republicans’ own efforts to make
good on their campaign promises further fueled international misunder-
standing. In February, freed of Lower South opposition, a Republican-
led Congress passed—and in one of his last Presidential acts, Buchanan
signed—the Morrill Tariff raising duties on many imported goods, includ-
ing chief imports from Britain: textiles and pig iron. The policy—passed
on the heels of Davis’s free trade speech and just before the Confederates’
ratification of an explicitly “free trade” constitution—appeared in Europe
as both an affront and an indication that the North intended to let the free-
trade-loving South peaceably go. Picking up his pen for a larger audience,
Union sympathizer Charles Dickens later declared matter-of-factly that
the Morrill tariff had “severed the last threads which bound the North and
South together.”58 The policy itself, as Marc Palin makes clear, angered
British officials and the general public, leading many toward an anti-
Union position under the mistaken belief that free trade desires—rather
than attachments to slavery—had been the real impetus for secession.59
For a shrinking number of northern Conservatives, fear added urgency to
compromise efforts. They also, however, allowed Northern Unionists to
paint Cotton South secessionists as the worst kind of traitors: those will-
ing to literally undo the American Revolution by getting into bed with the
nation’s long-time rival (Britain) or Continental Europe’s newest tyrant,
Emperor Napoleon III.
In this context, the continual Republican pounding against the Cotton
Confederacies’ numerous atrocities against, not just Northerners, but
union-loving slaveholders had their intended effect. Outside of New York
City—which Democratic Mayor Fernando Wood proposed making a “Free
Port”—cotton-based traction for compromise eroded. According to the
600-page unofficial record of a last ditch February peace conference, the
word “cotton” only appears three times, none in references to its power
to avert war.60 King Cotton’s minions had long held back the North from
presumably more advantageous policies—including for Colwell and Carey,
protection. Now by seceding they were showing that their ruthless pur-
suit of slave mastery led them to wreak havoc on a generally profitable
trading system. Did such men as this deserve independent nationhood?
Northerners compelled to search for historical comparisons for secessionists
understandably ignored European independence and nationalist movements
that had garnered considerable sympathy. Instead, they compared them to
 SOUTHERN WEALTH, GLOBAL PROFITS: COTTON, ECONOMIC CULTURE... 83

autocratic Austrians’ or drew upon the recent Sepoy rebellion, accusing the
“Sepoys of Montgomery” of a ferocity and barbarity only befitting those
who have “played tyrants all their lives” but whose revolutionary schemes
had been rebuked.61 Now, state governors and the Davis-led Confederacy
had sent agents to Europe to purchase weapons on cotton’s credit and
appeared ready to harm northern interests directly.
A cynical interpretation of these developments (or a Neo-Confederate
one) might conclude that united Northerners forced the South back into
the Union out of material greed. Though most northerners had con-
cluded that the national economic sum was greater than their diverse con-
stituent parts, such a conclusion overplays the degree of cohesion within
the North and fails to recognize the continued appeal that peaceable sepa-
ration had for some economic nationalists tired of Deep South obstruc-
tionism. As late as January, for example, Carey declared himself “entirely
willing” that the Cotton States “should stay out, that I would not move a
finger to induce them to return.”62 Even for the hard-headed economist,
and even more so for Lincoln who in his first inaugural eschewed the idea
that interest alone could preserve the union—action was predicated on a
more romanticized appeal to “bonds of affection” and the “mystic chords
of memory.”63 Critically, as both men and countless others saw the nation
they loved devolving into legal, political, and economic chaos, the early
claim that secession’s telos was anarchy became ever more real. Fears of
a domino effect heightened anxiety that the North American continent
would again be vulnerable to European power.
A fuller interpretation of why Northerners resisted secession remains
to be written, but part of that story must capture the sense of frustra-
tion, anger, and to some extent, embarrassment, that northerners believed
the slavery-loving Cotton Lords had brought upon the United States.64
Equally critical to Carey and Lincoln, however, was the fate of non-
slaveholding whites living in closer proximity to King Cotton’s tyranny.
Sometime in the late spring, a British correspondent challenged Carey to
prove that Lincoln’s determined policy of forced union through “con-
quest,” had not been sought merely “to be enabled to continue to hold up
to Europe the appearance of ‘a great and powerful State.’” Carey retorted
that war must be pursued not just to preserve the Union but to liberate the
most immediate victims of the “aristocratic tyranny” of the cotton belt:
“freedom-loving” whites who resided in a “great free soil wedge” that
extended from the mountains in Alabama through Tennessee, Kentucky,
Maryland, and western Virginia. Neither the United States nor Europe, he
84 B. SCHOEN

contended, should abandon those residing in this “great backbone of the

Union” to the “tender mercies of those under whose tyranny they have
already so much suffered—those who now denounce every loyal south-
ern man as a traitor and an abolitionist.”65 Carey’s British correspondent
admitted that he had perhaps taken too simplistic a view, but continued
to reject the proposition that coercion remained humane or feasible, an
opinion many Europeans continued to hold.66
Carey, however, believed it deeply enough to overcome his general
pacifism and demand military action after the Confederacy’s attack on
Fort Sumter. On Monday, April 15, the day that Lincoln issued a call
for 75,000 troops, he calmly affixed his name to a document that urged
the federal government to “sustain the government in its effort to main-
tain the honor, the integrity, and the existence of our National Union
and the perpetuity of its popular government.”67 Outside, a more excited
pro-Unionist crowd ransacked a small mercantile newspaper flying a pal-
metto flag and impulsively offered a display noteworthy in its symbol-
ism. Happening upon an unlucky merchant carting bales of cotton, the
Philadelphia Inquirer reported, “hundreds of men picked the fabric from
its covering, and amid groans and cheers, filled the air with the light mate-
rial.”68 Such was King Cotton’s diplomatic fate in the United States, and
eventually, abroad.

NOTES
1. Douglas R.  Egerton, “Rethinking Atlantic Historiography in a
Postcolonial Era: The Civil War in a Global Perspective,” The
Journal of the Civil War Era 1 (2011): 79–95; Michael E. Woods,
“What Twenty-First-Century Historians Have Said About the
Causes of Disunion: A Civil War Sesquicentennial Review of the
Recent Literature,” Journal of American History 99 (2012):
415–439. Andre M. Fleche, The Revolution of 1861: The American
Civil War in the Age of Nationalist Conflict (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2012). Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and
Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, 2nd ed.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Timothy Mason
Roberts, Distant Revolutions: 1848 and the Challenge to American
Exceptionalism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press,
2009); Paul Quigley, “Secessionists in an Age of Secession: The
Slave South in Transatlantic Perspective,” in Secession as an
 SOUTHERN WEALTH, GLOBAL PROFITS: COTTON, ECONOMIC CULTURE... 85

International Phenomenon: From America’s Civil War to

Contemporary Separatist Movements, ed. Don H. Doyle, (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 2010), 151–173. Don H.  Doyle,
Nations Divided: America, Italy, and the Southern Question
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002).
2. Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence China, Europe, and the
Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2000); Nicholas and Peter Onuf, Nations, Markets,
and War: Modern History and the American Civil War (Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 2006). Jay Sexton, Debtor Diplomacy:
Finance and American Foreign Relations in the Civil War Era,
1837–1873 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
3. Brian Schoen, The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics,
and the Global Origins of the Civil War (Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2009); Sven Beckert, “Emancipation
and Empire: Reconstructing the Worldwide Web of Cotton
Production in the Age of the American Civil War,” The American
Historical Review 109 (2004): 1405–1438; Douglas Farnie and
David Jeremy, The Fibre That Changed the World: The Cotton
Industry in International Perspective, 1600–1990s (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2004); Walter Johnson, River of Dark
Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom, (Cambridge:
Harvard Belknap Press, 2013).
4. Edward Bartlett Rugemer, The Problem of Emancipation (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009), 180–221; “East
Indian Cotton,” Southern Quarterly Review, 1 (1842): 449; Duff
Green in United States Telegraph, August 21, 1833; William
Freehling, Road to Disunion: Vol. I: Secessionists at Bay (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1990), I: 385–387; Thomas Hietala,
Manifest Design: American Exceptionalism & Empire (1985:
Ithaca: Cornell University, 2003).
5. Green to Calhoun, January 24, 1842, in Correspondence of John
C. Calhoun, ed. Jameson, (Washington: GPO, 1900), 2:842–843.
6. “East Indian Cotton,” Southern Quarterly Review, 1 (1842), 449;
Rugemer, Problem of Emancipation, 204–220, especially 204–220;
Edgar L. Erickson, “The Introduction of East Indian Coolies into
the British West Indies,” Journal of Modern History 6 (1934):
127–146; New Orleans Bee in Mississippi Free Trader and Natchez
Gazette, May 8, 1844.
86 B. SCHOEN

7. “East India Cotton,” Mississippi Free Trader and Natchez Gazette,

(Natchez, MS), October 11, 1843; Frenise A. Logan, “A British
East India Company Agent in the United States 1839–1840,”
Agricultural History 48 (1974): 267–276.
8. Charles Kershaw Rowley, Robert D.  Tollison, and Gordon
Tullock, The Political Economy of Rent Seeking (Boston: Kluwer
Academic Publishing, 1988), 207–208; Donald N. McCloskey,
“Magnanimous Albion: Free Trade and British National
Income, 1841–1881,” Explorations in Economic History, 2nd
series, 17 (1980): 308.
9. George McDuffie to George Wilson, 11 March 1845, MSS,
Papers of George Wilson, Manchester (UK) Central Library,
M20/vol. 8.
10. Congressional Globe, 29 Cong., 1 sess. 296 (February, 1846);
Robert E.  May, The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire,
1854–1861 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002);
Schoen, Fragile Fabric, 190–196; Johnson, River of Dark Dreams,
395–420.
11. Edward B.  Bryan, Letters to the Southern People… (Charleston:
Press of Walker, Evans and Co., 1858), esp. 20; Robert E. Bonner,
“Proslavery Calculations and Disunion,” in Secession as an
International Phenomenon, Doyle, Secession as an International
Phenomenon, 115–132.
12. Clarendon to Palmerston, December 23, 1855, quoted in Kenneth
Bourne, Britain and the Balance of Power in North America,
1815–1908 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967),
191. Also Kenneth Bourne, “The Clayton-Bulwer Treaty and the
Decline of British Opposition to the Territorial Expansion of the
United States, 1857–1860,” Journal of Modern History 33 (1961):
287–291.
13. William Henry Trescot, A Few Thoughts on the Foreign Policy of the
United States (Charleston: John Russell, 1849), 11, 8. Sam
W. Haynes, Unfinished Revolution: The Early American Republic
in a British World (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press,
2010), Chapter 12.
14. Schoen, Fragile Fabric of Union, ch. 5.
15. U.S. Government, Treaties and Conventions Concluded between the
United States of America and Other Powers, revised edition
(Washington D.C: GPO, 1873), 58, 450, 535, 641, 856.
 SOUTHERN WEALTH, GLOBAL PROFITS: COTTON, ECONOMIC CULTURE... 87

16. John C. Claiborne, Report of the Secretary of the Interior, 35th

Congress. 1st session, Ex. Doc. No 35, on Breman report,
35–38.
17. Douglas A.  Farnie, “Merchants as Prime Movers,” in Fibre That
Changed the World, Farnie, and Jeremy, Table 2.1, 23.
18. Congressional Globe, 35th Cong., 1st Sess., 961–962. See James
L.  Huston, The Panic of 1857 and the Coming of the Civil War
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987).
19. Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the
English Imagination 1830–1867, 1st ed. (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2002).
20. Reprinted in Charleston Mercury, April 28, 1858.
21. Reprinted in Thomas Prentice Kettell, Southern Wealth and
Northern Profits (1860; Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama
Press, 1965), 41–42.
22. John Vincent Nye, “The Myth of Free-Trade Britain and Fortress
France: Tariffs and Trade in the Nineteenth Century,” The Journal
of Economic History 51 (1991): 23–46, table 6.
23. R. J. M. Blackett, Divided Hearts: Britain and the American Civil
War, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000); Henry
Blumenthal, A Reappraisal of Franco-American Relations,
1830–1871 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959).
24. Bryan, Letters, 20.
25. John Townsend, The South Alone Should Govern the South and
African Slavery Should be Controlled by those only who are Friendly
to it (Charleston: Evans and Cogswell, 1860), 8, 18–20.
26. Ephraim Douglass, Great Britain and the American Civil War
(1925: Dodo Press, 2006), I: 61–62.
27. Kettel, Southern Wealth and Northern Profits, 61.
28. Cobb, “Secessionist Speech, Monday Evening, November 12,” in
Secession Debated, Freehling, and Simpson, 15.
29. On victim mentality see Schoen, Fragile Fabric, ch. 5; Paul Quigley,
Shifting Grounds: Nationalism and the American South, 1848–1865
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 87–127.
30. “Despatch from the British Consul at Charleston to Lord John
Russell, 1860,” The American Historical Review 18 (1913),
783–787.
31. William Mure to Russell, December 13, 1860, quoted in Walther,
William Yancey, 303.
88 B. SCHOEN

32. Susan-Mary Grant, North Over South: Northern Nationalism and

American Identity in the Antebellum Era (Lawrence: University of
Kansas Press, 2000); David Potter, The Impending Crisis,
1848–1861 (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 420.
33. “Republican Party Platform of 1860,” May 17, 1860. Online
by Gerhard Peters and John T.  Woolley, The American Presidency
Project . http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29620 .
Accessed 2/6/2015.
34. Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New  York City and the
Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003); Philip S.  Foner, Business &
Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1941).
35. Samuel Powell, Notes on “Southern Wealth and Northern Profits,”
(Philadelphia: C. Sherman and Son, Printers, 1861).
36. New York Times, November 3, 1860.
37. William Windom, The Homestead Bill--its Friends and Its Foes.
March 14, 1860 (Washington: Buell and Blanchard, 1860).
Economists have also identified the redirection of commodities
from New Orleans to New  York: Albert Fishlow, American
Railroads and the Transformation of the Antebellum Economy
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), 275–288.
38. Richard H.  Abbott, Cotton and Capital (Amherst: University
of Massachusetts Press, 2009), 59; Kinley J. Brauer, Cotton ver-
sus Conscience: Cotton versus Conscience: Massachusetts Whig
Politics and Southwestern Expansion, 1843–1848, (Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky, 1967); Thomas H.  O’Connor,
Lords of the Loom, the Cotton Whigs and the Coming of the Civil
War, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968); Kenneth
M.  Stampp, And the War Came: The North and the Secession
Crisis, 1860–1861 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 2006). Marc Egnal, Clash of Extremes: The Economic
Origins of the Civil War (New York, New York: Hill and Wang,
2009), esp. 205–257.
39. For Kettell-like analysis see: Merchant of Philadelphia’s, The End of
the Irrepressible Conflict, and The Ides of March: or, Abraham
Lincoln, Private Citizen (Philadelphia: King and Baird,
1860–1861); Daniel Kilbride, An American Aristocracy: Southern
Planters in Antebellum Philadelphia (Columbia: University of
South Carolina Press, 2006).
 SOUTHERN WEALTH, GLOBAL PROFITS: COTTON, ECONOMIC CULTURE... 89

40. Michael Holt, Forging a Majority the Formation of the Republican

Party in Pittsburgh, 1848–1860. (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1969). And Judith Giesberg, “The Most Northern of
Southern Cities,” in The New  York Times: Opinionator, May 22,
2011: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/22/the-
most-northern-of-southern-cities/ accessed August 24, 2011.
41. Henry Charles Carey, The Slave Trade, Domestic and Foreign: Why
It Exists, and How It May Be Extinguished (New York: A.M. Kelley,
1853).
42. Henry Charles Carey, Letters to the President: On the Foreign and
Domestic Policy of the Union, and Its Effects, as Exhibited in the
Condition of the People and the State (Philadelphia: M.  Polock,
1858), 170.
43. Onuf and Onuf, Nation’s, Markets, and War, 280; 291–331 pas-
sim; Carey, The Slave Trade, Domestic and Foreign, chs. 16–19.
44. Richard Franklin Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central
State Authority in America, 1859–1877 (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1990), 51–57, quote from 55.
45. Congressional Globe, 36th Congress, 1st Session, p. 2056.
46. George Winston Smith, Henry C. Carey and American Sectional
Conflict (Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press, 1951),
84–88.
47. Stephen Colwell, The Five Cotton States and New  York…
([Philadelphia, n.p.], 1861).
48. Ibid., 64.
49. Notes on “Southern Wealth and Northern Profits,” 29.
50. “Secession: A Cotton Conspiracy,” in Philadelphia Inquirer,
February 11, 1861, in Howard Perkins, Northern Editorials on
Secession. (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1964), 866–867.
51. Ibid., 853–855.
52. Ibid., 539–561. Quote from February 25, 1861, Chicago Daily
Tribune, 558.
53. “The First Act of Illegal Violence,” Daily Chicago Post, December
29, 1860,” (203–206); “Secession and the Revenue Laws,”
Philadelphia Press, January 15, 1861 (“levying war”) (216–220)
“Southern Repudiation of Debts Due the North,” (Montpelier,
VT) Green Mountain Freeman, May 17, 1861 ibid., 605–606.
54. Perkins, Northern Editorials, 607–618.
55. Colwell, Five Cotton States and New York, 29.
90 B. SCHOEN

56. Perkins, Northern Editorials, 698–600.

57. For example, New York Herald, November 14, 1860; The State of
the Country,” Cincinnati Daily Commercial, March 23, 1861, in
Perkins, Northern Editorials, I: 371–375.
58. “The Morrill Tariff,” All the Year Round, December 28, 1861
(London: Chapman and Hall, 1862), 328–331.
59. See Marc-William Palin, “The Civil War’s Forgotten Transatlantic
Tariff Debate and the Confederacy’s Free Trade Diplomacy,”
Journal of the Civil War Era 3 (2013): 35–61.
60. L. E. Chittenden, A Report on the Debates and Proceedings of the
Secret… (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1864).
61. “Austria or America?,” Cincinnati Daily Commercial, December 1,
1860 and “The Sepoys of Montgomery,” Albany Evening Journal,
May 10, 1861 and “Our Foreign Relations,” New  York Daily
Tribune, June 3, 1861, Perkins, Northern Editorials, 510–512,
973.
62. Smith, Henry C. Carey and American Sectional Conflict, 96.
63. Lincoln’s First Inaugural. See Richard Carwardine, “Lincoln’s
Horizons: The Nationalist as Universalist,” in The Global Lincoln,
eds. Richard Carwardine and Jay Sexton (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2011), 28–43.
64. Two useful recent starting places are: Gary W.  Gallagher, The
Union War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011);
Elizabeth Varon, Disunion!: The Coming of the American Civil
War, 1789–1859 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina
Press, 2008).
65. Henry Carey, “American Civil War: Correspondence with
Mr. H. C. Carey of Philadelphia,” ([London], August-September,
1861), 4, 7.
66. For discussion of the humanitarian motives for intervention see:
Howard Jones, Blue and Gray Diplomacy: A History of Union and
Confederate Foreign Relations (Chapel Hill: The University of
North Carolina Press, 2010).
67. Smith, Henry C. Carey and American Sectional Conflict, 98.
68. The Philadelphia Inquirer, April 16, 1861, quoted in Giesberg,
“The Most Northern of Southern Cities.”
 CHAPTER 6

International Finance in the Civil War Era

Jay Sexton

As this volume makes clear, the Civil War extended beyond the United
States. One of the most important overseas battlegrounds took place on
British and European money markets, where the cash-strapped Union and
Confederate governments sought foreign capital. Statesmen in Washington
and Richmond also hoped that a successful foreign loan would lend cred-
ibility to their respective causes by establishing abroad a politically influ-
ential group of bondholders. “I think every bond sold on this side of
the water becomes a bond of sympathy,” Union financial agent to Britain
William Aspinwall declared in 1863.1 The international financial dimen-
sion of the Civil War thus merged with its political and diplomatic ones.
The story of transnational finance during the Civil War era is also impor-
tant for what it reveals about long-term development and change in the
international financial system. The American conflict disrupted and altered
the financial relationships, institutions, and flows of capital that had devel-
oped around the burgeoning Atlantic economy. When British capitalists
shied away from investing in the bonds of the belligerents, they prompted
upstart American financiers to court investors in France, Holland, and
Germany. The modest amounts of funds raised in these places, however,
accounted for only a fraction of the war costs. Forced to look to domestic

J. Sexton ( )
University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, United States

© The Author(s) 2016 91

J. Nagler et al. (eds.), The Transnational Significance of the
American Civil War, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40268-0_6
92 J. SEXTON

sources for the overwhelming majority of its capital needs, the United
States reoriented its financial institutions and structures along new national
lines. This national financial system was built upon the transnational bank-
ing structures of the early nineteenth century and reconfigured, rather than
severed, financial links with the wider world.
***
The post-1815 era was a period of great financial innovation and inte-
gration in Europe and its Atlantic subsidiaries. A sophisticated, inter-
national bond market centered in the City of London emerged to fund
national debts and underwrite infrastructure development. The gatekeep-
ers to this capital system were a series of multinational banking houses,
led by the Rothschilds and Baring Brothers. Nineteenth-century bond
markets became inextricably entwined with politics, diplomacy, and impe-
rial policy. Jittery bond markets led reluctant leaders to engage in politi-
cal reforms; conversely, successful bond issues empowered and stabilized
what otherwise might have been rickety regimes. The bond market, one
historian has suggested, thus can serve as “a kind of daily opinion poll, an
expression of confidence in a given regime.”2
The bonds of finance connected the early American republic to the
capital system of the Old World. Long-term foreign investment in the
United States increased from $18 million in 1789 to $110 million in 1838
to $444 million by the eve of the Civil War.3 An estimated ninety percent
of this foreign investment in 1861 was British.4 Foreign capital helped fuel
the dramatic economic take-off of the United States: it kept interest rates
lower than they otherwise would have been, underwrote important aspects
of the “transportation revolution,” and financed the debts of municipali-
ties, states, and the federal government. By 1853, nearly half of the US
national debt was held abroad, chiefly in Britain. Powerful multinational
banks based in London, led by Baring Brothers and George Peabody and
Co., with the Rothschilds playing a secondary role, facilitated this westward
flow of capital. Though they did not enjoy the political leverage in America
that they did in Europe, these leading banks were by no means excluded
from the new republic’s corridors of power. American agents of the top
British firms, such as Barings’ consultants in Massachusetts, Thomas Wren
Ward and Daniel Webster, and the Rothschilds’ New York representative
August Belmont, were also important lobbyists and politicians. American
expatriate bankers in London, such as Joshua Bates of Baring Brothers and
George Peabody and his partner J.S.  Morgan, similarly fostered political
relationships on both sides of the Atlantic.
 INTERNATIONAL FINANCE IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA 93

Many nineteenth-century Americans were alarmed by their indebtedness

to their former colonial master. The era’s Anglophobic tracts, particularly
those coming from Jacksonian quarters, contended that British financial
power compromised American independence. Yet historians have stopped
short of classifying the United States as part of Britain’s informal empire.
If the aggregate figure of British investment in America was high, Britain’s
proportional slice of the overall economic pie was less than what it enjoyed
in her settler dominions or areas of informal influence such as Argentina.5
The United States was able to exercise some control over its public debt
that was held in Britain. Unlike the obligations of Latin American states
that were denominated in pounds sterling, the national debt of the United
States was forever transferred to dollars in 1795. The absence of British
“gunboat diplomacy” in the United States also differentiated the Anglo-
American financial relationship from that of Britain’s informal empire.
Indeed, one might turn the tables and emphasize the benefits the
United States enjoyed within Britain’s international financial system.
Compared to the economic difficulties faced by the new states in Latin
America, who were unable to attract a consistent flow of capital at the
affordable rates their northern neighbor enjoyed, foreign investment in
the United States does not appear in a pejorative light. The privileged
position afforded to American debtors on the London money market
owed much to the shared culture, racial thought, and networks that
grew out of old colonial ties. It is difficult, for example, to view Baring
Brothers as an agent of recrudescent British imperialism: the bank’s
London partnership included US citizens; it acted on the advice of its
American correspondents; it helped finance the Louisiana Purchase and
the 1848 indemnity payment to Mexico; and the head of the firm in the
early nineteenth century, Alexander Baring, doubled as an MP and dip-
lomat who labored to preserve Anglo-American peace.
Where the United States might have resembled British dependencies
lay in its vulnerability to transnational financial crises. The panics of 1819
and 1837, which were rooted not only in land bubbles in the American
West but also in sharp collapses in transatlantic security and commodity
prices, crippled the US economy. When eight state governments and one
territory defaulted on debt obligations in the early 1840s, many Americans
relished the opportunity, as one Mississippian put it, “to slap John Bull in
the face.”6 Transatlantic financiers were appalled. Plummeting American
securities soon became known as “American insecurities” among traders
on the London Stock Exchange.7 Leading transatlantic banks responded
94 J. SEXTON

by orchestrating a campaign to restore American credit. But rather than

push for British gunboat diplomacy or intervene themselves in American
politics (as they might have done had the defaulters been Latin American),
financial interests used moral suasion and appeals to America’s long-term
self-interest in a “restoration campaign” of public addresses, journal arti-
cles, and sermons. This approach eventually paid dividends, with six of the
offending states resuming, or at least restructuring, debt obligations in the
mid-1840s, mostly because they needed to attract further investment from
abroad. Yet three states repudiated their debts outright on the question-
able grounds that the debts had been illegitimately accrued. Significantly,
all were from the South: Mississippi, Arkansas, and Florida. British and
European capitalists would not forget the actions of these Southern debt-
ors when the Confederacy sought loans during the Civil War.
Despite the state defaults and repudiations of the 1840s, the United
States soon reassumed its favored position on the international money mar-
kets. This was in part the result of cultural and racial factors. British finan-
ciers remained inclined to trust fellow “Anglo-Saxons” in business dealings
even if they at times proved to be unreliable debtors. The allure of US secu-
rities was perhaps more the result of the international financial context. The
British banking crisis of 1847 and the European turmoil of 1848 made the
United States, particularly after the Compromise of 1850, appear a safer des-
tination for capital. August Belmont informed the London Rothschilds that
US bonds “now may be considered the safest of any government.”8 British
and European investors soaked up a portion of the 1848 US Treasury bond
issue that covered costs of the Mexican War. By 1851 US Treasury bonds
sold at 113 on the London Stock Exchange, their peak price in the mid-
nineteenth century. American railway securities similarly boomed.
The sectional and political controversies of the 1850s punctured this
bull market. Inveterately fearful of instability, foreign capital became wary
of the United States as the slavery controversy intensified. “I don’t like
the looks of things ahead,” J.S.  Morgan wrote from London in 1860,
“nobody has confidence in the Political future.”9 If transatlantic finan-
ciers tended to point the finger at politicians on both sides of the Mason-
Dixon Line, they reserved special blame for those in the South. This
might be surprising given the importance that the cotton trade played
in the Atlantic economy. Yet, in contrast to the merchants, shippers, and
bankers of Liverpool, the cotton trade was of marginal importance to
the portfolios of the major London-based financiers who dealt mostly in
government and railroad securities.10
 INTERNATIONAL FINANCE IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA 95

Bank records and the financial press suggest that British capitalists dis-
criminated against the South because of its embrace of slavery. Creditors
feared that those whose moral compass endorsed holding men in bond-
age would be unscrupulous in financial dealings. The Southern state debt
repudiations of the 1840s gave further purchase to this narrative. This
is not to contend that slavery prevented capitalists from investing in the
South, but rather that slavery cost the South on British capital markets.
Yields on Southern state bonds, for example, typically were higher than
those on Northern bonds.11 “The existence of even a minute fraction of
the population in bondage,” asserted the Westminster Review, “places the
government of that state at a serious disadvantage in the money market.”12
Some in Britain went so far as to engage in an early form of “ethical invest-
ment” by favoring the state and railroad bonds from the North over those
of the slaveholding South. By the late 1850s, British financiers blamed
America’s increasingly aggressive foreign policy in the Caribbean on the
“slave power” that sought to expand the peculiar institution. Fears of pro-
slavery expansionism in the Caribbean led the British free-trade advocate
The Economist to endorse John C. Frémont in 1856, a remarkable position
considering the protectionism of the Republican Party.13
The new Confederacy was thus disadvantaged when it sought to enter
the London bond market in 1861. One should be careful, however, not to
take this argument too far. If few British capitalists liked the idea of a slave-
holding Confederacy, most did not see slavery as the cause of the American
struggle. The prospect of a costly and destructive Northern military cam-
paign to restore the Union did not appeal to capitalists who feared that
such a conflict would disrupt the business of the Atlantic economy. Nor
did the Republican Party’s tariff policy attract many friends in the City.
In contrast, the Confederacy’s policy of a low revenue-raising tariff fell in
financiers’ sweet spot: a government required some duties to meet foreign
debt obligations, but not a protectionist tariff that constricted trade.
The attitudes of transatlantic financiers to the outbreak of conflict in
America mirrored the “divided hearts” that characterized British atti-
tudes more generally.14 The two American partners of Baring Brothers
bank divided upon the outbreak of war: Joshua Bates resolutely sided with
the North, whereas Russell Sturgis sympathized with the South. Similar
divisions emerged within the multinational Rothschild partnership. Other
foreign capitalists—probably the majority—spurned both sides and simply
hoped for an end to the political disruption so that business as usual
could return. “I doubt whether we are not as deeply interested in the
96 J. SEXTON

matter as the parties themselves,” remarked Lord Overstone, one of the

largest British holders of American securities.15 Transatlantic financiers’
chief political response was to encourage statesmen on both sides of
the Atlantic to find a way to avert catastrophe. In financial terms, they
unloaded investments in North and South alike, repatriating an estimated
half of the American securities held abroad between 1860 and 1863.16
“The anticipation of a bloody conflict between the North and the South,”
Peabody observed in March 1861, “has already destroyed the confidence
in the U.S. Government and State securities.”17
Despite the slump in American securities abroad, both sides sought
throughout the conflict to acquire a foreign loan.18 There were obvious
financial incentives for doing this. An influx of foreign capital would
bolster reserves and prop up domestic bond markets. Historically reliant
upon the great European banks for large governmental loans, American
statesmen could be forgiven for wondering if their decentralized finan-
cial system could realize the funds that the conflict required. Such con-
cerns were particularly acute in the Confederacy, whose underdeveloped
banking system accounted for only a quarter of the domestic loans issued
in 1860.19
But it was the perceived political benefits that most led Union and
Confederate leaders to approach foreign banks and investors. It is here
where Civil War financial diplomacy must be contextualized within the
politics of the nineteenth-century bond market. It was in the City and
the Frankfurt bourse, not just in the halls of government in Westminster
and Berlin, where governments obtained international recognition and
credibility. A bullish market on a bond issue extended security and lever-
age to the government in question; conversely, a bear market revealed a
lack of confidence in a given regime, perhaps even initiating, rather than
just reflecting, a downward spiral in its fortunes. Given the importance
of recognition and legitimacy in Civil War diplomacy, it is not surpris-
ing that both sides viewed the international bond market as a key battle-
field. Winning the support of leading financiers both would inject capital
into the war effort and engender political support by creating a class of
sympathetic bondholders. Once such a class of partisan bondholders was
established, it was presumed, diplomatic favors would be forthcoming.
“English sympathy is very apt to follow English Capital,” Union agent
William Aspinwall declared in 1863, “this is one good political reason for
placing bonds in Europe.”20 Confederate agents deemed the political ben-
efits of a successful loan to be of such importance in 1863 that they chose
 INTERNATIONAL FINANCE IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA 97

to partner with the French Erlangers rather than smaller British banks,
despite the fact that the terms Erlanger offered were harsher. As Judah
Benjamin put it, only after the “political advantages likely to be derived
from the loan” had been considered did the Confederate cabinet accept
Erlanger’s proposal.21
With the perceived stakes so high, both sides hyped their bonds in
a bid to secure the backing of the international money markets. Union
agent August Belmont used every argument at his disposal to convince
the London Rothschilds to invest in the Union. “Stocks of our federal
Government at par ought to prove, even in the present distracted state of
our country, a very desirable investment to your capitalists,” he wrote to
his London superiors in 1861.22 Pro-Union publications abroad, such as
George Francis Train’s London American, curried favor in Britain by com-
paring Chase’s financial policies to those of William Pitt and Robert Peel.23
The self-imposed “King Cotton” embargo placed Confederate agents in a
difficult position: capitalists viewed the policy as a form of blackmail that
deprived the South of its most important form of collateral. But this did
not stop Confederate agents from seeking to find speculators to buy their
bonds, which were difficult to dump even at half of face value in the early
years of the conflict.
Another dimension of this financial diplomacy was the denigration of
the opposition’s reputation. Confederate agents highlighted Union mea-
sures such as protectionism and the suspension of specie payments that
were anathema to European financiers, as well as spreading rumors on
the money markets aimed at destroying the Union’s credit worthiness.
Perhaps the most effective financial emissary during the war was Union
agent Robert J.  Walker, whose 1863 mission to London was primarily
spent demolishing the Confederacy’s financial reputation. Walker pub-
lished a pamphlet that reminded British capitalists of the Southern state
repudiations of the 1840s. He went to great lengths to connect repu-
diation to Jefferson Davis, who had been a US senator from Mississippi
when the state repudiated its debt. “Slavery takes the philanthropic, the
sentimental and the religious classes and the people,” Walker informed
Chase, “but repudiation touches the pocket nerve and sweeps away the
lenders of money.”24 Such charges stuck. The London Bankers’ Magazine
believed that “President Davis is in some degree personally responsible for
the repudiation of the obligations of the State of Mississippi.”25
Neither side managed to score the major foreign loan which they
sought. The explanation for this is straightforward: capitalists saw too
98 J. SEXTON

much risk in extending credit to governments embroiled in a destruc-

tive and protracted civil war. As The Economist put it, “federations at a
crisis of revolutionary disunion cannot hope to have credit abroad.”26 The
Rothschilds responded to Belmont’s overtures on behalf of the Union
by expressing their concern that the war “can only be carried on at a
monumental expense, and loan would have to follow loan in order to
provide the means.”27 Barings made a similar point when it declined a
Union loan offer in 1863.28 There were further reasons for skepticism
particular to the respective sides. Financiers calculated that the blockaded
and inflation plagued Confederacy had little means of servicing its spiral-
ing debt. On the Union side, financial policies such as the suspension of
specie payments, the printing of paper “greenbacks,” and hikes in taxes
and tariffs did little to reassure jittery money markets abroad. “Why can-
not a country that can raise millions within itself raise a sixpence beyond
itself ?” The Economist asked, “The reason is the terror excited in Europe
by Mr Chase’s policy.”29 Fears of Anglo-American conflict, particularly
during the Trent crisis, further depressed Union bonds on in London.
Though there were concerns specific to the finances of each side, British
investors tended to classify Union and Confederate bonds together in the
junk category. “Prudent Englishmen,” the Bankers’ Magazine declared in
1862, “will have as little as possible to do either with the money matters
of the North or South.”30
Given the mood of the international money markets, it is perhaps sur-
prising that both sides managed to secure what they did in their financial
diplomacy. The Confederacy’s greatest success, if it can be called that,
came in March 1863 with a modest £3 million loan from the French
bank Erlanger and Co. The deal was made possible because Confederate
statesmen shelved their cotton embargo and made their new bonds
redeemable in cotton at an attractive fixed price of six pence per pound.
The loan got off to a promising start when auctioned in Paris, London,
Amsterdam, Frankfurt, and Liverpool. A triumphant John Slidell, the
Confederate emissary in Paris, declared it a “financial recognition of our
independence.”31 But Confederate agents soon had to enter the London
money market to prop up their plummeting cotton bonds. The provi-
sion in the loan that the bonds were redeemable for cotton only within
the blockaded Confederacy deterred investors, as did the Union military
victories in the summer 1863. The Erlanger loan was not an unmitigated
disaster—one study estimates that the Confederacy realized more than
half of the loan32—but it did little to alter the South’s financial position
 INTERNATIONAL FINANCE IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA 99

abroad. With the plummeting bonds frightening off major banks from
brokering a follow-on loan, the Confederacy had to rely ever more on
the support of its steadfast ally in Liverpool Fraser, Trenholm, and Co., a
modest and overstretched bank that was linked to the Charleston house
of John Fraser and Co.
The shortcomings of the Erlanger loan are perhaps most evident in
its failure to yield political benefits. There is little evidence to suggest
that Erlanger, who bought Union bonds in Frankfurt even as he dealt
with the Confederacy,33 was primarily motivated by a political desire to
contribute to the Southern cause. “This man Erlanger is a dangerous
one,” a Confederate agent in Liverpool asserted, “I judge him to be
ambitious, selfish, daring and unscrupulous.”34 The loan’s bondholders
similarly did little to promote the Confederate cause. The cotton bond-
holders were notoriously secretive of their identity, no doubt because of
the connection between the cotton bonds and slavery.35 The London
Rothschilds “did not hear of any respectable people having anything to
do with it… We ourselves have been quite neutral and have had nothing
to do with it.”36 Indeed, it is difficult to establish a reliable list of the
holders of the Confederacy’s cotton bonds. Even if important British
statesmen bought into the loan, as Union agents alleged at the time,
the bondholders did not form themselves into the pro-Confederate
lobby that leaders in Richmond anticipated.37 Rather than demonstrating
European capitalists’ faith in the Confederate government, the depreciat-
ing bonds soon became a barometer that measured declining confidence
in the Confederacy. “We may at length conclude,” Henry Adams wrote in
December 1863 when the price of the bonds fell to 40 in London, “that
the opinion among capitalists is fairly become that the chances are against
the independence of the rebels.”38
The Union’s greatest achievement in foreign finance during the war
resembled the Confederacy’s in that it produced only modest financial
gains. But unlike the Confederates during the Erlanger episode, the Union
never brokered a deal with a major foreign bank. Demand for Union bonds
abroad was instead met through private American banks that expatriated
debt on their own account. Perhaps surprisingly given the leading role
played by British financiers in antebellum America, the greatest purchases
of Union debt came on the exchanges of Amsterdam and Frankfurt, not
London. Upstart American banks such as J & W Seligman and Co. and
Knauth, Nachod, and Kuhne exported Union bonds to Europe. By war’s
end an estimated $320 million of Union debt—ten percent of the North’s
100 J. SEXTON

overall war-debt—was held abroad, primarily in Holland and Germany.39

“Shrewd as the British capitalist proverbially is, his judgment in regard
to American investments had been singularly fallible,” remarked Charles
Francis Adams, “When our national bonds went a begging at a discount
of sixty per cent, he transmitted them to Germany and refused to touch
them himself.”40
European capital helped soak up surplus Union debt, particularly dur-
ing the bleak summer of 1864 when bond prices plummeted on Wall
Street. The financial benefits of this US debt expatriation, however, should
not be overstated: Union bonds sold at deep discounts in Amsterdam and
Frankfurt and fluctuations in conversion rates disadvantaged the United
States. Reports from US consuls in Amsterdam and Frankfurt make clear
that many of the buyers were bargain-hunting speculators who sought to
turn a quick profit. Nonetheless, it appears that at least some of the inter-
est in Union bonds can be attributed to political and ideological factors.
Dutch and German migration to the Northern states, which translated into
enlistment in Union armies, established bonds of sympathy for the Union
cause in the old countries. Shared anti-slavery sentiments also played a
role. A liberal government in the Netherlands abolished slavery within
Dutch colonies just as Lincoln moved more assertively against Southern
slavery in 1862–1863. When news of the Emancipation Proclamation
reached Frankfurt, the US consul reported a rise in Union bonds “evi-
dently to be ascribed to the energetic anti-slavery proclamation of the
President which has been welcomed here with universal approbation.”41
Much like the diplomatic history of the Civil War, the most important
story of international finance during the conflict was that which never
happened. The bond markets never unequivocally recognized the viability
of the Confederate experiment. Leading banks, with the exception of the
Erlangers in Paris, never had enough confidence in the Confederacy to
sponsor a publicly subscribed bond issue, even on very favorable terms. If
anything, the major transatlantic firms tilted toward the Union. Though
they shied away from sponsoring a major bond issue, the Barings under-
wrote the activities of Union agents and purchasers abroad. “The Union is
to be preserved whatever the cost and all are traitors who talk of secession,”
declared Joshua Bates, who successfully countered the pro-Confederate
position of partner Russell Sturgis.42 Thomas Baring used his seat in
Parliament to oppose the recognition of the Confederacy and to diffuse
wartime crises in Anglo-American relations. Expatriate banker in London
George Peabody extended similar symbolic support to the Union. If many
 INTERNATIONAL FINANCE IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA 101

financial journals and some banks such as the London Rothschilds at times
flirted with the idea of foreign mediation as a means of ending the bloody
and costly conflict, the financial classes shied away from advocating such
measures once they understood that it likely would mean conflict with
the Union. As The Economist put it, “a war with either of the belligerents
would be a terrible calamity, but a war between England and the Northern
states of American would be the most affecting misfortune which could
happen to civilization.”43
Foreign investment in the United States slowly picked up in the years
after 1865. In the immediate post-war years, the centers of action remained
in Frankfurt and Amsterdam, which absorbed the majority of the estimated
$700 million of US debt abroad by 1868.44 British financiers continued
to fear that the United States might remain off the gold standard. The
conservative Grant administration dispelled these concerns when it made
returning to gold a priority. The Grant administration sought a foreign
loan both to bolster gold supplies in order to retire “greenbacks” and to
refinance the Civil War debt at a lower rate of interest. But plans for a major
foreign loan were thwarted by the unresolved Alabama claims dispute with
Britain. When diplomats finally resolved the Alabama affair in 1871, the
United States found its reward not only in the $15 million British indem-
nity payment but also on the London Stock Exchange, which absorbed the
majority of a $200 million low-interest US bond issue in 1871.45
The resolution to the Alabama claims and the commitment of the
United States to return to the gold standard ignited unprecedented inter-
est in American securities abroad. Though profoundly disrupted by the
great Panic of 1873, the United States would become the world’s most
popular destination for foreign capital. Its foreign debt would swell from
$1.39 billion in 1869 to $3.15 billion in 1899 to more than $7 billion
in 1914. Britain remained the nation’s chief creditor, though, reflecting
some of the investment patterns from continental Europe established dur-
ing the war, the proportion of foreign investment in the US that was
British declined from ninety to sixty percent between 1861 and 1914.46
The foreign investment of the late nineteenth century was not simply
a return to the patterns and structures of the antebellum period. In the
mid-nineteenth century, federal debt was the chief destination for for-
eign capital, accounting for eighty percent of the $1.39 billion of foreign
investment in the United States in 1869. This changed rapidly, particularly
after the return to the gold standard in the late 1870s relieved the federal
government from having to bolster gold supplies. By 1899 a mere $10
102 J. SEXTON

million in federal debt was held abroad.47 This shift is partly explained by
the higher returns on offer elsewhere in America, particularly in railroad
securities and direct investment opportunities such as mining. It also can
be explained by how the Civil War gave birth to new domestic financial
structures and, indeed, a new spirit of financial nationalism. Northerners
viewed British rejections of Union loan offers as an insult to national honor
that increased their determination to finance the war without European
help.48 Such views tapped into historic antagonism to foreign financial
interests. “We are free from foreign debt now. I count it one of the many
blessings to offset the miseries of this war,” American financier Jay Cooke
proclaimed at the war’s end.49 An important symbolic act occurred in
1871 when the US government appointed Jay Cooke and Co. to replace
the Barings as its official overseas financial agency (this appointment would
prove ephemeral when Cook’s house collapsed during the Panic of 1873,
at which point the US government appointed another American bank,
Morton, Rose, and Co., as its overseas agents).
The transfer of overseas agencies to American banks was a small part of
a much broader reorganization of American finance during the Civil War
era. The drying up of foreign investment during the war accelerated the
development of a national financial infrastructure that the United States
previously had lacked. Unable to rely on the London bond market for sup-
port, the United States established a national banking structure, created a
national currency, and turned toward an emerging group of American capi-
talists like Jay Cooke for assistance in marketing national loans. The average
daily exchange of the New York Clearing House totaled $19,269,520 in
1861; ten years later it amounted to $105,964,277.50 The increased vol-
ume of transactions on Wall Street necessitated the construction of a new
building on Wall Street in 1863, the New  York Stock Exchange, which
served as a symbol of the nation’s growing financial independence.51 The
demands of wartime mobilization similarly transformed American busi-
ness, which developed into webs of public-private partnerships that armed,
equipped, transported, and fed the massive Union army.52 These develop-
ments portended the emergence of Gilded Age big business.
The significance of the Civil War to the development of American
finance lies in how it created a set of conditions which facilitated the real-
ization of the nation’s latent financial power. The drying up of foreign
investment, the imperative of finding domestic markets for hundreds of
millions of dollars of bonds, the suspension of the gold standard, the need
to standardize and federate the nation’s inchoate financial structures and
institutions—all of these circumstances constituted a shock therapy that
 INTERNATIONAL FINANCE IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA 103

prompted American politicians and bankers to construct a financial system

capable of funding more than ninety percent of its massive $2.8 billion
debt at home. This restructuring of the financial system was not always
a smooth process in which bankers and politicians marched in lockstep,
but it yielded a more nationally integrated system presided over by a new
master financial class based in New York.53
The developments in American finance during the 1860s did not create
new practices and institutions out of thin air, but rather reoriented and
refashioned along national lines ones that previously had been structured
on local or transnational levels. Government contracts, federal legislation,
and domestic business relationships and practices played an indisputably
important role in the development of American finance. But so too did
transnational structures and processes that can be traced back to the early
nineteenth-century Atlantic economy. American banks and capital markets
were able to meet the challenges of the 1860s because they had long taken
root in the hospitable conditions of the expanding British financial system.
For example, the early nineteenth-century practice of British-based banks
establishing business links with American houses, rather than sending their
own agents across the Atlantic (as many British banks did in Latin America)
had long-term and unanticipated consequences. Many of the leading
financial houses in post-war America had their roots in the transatlantic
banks of the antebellum period. August Belmont and Co. of New York,
of course, began life as a small western outpost of the Rothschilds during
the bleak days of the Panic of 1837. J.P. Morgan started his banking career
in the 1850s as an apprentice to George Peabody’s London bank, where
his father J.S. was a senior partner. Far from exclusively turning inward
during the 1860s and 1870s, the upstart banks of the Civil War years
expanded overseas, establishing profitable relationships with partners in
Britain (as was the case, for example, with Morton, Bliss, and Co.) or in
Germany (as was the case with as J & W Seligman and Co. and Lehman
Brothers). In some cases American banks remained too reliant on foreign
capital markets: the 1873 collapse of Jay Cooke and Co. was precipitated
by the bank’s gamble that it could find takers in London for bonds of the
Northern Pacific Railroad.
The national financial system created during the Civil War thus did not
isolate the United States the capital markets of the Old World. After all,
America’s heyday as “the world’s greatest debtor nation” lay in the coming
decades. What the financial innovations of the war years did was change
the position of the United States on the international capital markets. New
national structures of finance and political economy forged a more unified
104 J. SEXTON

national market to match the national idea that emerged triumphant in

1865. In time this national financial system would prove capable not only of
servicing the needs of the US government and much of the nation’s indus-
trial growth but also of projecting its power beyond its borders. Morgan
and Co. (formerly George Peabody and Co.) became the first American
bank to broker a loan for a European government when it did so for France
in 1870. The new titans of American finance more often looked for invest-
ment opportunities in Mexico and the Caribbean, which fast became eco-
nomic satellites of the United States much as the early republic had been
to Britain at the beginning of the century. As with so much else in the Civil
War, the story of international finance reveals not only the emergence of
new national structures in the United States but also the intertwined pro-
cesses of its liberation from the structures of the Old World and the creation
of its own expanding sphere of influence outside of its borders.

NOTES
1. Aspinwall to Chase, 8 May 1863, Chase Papers, University
Publications of America, Library of Congress.
2. Niall Ferguson, The House of Rothschild, 2 vols. (London: Penguin,
1998–1999), I, 6.
3. Mira Wilkins, The History of Foreign Investment in the United States
to 1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 50–51,
137, 147.
4. Lance E.  Davis and Robert Cull, International Capital Markets
and American Economic Growth, 1820–1914 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994), 16–17.
5. P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, “The Theory and Practice of British
Imperialism,” in Gentlemanly Capitalism and British Imperialism:
The New Debate on Empire, ed. Raymond E.  Dumett (London:
Longman, 1999), 206–210.
6. Reginald McGrane, Foreign Bondholders and American State Debts
(New York: Macmillan, 1933), 34.
7. Bates to Webster, 15 April 1842, Thomas Wren Ward Papers,
Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston.
8. Belmont to N.M.R. and Sons, 20 March 1848, T54/275,
Rothschild Archive, London.
9. Morgan to Peabody, 30 March 1860, J.S.  Morgan Papers, The
Morgan Library, New York.
 INTERNATIONAL FINANCE IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA 105

10. Dorothy Adler, British Investment in American Railways

(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1970), 66.
11. Jay Sexton, Debtor Diplomacy: Finance and American Foreign
Relations in the Civil War Era, 1837–1873 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005). 75, footnote 210.
12. Westminster Review, Vol. 52, 1850, 213.
13. The Economist, 6 September 1856, 980.
14. R.J.M. Blackett, Divided Hearts: Britain and the American Civil
War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001).
15. Overstone to Norman, 15 January 1861, in The Correspondence of
Lord Overstone, vol. 2, ed. D.P. O’Brien (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1971), 937–938.
16. Davis and Cull, International Capital Markets and American
Economic Growth, 7.
17. Peabody to Sherman, 9 March 1861, B197 F2, Peabody Papers,
Essex Institute, Salem, Massachusetts.
18. For a detailed look at the financial diplomacy of North and South,
see Sexton, Debtor Diplomacy, 82–189.
19. Douglass Ball, Financial Failure and Confederate Defeat (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1991), 23.
20. Aspinwall to Chase, 21 March 1863, Chase Papers, UPA.
21. Benjamin to Slidell, 15 January 1863, in Compilations of Messages
and Papers of the Confederacy, including Diplomatic Correspondence,
1861–1865, 2 vols., ed. James Richardson (Nashville: United States
Publishing, 1906), vol. 2, 405–408.
22. Belmont to N.M.R. and Sons, 17 June 1861, T55/194, Rothschild
Archive.
23. London American, 5 February, 17 July, and 19 November 1861.
24. Walker to Chase, 15 May 1863, Chase Papers, Historical Society of
Pennsylvania; Robert J.  Walker, Jefferson Davis, Repudiation,
Recognition and Slavery (London: William Ridgway, 1863).
25. Bankers’ Magazine, December 1862, 781–785.
26. The Economist, 18 January 1862, 57.
27. N.M.R. and Sons to Belmont, 11 June 1861, Rothschild Archive.
28. Baring Brothers to Ward, 2 April 1863, Baring Papers, Library of
Congress (microfilm).
29. The Economist, 20 December 1862, 1401.
30. Bankers’ Magazine, December 1862, 781–785.
31. Slidell to Benjamin, 21 March 1863, ORN, 2, 3, 718–720.
106 J. SEXTON

32. Judith Gentry, “A Confederate Success in Europe: The Erlanger

Loan,” Journal of Southern History 36 (1970): 157–188.
33. Murphy to Seward, 20 January 1863, RG 59, Main 161, NARA II.
34. Quoted in Frank Hughes, “Liverpool and the Confederate States,”
M.Phil. dissertation, Keele University, 1998, 256.
35. Seward to Adams, 4 November 1865, FRUS, 1865, 1, 628–629.
36. N.M.R. & Sons to August Belmont & Co., 24 March 1863,
Rothschild Archive.
37. New York Times, 9 December 1865; John Bigelow, Lest We Forget:
Gladstone, Morley and the Confederate Cotton Loan of 1863 (New
York, 1905).
38. Henry Adams to Charles Francis Adams Jr., 11 December 1863, in
Worthington Chauncey Ford (ed.), A Cycle of Adams letters,
1861–1865 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1921), vol. 2, 109.
39. Wilkins, Foreign Investment, 104.
40. Quoted in Wilkins, Foreign Investment, 108.
41. Murphy to Seward, 1 November 1862, RG 59, Main 161, NARA II.
42. Bates to Young, 2 October 1861, HC1.20.8, 1856–1862, Letters
of Joshua Bates, ING. Baring Archives, London.
43. The Economist, 1 June 1861, 590.
44. Wilkins, Foreign Investment, 109–110.
45. Sexton, Debtor Diplomacy, chapter 4.
46. Davis and Cull, International Capital Markets and American
Economic Growth, 17–19.
47. Wilkins, Foreign Investment, 147.
48. Heather Cox Richardson, The Greatest Nation of the Earth:
Republican Economic Polices during the Civil War (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 44, 54–55.
49. Ellis P. Oberholtzer, Jay Cooke, Financier of the Civil War, vol. 1
(Philadelphia: G.W. Jacobs, 1907), 286.
50. The Economist, 19 October 1872.
51. Richard Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State
Authority in America, 1859–1877 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990), 249.
52. Mark Wilson, The Business of Civil War: Military Mobilization and the
State, 1861–1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).
53. Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New  York City and the
Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001).
 PART III

Transnational Discourses on Freedom

and Radicalism
 CHAPTER 7

Uprooted Emancipators: Transatlantic

Abolitionism and the Politics of Belonging

Mischa Honeck

The scene unfolding before a group of American sailors who had inter-
cepted a Portuguese slave ship in the South Atlantic could not have
been more ghastly. African men and women, wrenched from their native
shores, languished handcuffed on deck, covered in filth and tranquilized
with rum. Attempts to speak with the terrified blacks bore no fruit until
Philip Nolan, a decommissioned naval officer and participant in the res-
cue operation, managed to explain to the captives in broken Spanish that
they need not fear their liberators. Nolan had all possible reason to pride
himself on bringing this dramatic intervention to a happy conclusion. Yet
his abolitionist heroism did little to soothe his troubled mind. While the
Africans would be returned safely to their families, Nolan, who had for-
saken his nation in a fit of anger, remained doomed to spending the rest of
his life on the high seas, without permission to ever set foot on his native
soil again. Stripped of his homeland, the exiled mariner found no comfort
in an abstract humanity. His fate was to live and die as the notorious “Man
without a Country.”1

M. Honeck ( )
German Historical Institute, Washington, DC, United States

© The Author(s) 2016 109

J. Nagler et al. (eds.), The Transnational Significance of the
American Civil War, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40268-0_7
110 M. HONECK

Philip Nolan is the main character of a short story written by the clergy-
man and abolitionist Edward Everett Hale at the height of the American
Civil War. The publication of Hale’s story in 1863, the year when Abraham
Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation went into effect, was no coinci-
dence. Commonly cited as a patriotic allegory in a time of national crisis,
“The Man Without a Country” can also be read as a profound reflection
on the entangled histories of nineteenth-century abolitionism and nation-
alism. Positing a close correlation between both movements may appear
counterintuitive to traditional historiography. For historians, abolitionism
marks the nineteenth century’s quintessential humanitarian moment, the
triumph of moral politics in an age rife with capitalist exploitation, impe-
rial conquest, and racist thinking. The politics of nationhood, by contrast,
although propagated with the same liberatory fervor, seems ethically less
glamorous and distant from the drama of emancipation given that the rise
of modern nation-states was accompanied by large-scale territorial conflict
and warfare.
This chapter argues against this morally naïve and historically mislead-
ing separation of nationalism and abolitionism. By the 1860s, the inability
to disentangle the battle against slavery from questions of belonging, as
embodied by the fictional character Philip Nolan, had become not merely
an American phenomenon but a global one. The politics of belonging
acquired a particular urgency in the modern Western world when demo-
graphic growth, economic expansion, and the increasing number of peo-
ple in transit coincided with the evolution of new “legal fortresses” in the
shape of the nation-state.2 Focusing on the period from the European
Revolutions of 1848/49 to the end of the American Civil War, this chapter
revisits the transatlantic space through which various antislavery radicals
moved to highlight the complicity of abolitionism in formulating strong
ethnic and national identities. This “second age of Atlantic Revolutions”
inherited from the late eighteenth-century revolutionary period what his-
torian R.R. Palmer summed up as “a discomfort with older forms of social
stratification” but owed its unique identity to at least four interrelated
developments.3 First, it was an age of industrialization that saw rapid eco-
nomic growth along with heightened class conflict. Second, it was an age
of emancipation during which countries as far apart as France, Russia,
Denmark, and the United States followed Great Britain’s example and
outlawed slavery and serfdom. Third, it was an age of mass migration
characterized by a rising tide of European settlers, mostly from Ireland
and the German states, who crossed the Atlantic in search of a better
 UPROOTED EMANCIPATORS: TRANSATLANTIC ABOLITIONISM... 111

life. Fourth, it was an age of nationalist strife rocked by revolutions and

counterrevolutions in Europe and the Americas over the future political
fabric of these continents. Looking at the interplay of the last three histori-
cal processes—abolition, migration, and nation-building—this essay links
the transnational struggle to end slavery to a mounting desire to avoid
expulsion from nationhood in an Atlantic world set in motion by unprec-
edented migration and revolutionary turmoil.
In keeping with the book’s general tenor, this chapter deprovincializes
the story of American abolitionism, which culminated in the Civil War, by
emphasizing how it both influenced, and was influenced by, transnational
developments.4 Such a broadened perspective brings into play a culturally
diverse but highly mobile group of actors: northern antislavery agitators,
southern dissenters, free blacks, runaway slaves, European revolutionaries,
and US-born expatriates. Many members of this Abolitionist International
had comparable experiences of upheaval, uprootedness, and migration
caused by racial or political strife. Drawn into proximity by converging
public spheres and an increased geographical mobility, they engaged in
a vibrant dialogue about the meaning of liberty, equality, and nationality
in a more integrated age of cross-border interactions. At the same time,
though, individual and collective efforts to make sense of these experi-
ences fueled the contentious process of redefining civic roles and national
allegiances in the second age of Atlantic Revolutions. The question of who
was “in” or “out” of the nation was very much in flux, and the persistence
of an institution such as slavery and the realities of abduction, diaspora,
and homelessness associated with it were grim reminders that degradation
and despair awaited the outcast.5 This chapter addresses a central para-
dox in the history of transatlantic abolitionism. Though dedicated to the
eradication of slavery, it ultimately contributed to the formation of com-
munal structures often conceived along rigid ethnic, racial, and national
lines, allowing for new forms of othering and exclusion. Revealing their
dual role as selfless humanitarians and self-interested nation-builders, the
abolitionists’ life stories demonstrate the ways in which the struggle for
emancipation and the search for belonging were inextricably interwoven.
***
Simultaneous political developments in Europe and North America, cou-
pled with advancements in transportation and communication, propelled
the twin issues of freedom and belonging onto a larger international
stage. In the 1830s and 1840s, reform conventions in London, Paris, and
other European capitals devoted to temperance, pacifism, and antislavery
112 M. HONECK

attracted prominent abolitionists from the United States. William Lloyd

Garrison and Elihu Burritt were two in a cordon of white philanthropists
who nurtured friendships at these international venues, hoping that their
example would encourage others to join in the task of building bridges
across races and nations. Imprisoned in Baltimore and harassed in Boston
for his radical politics, Garrison traveled abroad in part to escape the con-
fines of a narrow and narcissistic nationalism.6 Garrison, who had embla-
zoned the masthead of the newspaper he edited, the Liberator, with the
inscription “Our Country is the World, Our Countrymen are Mankind,”
acted on his cosmopolitan sensibilities and befriended a handful of foreign-
born progressive nationalists, including the German radical Karl “Charles”
Follen and the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini.
African Americans who sailed across the Atlantic in that period were
particularly thrilled by the absence of a strict color line in liberal European
circles, which they idealized as an antipode to race relations at home.
William Wells Brown rejoiced that his “colored face and curly hair did
not prevent [him] getting an invitation” to a reception at the residence of
the French foreign minister.7 Likewise, Henry Highland Garnet, speak-
ing at the 1850 World Peace Congress in Frankfurt, promised to never
“forget the kindness” of his German hosts.8 Black clergyman and fugitive
slave James W.C. Pennington, who accompanied Garnet to Frankfurt, had
been awarded an honorary doctorate by Heidelberg University’s faculty of
theology one year earlier for his commitment to the antislavery and peace
causes.9 These ambassadors of black America were surely elated to learn
about antislavery legislation passed in central European monarchies such
as the 1826 Austrian act against the slave trade or a Prussian statute from
1857 that promised freedom to every slave who wound up on Prussian
territory.10 Amiable encounters like these boosted African American self-
reliance and raised expectations that civic inclusion should also be possible
in a republic whose egalitarian ideals were stained by the prolonged exis-
tence of racial slavery.
The transfer of abolitionist ideas and activists across the Atlantic, though,
went in both directions. After the revolutionary uprisings of 1848/49 in
Europe had faltered, many participants fled to North America to avoid
persecution and incarceration. The refugee democrats were anything but a
uniform cohort—most came from the German-speaking regions, but there
were also smaller cells of Polish, Italian, French, and Hungarian revolu-
tionaries. Many bickered over the best way to create a secular paradise, and
disagreements between liberal democrats, socialists, and utopian radicals
 UPROOTED EMANCIPATORS: TRANSATLANTIC ABOLITIONISM... 113

flared up repeatedly in the emigration.11 Yet what piqued the curiosity of

native-born abolitionists most was that almost all of these exiled “Forty-
Eighters” publicly assailed chattel slavery, an institution that evoked horrid
memories of Europe’s reactionary nobility. As early as 1851, a group of
recent arrivals declared opposition to “Slavery…in whatever shape it may
be seen.”12 Three years later, a convention of German-speaking immigrant
radicals drafted the Louisville Platform, which termed bondage “a political
and moral cancer” and demanded universal suffrage for blacks and whites
alike because “skin color cannot justify a difference in legal status.”13
This same sentiment also prevailed at the 1855 meeting of the national
Turner confederation, the leading Forty-Eighter association in the United
States. Again the delegates took an open stand against slavery, denouncing
the institution as “unworthy of a republic and directly opposed to the prin-
ciples of freedom.”14 Such proclamations warmed the heart of Frederick
Douglass. Likely under the influence of the Jewish-German journalist
Ottilie Assing, with whom Douglass entertained a romantic liaison, the
black intellectual hailed “the many noble and high-minded men, most of
whom, swept over by the tide of the revolution in 1849, have become our
active allies in the struggle against oppression and prejudice.”15 Native-
born abolitionists were confident that they had found fellow liberators,
fearless coworkers in the cause of human freedom.
Personal relationships and ideological affinities generated a sense of
interdependency and common cause. A personality cult that stretched
across oceans and continents developed around revolutionary leaders
such as Giuseppe Garibaldi or Friedrich Hecker. When the Italian radical
Felice Orsini was beheaded in 1858 for his failed assassination attempt
on Louis Napoleon, American abolitionists joined immigrant democrats
in commemorating Orsini’s political martyrdom.16 This border-crossing
camaraderie was in full display again in the days following John Brown’s
execution in December 1859. The French novelist Victor Hugo declared
that the Brown’s fate “attracted the eyes of the whole of Europe,” while
the Polish poet Cyprian Norwid paid tribute to an imagined transatlantic
alliance of republicans with his poem “Do oywatela Johna Brown” (To the
Citizen John Brown).17
Just as American enemies of slavery pointed to European criticisms
of the “peculiar institution” to shame their countrymen into supporting
emancipation, European liberals drew inspiration from the fact that their
coups for national independence were being cheered at abolitionist meet-
ings on the other side of the ocean. Claims that slaveholder tyranny and
114 M. HONECK

aristocratic oppression were one and the same the world over abounded in
this transnational public sphere. Believing with her friends at the outset of
1848 that humankind was entering “a world era” of progress, Philadelphia
reformer Lucretia Mott understood “the struggle for liberty in the old
world, the anti-slavery movement in France, the Chartist movement in
England, and the repeal movement of Ireland” as interconnected events
that could energize the abolitionist movement in her country.18 On the eve
of the Civil War, émigré Republican Carl Schurz placed the sectional con-
flict in the same world-historical context. Linking the plantation South to
an international coalition of despotism, Schurz mocked the slaveholders as
being out of lockstep with the forces of civilization: “You hear of emanci-
pation in Russia, and wish it fail. You hear of Italy rising, and fear the spirit
of liberty may become contagious.” But this was “the world of the nine-
teenth century,” Schurz trumpeted, and the days when slaveholders could
defend their barbaric customs at the bar of history were numbered.19 Such
sweeping comparisons were popular in abolitionist circles because they
made their arguments less local, more global, and hence more compelling.
However, shared hostility to slavery did not automatically fan the flames
of cross-cultural and cross-racial solidarity. Aside from obvious language
barriers, alliances between American and European radicals were compli-
cated by differing outlooks and conflicting agendas. Except for their com-
mon hatred of slavery, little connected the paragons of North American
reform to the Europeans who had mounted the barricades in 1848.
Differences of class, religion, and ethnicity left both sides frustrated. In
particular, the anti-temperance, socialist, and anticlerical attitudes popular
among immigrant revolutionaries stood in striking contrast to the evan-
gelical Protestant beliefs held by most native-born American reformers.
That much is illustrated by the remarks of Henry Ward Beecher, the popu-
lar abolitionist preacher. “We thank Europe for a great deal—for litera-
ture, ancient and modern,” Beecher conceded. “But when the Socialists
of Germany, and the Communists of France…come to America teach us
how to make commonwealths we think they are out of place, decidedly.”20
Meanwhile, the Old World revolutionaries did not stand idly by. When
attacked, they struck back, usually with a vigor and pretentiousness tanta-
mount to that of their critics. In private as well as public statements, they
lashed out at Sabbatarianism, prohibition, immigration control, and other
issues dear to religiously inspired Anglo-American reformers, sometimes
with stunning militancy. Shortly after arriving in the United States, Ottilie
Assing wrote home, “I would feel more comfortable here if there were
 UPROOTED EMANCIPATORS: TRANSATLANTIC ABOLITIONISM... 115

more paintings, better drama, and less religion!…This disgusting garlic

smell and the stench of religion permeate all of life.”21 And the refugee
journalist Karl Heinzen commented on the cultural rift separating both
camps in early 1859, “They take each other’s hands in Uncle Tom’s hum-
ble cabin but are at each other’s throats in the church of the Lord.” No
stranger to peppering his remarks with a sarcastic phrase or two, Heinzen
exclaimed, “What a happy coincidence that this country is blessed with
slavery; else there would be no common ground for the American and
German freemen to stand on. Our mediator, our only one, is Sambo.
Long live Sambo!”22
Antislavery Americans who spent substantial time abroad also became
more conscious of their nationality. There was a growing sense that US
citizenship had global implications, and the interlocked political upheavals
in Europe and North America convinced many American reformers that
their country had to be vindicated on a planetary scale. Faced with allega-
tions that the cruelties of the “peculiar institution” made the wrongs of
despotic regimes elsewhere seem trifling, poet and writer Mary Booth,
who lived in Switzerland during the Civil War years, implored her coun-
trymen, “Abolish slavery, then swing the old stars and stripes in the face
of Europe and of the whole world. Conquer yourselves, and you will have
placed your Nation at the head of all the nations upon earth…To tell you
the truth, Europe is jealous of you; deprive her of the right to throw the
slavery question in your face, and she must, and will acknowledge your
governmental superiority; it will not be agreeable to her at first, but she
will do it by-and-by.”23 Despite slavery, Booth clung to the belief that it
was America’s divine mission to serve as a beacon to other nations—a
belief that grew more intense overseas. Similarly, touring through England,
France, and Germany in 1862, New England abolitionist Gilbert Haven
proudly weighed his nation’s republican institutions against the vestiges of
European feudalism. Determined to see in a Union victory an affirmation
of his country’s manifest destiny and divine mission to redeem human-
kind, Haven proclaimed, “America’s regeneration, if it goes forward, will
ensure Germany’s, Europe’s, and the world’s.”24 Humanitarian idealism
and exceptionalist national rhetoric combined in many such accounts,
with profound ramifications for how these culturally diverse abolitionists
viewed themselves, each other, and their place in the world.
***
Like most revolutionary movements of the time, abolitionism was pro-
pelled by an unshakable faith in the certainty of progress. The nineteenth
116 M. HONECK

century was a Hegelian century, an era shaped by grand ideas and epic
struggles between seemingly antithetical forces. This dualistic worldview
framed the agendas of secular and religious reformers alike. Seeing the
signs of progress everywhere—from toppled governments and growing
industries to the expansion of railroads and the invention of the tele-
graph—abolitionists of various stripes read these political and material
transformations as evidence that humanity was capable of evolving morally
as well, that a better future was attainable in their lifetime. Yet by working
to extend individual rights to the enslaved and oppressed, abolitionists had
to grapple with the question of how to best protect these rights once they
had been achieved.
As the twin forces of economic and political modernization chipped away
at hereditary systems of privilege and power, the nation became the main
container for peoples’ desires for freedom and equality. Revolutionaries
from Germany to France, from Great Britain to the United States,
advanced the tenets promulgated by the key documents of 1776 and 1789
that human rights, civic equality, and national sovereignty were mutually
reinforcing. The proponents of liberal nationalism and abolitionism were
located on the left politically, finding common ground in their view of the
nation-state as the guarantor of individual equal rights and the natural
enemy of hereditary privilege and entrenched local elites (with the excep-
tion of a few Garrisonians, who believed that states were essentially cor-
rupt). Freedom, they felt, was universal in theory but needed strong and
clearly defined political bodies to blossom. At the height of the American
Civil War, the German American scholar Francis Lieber echoed this convic-
tion saying that, “Liberty, true liberty, requires a country.”25 And Giuseppe
Mazzini spoke for many when he famously asked, “What is [a] country…if
it not be the spot wherein our individual rights are most secure.”26
The inclination to discern in the forging of new nations a manifesta-
tion of human progress was not limited to abolitionists, but their radi-
calism posed a challenge to those who wanted “the circle of we” to be
small rather than wide.27 Radical abolitionists from different backgrounds
closed ranks to overthrow slavery but also grappled with a kind of herren-
volk nationalism that derived the promise of political equality for whites
from the exclusion of darker races.28 They frequently lectured their con-
servative compatriots that (male) citizenship had to be universal and invio-
lable. During the Civil War, as historian Alison Efford pointed out, liberal
European immigrants contented that the processes of naturalizing new-
comers and African American emancipation were part of the same rights
 UPROOTED EMANCIPATORS: TRANSATLANTIC ABOLITIONISM... 117

revolution.29 American abolitionists agreed. National greatness, they

argued, was not about material wealth or territorial expansion. Frederick
Douglass developed this idea most eloquently in his 1869 speech “Our
Composite Nationality.” The enduring meaning of Union victory in the
Civil War, the black abolitionist cautioned, should not be reduced to a
simple affirmation of national unity. The seminal question was whether
a country like the United States was better off “for being composed of
different races of men.” Douglass answered with a resounding yes. He
explained that much of the nation’s industry and enterprise had been
due to the head, heart, and muscle of various “races,” from the “Indian
and Celt; negro and Saxon” to the “Latin and Teuton; Mongolian and
Caucasian.” But what made America truly exceptional was that it stood
out as a perfect illustration of the idea that national importance and the
willingness to accommodate “people of all countries, nationalities, and
color” were closely intertwined. Nations, Douglass believed, were indis-
pensable to the extent that they valued what we have learned to look upon
as multicultural societies. Extolling America’s “Composite Nationality,”
Douglass promoted the vision of a politically expansive and racially
inclusive American nation, one that conceived difference as a source of
strength, not discord.30 Because the civic demands voiced by Douglass and
likeminded abolitionists eclipsed boundaries of race, class, national origin,
and sometimes even of sex, Forty-Eighters, Garrisonians, and other trans-
atlantic radicals have been labeled civic or cosmopolitan nationalists.31
According to this interpretation, they learned to see the nation as a com-
munity circumscribed by political principles, not blood and ancestry, and
it was this belief that made them champion the enfranchisement of African
slaves and other underprivileged groups.
While cosmopolitan inclusiveness was certainly pronounced in aboli-
tionist thinking about nations, it is important to understand these ideas
not as an upshot of local circumstance but as part of a broader effort
to preclude marginalization. Wary of the dangers of ostracism, uprooted
radicals sought to reinscribe themselves into stable political communities
offering protection and purpose. In an expanding transatlantic vortex of
migration, displacement appeared in many guises: fugitive blacks escaping
from slavery, white reformers run out of town for their allegedly incen-
diary beliefs, political refugees scrambling to distant shores, all of them
eager to leave behind spaces of unfreedom and seek out perceived spaces
of freedom. These various efforts to transcend victimhood and achieve
reintegration intersected. They ran parallel to the multiple flows of goods,
118 M. HONECK

people, and ideas that bound together both continents and raised urgent
questions about assimilation, diversity, and social cohesion, challenging
concepts of community that defined national belonging as hereditary and
impermeable. “Mobility, the source of [many] problems,” to borrow a
phrase from the historian Robert Wiebe, “had to be turned into solutions
as well.”32
There is little doubt that transnational mixing could give rise to more
tolerant and pluralist nationalist ideologies such as the one expressed by
Douglass. Then again, this narrative stands in an uneasy relationship with
the invidious remarks of ethnic difference made by sojourning emanci-
pators like Mary Booth and Karl Heinzen. Racist sentiments, too, were
anything but absent from transatlantic abolitionism. Paternalist attitudes
made it difficult for even the most unprejudiced white activist to see in
blacks little more than members of a disadvantaged race in need of uplift.
Even as some abolitionists identified new sources of kinship in their inter-
ethnic partnerships, many others drew less benign conclusions from their
dealings with strangers. Transnationalism, in short, could just as easily
breed mutual disaffection and alienation, planting the seeds for more
exclusive conceptions of nationality and citizenship that came into full
bloom later in the century.
Intellectuals striving to place themselves and their respective ethnicities
in the forward ranks of a transnational coalition for human liberation were
usually also responsible for injecting nationalist emotions into the move-
ment for black emancipation. If moral and cultural superiority of one’s
own approach to combating slavery could be demonstrated, then this
would also elevate national prestige. Forty-Eighter writings about human
rights were often fraught with ethnocentrism. “A German who becomes
a slaveholder betrays his heritage, history, and destination,” one German-
born journalist from Pittsburgh noted. “An American who keeps slaves
stains a principle, but a German who keeps slaves stains his character…A
German must not keep slaves because doing so violates the creed of his
countrymen and dishonors the great movement of black emancipation
which is predominantly supported and represented by the German ele-
ment.”33 The immigrant socialist August Willich hardly sprang into notice
as a flag-waving patriot, but he too felt no need to conceal his ethnic
colors when speaking about slavery. Associating Germanness with the
historic mission to abolish slavery, Willich wrote, “We are only Germans
and act as such if we implement the spirit of humanity…The sympathy,
the trust of the oppressed nationalities and races…we must not run from
 UPROOTED EMANCIPATORS: TRANSATLANTIC ABOLITIONISM... 119

it like cowards, if we do not want to betray our own people, our own
race.”34 Although Willich’s socialist abolitionism called for solidarity with
the exploited factory worker and the enslaved field hand, he had strong
misgivings whether African Americans would ever be able to elevate them-
selves without the assistance of benign whites. More importantly, by fusing
the legacy of 1848 with the quest for black emancipation, immigrant radi-
cals like Willich could shake off the stigma of defeat, reclaim meaningful
citizenship, and link his nationality to the universal advancement of liberty.
American abolitionists, by contrast, alarmed by the United States’s
declining reputation abroad, believed that it was their responsibility to vin-
dicate freedom over slavery, and that their country was the chosen place
for this millennial endeavor. Charles Loring Brace, a proud Episcopalian
reformer and abolitionist, made the painful discovery that the “peculiar
institution” harmed America’s reputation overseas and made it a target
of ridicule in the eyes of the civilized world. On a trip through Germany,
Austria, and Hungary, which included a brief term in prison for alleged
connections to revolutionary circles, Brace was repeatedly confronted with
the charge that Americans were not practicing what they preached. “The
blood tingled to my cheeks with shame,” Brace confessed after listening to
a Prussian diplomat scold the United States for tolerating under its jurisdic-
tion a system as repugnant as chattel slavery. “There is a system now with
you, worse than anything we know, of tyranny—your Slavery… We have
nothing in Hungary or Russia which is so degrading, and we have nothing
which so crushes the mind,” the diplomat confronted Brace. “We here in
Europe have many excuses in ancient evils and deep-laid prejudices, but
you the young, free people, in this age, to be passing again, afresh, such
measures of unmitigated wrong and oppression!”35 As long as slave families
could be torn apart on auction blocks or black men and women whipped
until unconscious, Brace realized, his country lacked the moral authority
to castigate oppression in other parts of the world. In all these examples,
ethnicity worked in tandem with a cosmopolitan concern for human rights
to advance nationalist discourses that presented themselves as redemptive,
exceptional, and claimed leadership in the global pursuit of civilization.
***
Molded in the violent mid-century convulsions of revolution, migration,
and nation-making, the ethnic patriotism of people like Willich and Brace
gained even greater traction in the post-Civil War era, much to the detri-
ment of the newly enfranchised blacks and other minorities. A close reader
of their texts will find that their fight for democracy was a cultural obligation
120 M. HONECK

that grew out of their idealism and national pride, if not ethnic chauvinism.
To buttress his argument for a leading German role in democratic nation-
building, even a man as radical as Karl Heinzen would dabble in contem-
porary racial theory. Bodies became more than just a metaphor for the new
nation. Offering his (rather bizarre) spin on the popular subject of phre-
nology, the Boston editor characterized the Anglo-Saxon skull structure as
“solid” and “valiant-looking” but lacking in capacity for cultural growth. If
the Americans wanted to prosper commercially as well as intellectually, they
needed to accommodate the German element and its “organic disposition
for ideality” that was allegedly located in the rear segment of the Germanic
skull.36 Heinzen’s definition of cosmopolitan nationalism was racialist and
pluralist, not assimilationist. A multiethnic nation should grant every citizen
equal rights, regardless of rank, origin, and skin color. But formal equality
was also supposed to retain unique ethnic traits and guarantee the flowering
of German culture in distant settler communities.
Competing ethnocultural agendas may not have gotten in the way of
a functioning transnational alliance against slavery, but their vindication
through war and shared sacrifice made them constitutive to concepts of
freedom, progress, civilization, and belonging. As with most history, these
ethno-nationalist attempts to make discursive sense of the unsettling and
transformative experiences of revolution, war, and emancipation produced
winners and losers. Gender and race were decisive fault lines. Old partner-
ships soured over patriarchal conceptions of citizenship that thrived in
the aftermath of the American Civil War. By 1868, the controversy had
become so bitter that the feminist Susan B. Anthony threw in Frederick
Douglass’ face the statement that she would “sooner cut off [her] right
hand than ask the ballot for the black man and not for women.”37 Next
to the repudiation of women’s rights, white male hegemony also meant
the devaluation of other forms of masculinity that were considered sub-
ordinate on grounds of race, class, ideology, or sexual orientation. White
abolitionists and revolutionaries from both sides of the Atlantic had
pledged themselves to African American freedom; yet their successors had
no qualms about subjugating black people in subsequent imperial ven-
tures. Civil War soldiers drew comfort from the home-front support of
their wives; yet in peace, women were not allowed to be anything but
supporting actors. The participation of European immigrants in North
American settler colonialism gives another reason to pause. While immi-
grant men claimed to have fought for the highest ideals between 1861 and
1865, the growing number of European-born settlers streaming westward
 UPROOTED EMANCIPATORS: TRANSATLANTIC ABOLITIONISM... 121

in search for land and opportunity inevitably contributed to the decima-

tion of Native Americans.
Friedrich Kapp’s odyssey perhaps exemplifies this narrowing of dem-
ocratic trajectories in favor of stable national and imperial identities. A
German American revolutionary fighting the ancient régime on both
continents, Kapp escaped to the United States after the botched events
of 1848–1849. His hatred of aristocracy animated him to sharp attacks
against the southern planter class and their system of unfree labor. He
joined the Republican Party, wrote two acclaimed books on the history of
American slavery, and mobilized German American support for Lincoln in
the Civil War. Although his activities earned him the esteem of influential
native-born men, Kapp never felt at home on American soil. A shrewd
critic of Yankee culture and the “cosmopolitan fuzziness” of some of his
fellow refugees, the German exile opted for repatriation. When learning
that the German armies had been victorious in the Franco-Prussian War of
1870–1871, Kapp beamed with joy.38 At least, dreams of a strong father-
land capable of projecting power and civilization had come true. The sec-
ond Reich offered him the kind of security and sense of belonging he
had always wanted, feelings that ultimately triumphed over his teenage
visions of human brotherhood. His reception back home was exuberant.
Celebrated for his promotion of German Kultur abroad, Kapp was voted
into the Reichstag on the ticket of the National Liberal Party. The revolu-
tionary of the 1850s, it seemed, had become completely reconciled with
Bismarck’s Germany. Kapp, unlike Philip Nolan, had found his country.
Friedrich Kapp was only one in a cohort of transnational revolutionar-
ies who ended up putting their weight behind the construction of sover-
eign nation-states such as Italy in 1861, the United States in 1865, and
Germany in 1871.39 Protecting the rights of ethnic and racial minorities
mattered little in this transition from local networks of patronage to strong
centralized governments. To white radicals from both sides of the Atlantic,
overthrowing black bondage was never primarily about fighting for racial
justice; it was about sustaining a campaign for liberal nationhood born
in the upheavals of the post-Napoleonic era. American reformers like the
historian John Lothrop Motley or the writer Oliver Wendell Holmes felt
no sense of urgency about building an interracial democracy once slavery
had been outlawed. Instead, they preferred to talk about having defended
the principle of national unity against southern secessionists. No longer
haunted by the corrosive politics of slavery, they assertively bound their
country’s fate to the global spread of republican institutions. As Motley
122 M. HONECK

announced in 1868, “the hope of the world lies in the Americanization of

the world.”40 Kapp likewise brushed African American interests under the
carpet when he wrote, echoing William Seward, “The slavery issue is not
a negro issue. It is the eternal conflict between the privileged few and the
non-privileged many, between aristocracy and democracy.”41 Because citi-
zenship was intricately tied to white narratives of civilization, true interracial
equality was rarely accomplished and never emerged as a major concern.
This is not to say that there were not also individuals who continued to
portray the black freedom struggle in the difficult period of Reconstruction
and beyond as the extended arm of the struggle to obliterate slavery. On
a larger scale, though, attempts to braid the achievement of emancipation
to an active recognition of universal humanity received little applause in an
age witnessing the boisterous rise of competitive ethnic nationalisms and
colonial rivalries. Having demonstrated their special aptitude for advanc-
ing civilization and progress, white Europeans and North Americans felt
entitled to spread their institutions to less fortunate people across the
globe. Although formal enslavement became acceptable to fewer societies,
the domination of non-white population groups by whites was regarded
essential to the fulfillment of civilization, slowly drowning out voices won-
dering whether democracy and empire were at all compatible.42 Historians
of abolitionism have long been reluctant to integrate their champions into
these larger histories. But the multiple and contradictory responses to the
transnational reality of social mixing warrant further examination, even at
the risk of shattering popular assumptions about the abolitionists’ deep-
seated altruism. Their attempts at rationalizing difference while striving
for equality in a more integrated transatlantic world did not necessarily
counteract the construction of nations as culturally and racially homog-
enous units. In many ways, they helped produce them.

NOTES

1. Edward Everett Hale, “The Man Without a Country,” Atlantic

Monthly, December, 1863, 665–680.
2. The term “legal fortresses” is taken from Sallie Westwood and Annie
Phizacklea, Trans-Nationalism and the Politics of Belonging (New
York: Routledge, 2000), 1. On the cultural foundations of modern
nationalism, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities:
Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso,
1991).
 UPROOTED EMANCIPATORS: TRANSATLANTIC ABOLITIONISM... 123

3. Robert R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political

History of Europe and America, 1760–1800, vol. 1 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1959), 4. On the revolutionary cur-
rents of nineteenth-century Atlantic history, see Donna Gabbacia,
“A Long Atlantic in A Wider World,” Atlantic Studies 1 (2004):
1–24. I disagree with historian Jürgen Osterhammel, who denies
the persistence of a revolutionary Atlantic in this period. See
Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt: Eine Geschichte des 19.
Jahrhunderts (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2008), 777.
4. On the transnational dimensions of reform and revolution in the
Civil War era, see Timothy Mason Roberts, Distant Revolutions:
1848 and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism (Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 2009); Andre M.  Fleche, The
Revolution of 1861: The American Civil War in the Age of
Nationalist Conflict (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2012); and W. Caleb McDaniel, The Problem of Democracy
in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic
Reform (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013).
5. Black diaspora studies as a mode of countercultural analysis and re-
reading white history has been promoted by Paul Gilroy, The Black
Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso
1993).
6. See McDaniel, The Problem of Democracy, 45–89.
7. William Wells Brown, Three Years in Europe: or, Places I have Seen
and People I have Met (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1852), 50.
8. Report of the General Proceedings of the Third General Peace
Congress, Held in Frankfort, on the 22nd, 23rd, and 24th August,
1850 (London: Charles Gilpin, 1850), 66.
9. See Herman E.  Thomas, James W.C.  Pennington: African
American Churchman and Abolitionist (New York: Garland,
1995), 180–186, and Mischa Honeck, “Liberating Sojourns:
African American Travelers in Mid-Nineteenth Century Germany,”
in Germany and the Black Diaspora: Points of Contact, 1250–1914,
ed. Mischa Honeck et  al. (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013),
153–168.
10. See Hartmut Schmidt, “‘Kein Deutscher darf einen Sclaven
halten’—Jacob Grimm und Friedrich Wilhelm Carové,” in
Bedeutungen und Ideen in Sprachen und Texten, ed. Werner
Neumann and Bärbel Techtmeier (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag,
1987), 183–192; and Friedrich Harrer and Patrick Warto, “Das
124 M. HONECK

ABGB und die Sklaverei,” in 200 Jahre ABGB—Ausstrahlungen.

Die Bedeutung für andere Staaten und andere Rechtskulturen, ed.
Michael Geistlinger et al. (Wien: Manz, 2011), 283–290.
11. Recent works on the Forty-Eighters in America are Alison Clark
Efford, German Immigrants, Race, and Citizenship in the Civil
War Era (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2013);
Daniel Nagel, Von republikanischen Deutschen zu deutsch-ameri-
kanischen Republikanern: Ein Beitrag zum Identitätswandel der
deutschen Achtundvierziger in den Vereinigten Staaten, 1850–1861
(St. Ingbert: Röhrig Universitätsverlag, 2012); and Mischa
Honeck, We Are the Revolutionists: German-Speaking Immigrants
and American Abolitionists after 1848 (Athens, GA; University of
Georgia Press, 2011).
12. New York Daily Tribune, August 29 and September 9, 1851.
13. “The Louisville Platform,” in The German-American Forty-
Eighters, 1848–1998, ed. Don Heinrich Tolzmann (Indianapolis:
Indiana German Heritage Society, 1998), 98–105.
14. “Verhandlungen der Turner-Tagsatzung zu Buffalo, vom 24. bis
27. September 1855,” Sozialistischer Turnerbund Papers, New York
Public Library.
15. Douglass’ Monthly, August 1859.
16. See Mischa Honeck, “‘Freemen of all Nations, Bestir Yourselves,’
Felice Orsini’s Transnational Afterlife and the Radicalization of
America,” Journal of the Early Republic 30 (2010): 587–615.
17. Hugo is quoted in Seymour Drescher, “Servile Insurrection and
John Brown’s Body in Europe,” Journal of American History 80
(1993): 499. Kamila Janisczewska brought Norwid’s poem to my
attention.
18. Mott quoted in McDaniel, The Problem of Democracy, 187.
19. Carl Schurz, “The Doom of Slavery,” in Speeches, Correspondence,
and Political Papers of Carl Schurz, ed. Frederic Bancroft, vol. 1
(New York: G.P. Putnam’s sons, 1913), 157.
20. Henry Ward Beecher, “The Reign of the Common People,” in
Lectures and Orations By Henry Ward Beecher, ed. Newell Dwight
Hillis (New York: AMS Press, 1970), 102–103.
21. Ottilie Assing quoted in Maria Diedrich, Love Across Color Lines:
Ottilie Assing and Frederick Douglass (New York: Hill & Wang,
1999), 104.
22. Der Pionier, January 29, 1859.
 UPROOTED EMANCIPATORS: TRANSATLANTIC ABOLITIONISM... 125

23. Daily Life, November 14, 1861. On Mary Booth’s stay in

Switzerland and her friendship with the German-born female revo-
lutionary Mathilde Franziska Anneke, see Honeck, We Are the
Revolutionists, 104–136.
24. Gilbert Haven, The Pilgrim’s Wallet: or, Scraps of Travel Gathered
in England, France, and Germany (New York: Hurd & Houghton,
1869), 394.
25. Lieber is quoted in Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom
(New York: Norton, 1996), 96.
26. Giuseppe Mazzini, The Duties of Man (London: Chapman and
Hall, 1862), 11.
27. The phrase was coined by David Hollinger. See Hollinger, “How
Wide the Circle of the ‘We’? American Intellectuals and the
Problem of the Ethnos since World War II,” in Scientific Authority
and Twentieth-Century America, ed. Ronald G. Walters (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 13–31.
28. On the related concept of herrenvolk democracy, see Pierre L. van
den Berghe, Race and Racism: A Comparative Perspective (New
York: Wiley, 1967), 18.
29. Efford, German Immigrants, 5.
30. Frederick Douglass, “Our Cosmopolite Nationality: An Address
Delivered in Boston, Massachusetts, December 7, 1869,” in
Frederick Douglass Papers: Speeches, Debates and Interviews, vol. 4,
ed. John W.  Blassingame (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1979–1992), 241–254.
31. See McDaniel, The Problem of Democracy, and Honeck, We Are the
Revolutionists, 7–8.
32. Wiebe, “Framing U.S. History,” 242.
33. Pittsburger Courier, January 25, 1858.
34. Cincinnati Republikaner, December 27, 1859.
35. Charles Loring Brace, Home-Life in Germany (New York:
C. Scribner, 1853), 271–272.
36. Karl Heinzen, Die Teutschen und die Amerikaner (Boston: Der
Pionier, 1860), 35–36.
37. Susan B. Antony quoted in William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglass
(New York: Norton, 1991), 266.
38. The “cosmopolitan fuzziness [kosmopolitische Verschwom-
menheit]” phrase appears in Kapp, Kapp, Leben des amerikanischen
126 M. HONECK

Generals Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben (Berlin: Dunker &

Humblot, 1858), iii. On Kapp’s return to Germany and his infatu-
ation with the German Reich, see also Wolfgang Hinners, Exil und
Rückkehr: Friedrich Kapp in Amerika und Deutschland, 1824–1884
(Stuttgart: Heinz, 1987), 235–255.
39. A more elaborate version of this argument can be found in Bender,
A Nation Among Nations, 116–181. See also Ian Tyrell,
Transnational Nation: United States History in Global Perspective
since 1789 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); and Carl
Guarneri, America in the World: United States History in Global
Context (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007).
40. Motley quoted in Frank Ninkovich, Global Dawn: The Cultural
Foundations of American Internationalism, 1865–1890 (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2009), 80.
41. Friedrich Kapp, Die Geschichte der Sklaverei in den Vereinigten
Staaten von Amerika (New York: Hauser, 1860), 517.
42. Slavery and the slave trade in parts of Africa and southern Asia
persisted well into the twentieth century, despite efforts of reform-
ers to ban this form of unfree labor. See Daniel Laqua, “The
Tensions of Internationalism: Transnational Anti-Slavery in the
1880s and 1890s,” The International History Review 33 (2011),
705–726.
 CHAPTER 8

Africa and the American Civil War:

The Geopolitics of Freedom
and the Production of Commons

Andrew Zimmerman

Scholars have long recognized that the histories of West Africa and North
America are so fundamentally intertwined that it makes more sense to
speak of the two regions as parts of a common Atlantic World than to
describe discrete interactions between two autonomous geopolitical enti-
ties. This common Atlantic history is especially obvious in the period of
the Atlantic slave trade, when enslaved Africans formed one of the larg-
est, though involuntary, migrant groups to North America. The decline
of the trade may have reduced the direct contacts between Africa and
the Americas; however, these contacts continued and, more to the point,
common political and intellectual traditions continued to inform histo-
ries around the Black Atlantic.1 Two of the most basic features of the
American Civil War, the division of identifiably slave and free states and
the creation of self-managing free agricultural enterprises, are, in fact, by
no means unique to the United States but are rather key elements of the
struggle over slavery in the African diaspora.2 While the flight of slaves

A. Zimmerman ( )
George Washington University, Washington, DC, United States

© The Author(s) 2016 127

J. Nagler et al. (eds.), The Transnational Significance of the
American Civil War, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40268-0_8
128 A. ZIMMERMAN

and their subsequent, short-lived establishment of self-managed, econom-

ically autonomous agriculture might appear to be spontaneous, natural
reactions to slavery, we should resist the temptation of regarding them
as such. Rather, as E.P. Thompson taught with his study of the food riot,
we should understand these actions as based in traditions of political and
moral thought.3 If the reactions seem natural to us, it is because we have
learned from, and perhaps even participate in, these traditions.
This chapter is part of a larger project on the ways European, African,
and American revolutionary movements and traditions shaped the
American Civil War and how that conflict, in turn, shaped these revolu-
tionary movements and traditions. There are three basic mechanisms that
structure the narrative examples that follow:
First, while the boundary between slavery and freedom did not coincide
with the boundary between the Union and the Confederacy, the intense
relation of state boundaries and slavery—the geopolitics of freedom—did
allow the slaveholders’ rebellion to take the form of an interstate war. That
there were such things as free states depended on a transatlantic embrace
of formally free methods for organizing production. These emerged in the
eighteenth century—far more gradually and tentatively than is generally
remembered.4 As political and economic elites scrambled to define and con-
trol the freedom they declared to be a quality of their states, fugitive slaves
became powerful actors in interstate politics. This was true in Africa and the
Diaspora, and the US case should be understood within this larger context.
Second, that freedpeople occupied and cultivated lands taken from
slaveholders during the American Civil War was not simply an outcome of
Union victories. Indeed, during the war Union officials subjugated these
commons to ‘loyal’ planters, and the Union victory would spell the end
of this economic self-valorization. But the self-managed and autonomous
economic activity of former slaves did form an essential component of
Union military strategy. This too was a US component of a much larger
history. Ex-slaves organized their own economic production, on the most
basic level, simply to survive outside of bondage. Maroon communities
especially had to create new modes of politics and economics just to exist.
However, as with the border crossings of fugitives, these economic activi-
ties did not just grasp at a preexisting conception of freedom, but actually
defined, experimented with, and created freedom.5 The problem of orga-
nizing production as a means of creating and securing freedom was one
common also to the emerging European proletariat. Thinkers including
Proudhon, Cabet, Fourier, and Marx and the Free Soil movement in the
 AFRICA AND THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR: THE GEOPOLITICS OF FREEDOM... 129

United States helped formulate these demands. This surely helps explain
why, even if some latter-day Marxists imagine that the American Civil
War was a bourgeois or capitalist revolution, socialists and communists
of the day recognized it as part of their revolution, “the alarm bell,” as
Marx put it in the preface to the first volume of Capital (1867), “for the
European working class.”6 While the common is often imagined as the
scene of a mythical past of plenty, many thinkers—most recently Michael
Hardt and Antonio Negri—have highlighted it as the outcome of ongo-
ing political and economic creativity by working people.7 The enclosure
of the common was not some ancient original sin, but rather, like its
production, a permanent feature of capitalism and one of the many ways
American elites subverted the revolution on which the Union victory
depended.
The third point has to do with the geopolitics of imperialism and the
political economy of capitalism. Elites met the struggles of slaves (like
the struggle of formally free workers) for emancipation and autonomy by
accepting some of the terms of these struggles while seeking to channel
their energies in ways that would aggrandize their own political and eco-
nomic power. In Africa this is perhaps most clear in the use of anti-slavery
by colonial states to expand their sovereignty over and against both African
and other European colonial states as well as over and against their own
subjects. In the case of the American Civil War, this channeling maneuver
appears perhaps most clearly in attempts to return freedpeople to the plan-
tation system in a new labor-coercive system of leases, contracts, and wages.
***
The narrative of abolition told by later apologists for empire incor-
rectly suggested that the trade in slaves was, in the nineteenth century,
gradually replaced by the trade in “legitimate” goods—palm oil, peanuts,
ivory, and other commodities in high demand outside Africa. This shift
from the slave trade to legitimate trade began, according to this narrative,
under the tutelage of missionaries preaching the “three Cs”—Christianity,
Civilization, and Commerce—and it was finally completed under the
benevolent authority of colonial states.
In fact, there was nothing gradual about the decline of slavery in the
nineteenth century. Newly intensified zones of slavery emerged alongside
new zones of free soil. This polarization of slave and free soil allowed
individual slaves to play important political roles in the geopolitics of slav-
ery and freedom. The abolition of the slave trade, though for many a
desired step on the way to ending slavery, had a paradoxical effect on
130 A. ZIMMERMAN

slavery in Africa. The export of slaves from West Africa to the Americas
did decline rapidly in the first half of the nineteenth century, thanks to
the efforts of the ships of the British West Africa Squadron and the diplo-
matic efforts of Britain to get other slaveholding nations to ban the trade.
This ban did not, however, interfere with the institutions of slavery in
the Americas or in Africa. European and American merchants had always
traded in both “legitimate” goods and in slaves, and “legitimate” com-
modities, moreover, were often harvested and transported by slave labor
inside Africa. With increasing demand for African goods, especially palm
oil, in the world economy, and the decreasing effective demand for African
slaves in the Americas, many former slavers began exploiting slave labor
inside of Africa rather than selling captives overseas.8 According to eco-
nomic historian Anthony Hopkins, some former African slave ports began
using barracoons, barracks built to hold slaves awaiting transport across
the Atlantic, to store palm oil.9 For Hopkins, this new use for the barra-
coons signifies the decline of the slave trade and the rise of free labor econ-
omies in Africa. However, the products of slave labor inside Africa also
entered the Atlantic trade through the structures that had once facilitated
the Atlantic trade in slaves. Thanks to the growing global demand for
slave-grown products, by the mid-nineteenth century, according to Paul
Lovejoy, slaves even outnumbered free people in Dahomey and a number
of Yoruba states.10 British slave patrols, many missionaries, and European
officials generally avoided interfering with African slavery. Indeed, even in
Freetown, Sierra Leone, the outpost of the British anti-slave-trade patrols,
the domestic slave trade remained legal until 1896 and slavery until 1926.11
The growth of slavery inside of Africa was only one part of the picture
of this massive transition of the regional political economy. The legitimate
goods demanded by European and American markets could be produced
by slave labor, to be sure, but they could also be produced by independent,
free growers. Some historians have emphasized the growth of this small
producer model, most notably Anthony Hopkins, while others, like Paul
Lovejoy, have emphasized the growth of slave economies in the region.12
On both sides of the Atlantic there emerged a set of newly exploitative
slave states, including Dahomey, Abeokuta, and Lagos in West Africa and
Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama in the United States. No matter which
of the two forms of labor was more important, the West African economy,
like the US economy, experienced a bifurcation when free labor econo-
mies and slave labor economies emerged from the same conjuncture. In
Africa, this juxtaposition of conflicting forms of labor paved the way for
 AFRICA AND THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR: THE GEOPOLITICS OF FREEDOM... 131

slave rebellions, self-emancipations, and, also, by appropriating and redi-

recting these insurgencies, European colonial rule. In the United States,
the juxtaposition of slave and free states had comparable consequences.
The Ewe of the Bight of Benin offers a good example of both the
production of commons against slavery and of the appropriation of these
commons in the service of colonial rule. The Ewe lived in the no-man’s
land between the slave-trading kingdoms of Asante to the West and
Dahomey to the East. (They would become subjects of German Togo
and British Gold Coast.) The Bight of Benin as a whole, in the estimate
of historian Patrick Manning, suffered the most pronounced and long-
term population decline of any region in Africa affected by the slave trade.
The disproportionate export of male slaves meant that the male-to-female
sex ratio in the region recovered from its late eighteenth-century low of
approximately sixty men for every hundred women only in the second
half of the nineteenth century.13 After the decline of the Atlantic slave
trade and before the onset of German colonial rule, the Ewe created a free
labor economy resistant to many forms of domination, including colonial
capitalism. This was just one of thousands of instances of the production
of commons around the Atlantic. Others included Fourierists, Icarians,
and Bible Communists of Oneida, New York. Like all of these communi-
ties, Ewe polities built on local traditions, but by no commonly accepted
measure can it be regarded as primitive.
The Ewe enjoyed a brief period of relative freedom and prosperity in
the second half of the nineteenth century, as they recovered from the
demographic, economic, and political catastrophe of the slave trade, and
before the new catastrophe of German colonial domination.14 The Ewe
had had no unified state to protect them from the depredations of the slave
trade—or to defend them against the later depredations of the colonial
state—so, between the decline of the Atlantic slave trade and the imposi-
tion of German rule, no state to oppress them either. In southern Togo
in this period, production occurred in extended households that allowed
a level of collective and personal autonomy unusual in the Atlantic world
at the time. This autonomy would become such an obstacle to German
rulers that they would turn to the American New South for models and
methods of subjecting the Ewe to colonial capitalism.15
The Ewe developed a system of autonomous households that carried on
mixed agriculture and petty manufacturing for subsistence and trade. This
not only made the Ewe as a whole resistant to outside control but also gave
Ewe men and women a level of individual autonomy unusual in the Atlantic
132 A. ZIMMERMAN

world at that time. Several Ewe women shared a single husband and could
each possess their own households and fields, which were linked to those of
their husbands through gift and market exchange. Missionaries and colonial
officials would later remark, mostly with dismay, upon the unusual indepen-
dence of Ewe women. (Such democratic possibilities are also what led the
so-called Bible Communists of the Oneida Community in New York, for
example, to experiment with non-monogamous marriage.) Ewe households
could also hold slaves, although the scale of production made this a society
with slaves rather than a slave society. The growing world demand for palm
oil, as well as the conditions of production of this crop, meant that not
only large plantation owners but also individual producers could profitably
harvest and market palm oil. Oil palms grow freely in much of West Africa,
and, while they can be improved by cultivation, oil can also be collected and
processed by individuals from wild palms. Palm oil had a wide variety of uses
in Africa and in Europe. Palm oil was also a central ingredient in the West
African diet, so producers could choose to consume palm oil themselves if
they did not wish to market it locally or sell it to European merchants. While
Ewe political economy was hardly a classless society or an idyllic “merrie
olde Africa,” it did afford many of its members a greater degree of political
and economic autonomy than existed in slave economies of the Atlantic or,
arguably, in the free labor economies of Europe.
Economic historian Anthony Hopkins noted the particular moder-
nity of this small-scale production that emerged in the period pre-
ceding European colonial rule. Hopkins wrote: “In so far as firms of
this size and type are the basis of the export economies of most West
African states today [in 1973], it can be said that modernity dates not
from the imposition of colonial rule, as used to be thought, but from
the early nineteenth century.”16 I think we can take Hopkins’s point
even further: worker autonomy had long been the goal of enslaved
and free workers across the Atlantic, and female political and economic
autonomy had more recently become the goal of the most progressive
political movements of the region; the Ewe, as well as other societies
in West Africa, achieved this broader political and economic modernity
relatively early, certainly well before the societies colonizing them did.
The colonial state worked against this modernity, finally burying it in
an imagined primitivism.
***
In West Africa (and in much of the Atlantic), the coexistence of two
forms of labor—strengthened slavery and a free labor that would almost
 AFRICA AND THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR: THE GEOPOLITICS OF FREEDOM... 133

prove stronger even than colonial capitalism—created new constellations

of power, including inter-elite conflicts that offered new possibilities for
emancipation and oppression. On the most basic level, increased con-
centrations of slaves working inside West Africa could carry out success-
ful insurrections.17 A wave of uprisings, for example, spread through the
Niger Delta from the port town of Calabar in the 1850s, where slaves
rebelled to end the practice of sacrificing them at funerals.18
Alongside African slave states and slaving elites there emerged com-
peting colonial and missionary elites. While Europeans exercised signifi-
cantly less political power in the middle of the nineteenth century than
they would at the end of the century, regional centers of European colonial
power did emerge, along with the mixed European and African enclaves of
the mission stations. Most of these groups, while hardly advocates of slav-
ery in Africa or anywhere else, nonetheless tolerated slavery in Africa. The
Atlantic economy depended as much as ever on the labor of African slaves,
and even if some administrators and missionaries would have liked to crush
African slavery, they did not have the means to do so.19 Most colonial offi-
cials and missionaries refused to interfere with slavery in their own regions
of operation, even if their presence was justified by their opposition to
slavery. The practical realities of returning escaped slaves, however, did
sometimes allow for more informal, case-by-case interventions.
Yet, even while European colonial and missionary powers tolerated, and
often benefitted from, slavery in their own spheres of influence, anti-slavery
formed a component of their expansion into neighboring slaveholding
polities. Beginning with an 1836 naval bombardment of the port town of
Bonny by ships of the British West Africa Squadron, Britain gradually estab-
lished coercive treaties with states of the Niger Delta, culminating in the
1851 bombardment of Lagos to support the anti-slavery sovereign King
Akitoye, and the annexation of Lagos in 1861.20 With Lagos conquered,
the British there saw their abolitionism fade, and they continued to toler-
ate the widespread slavery in their new colony. We perhaps see a parallel in
those erstwhile Radical Republicans who, with federal power reestablished
in the South, found themselves liberal critics of Reconstruction and advo-
cates of the racist reconciliation that David Blight has analyzed.21
Slaves in Abeokuta, about one hundred miles inland from Lagos, took
the anti-slavery rhetoric the British used in their conquest of Lagos more
seriously than the British themselves did. Abeokuta was an inland city
settled by Egba Yoruba in the wake of the collapse of the Oyo Empire in
the first half of the nineteenth century. The Church Missionary Society
134 A. ZIMMERMAN

(CMS) and Sierra Leonean recaptives (slaves freed from ships intercepted
by British Navy patrols) who were originally from the region soon set-
tled there too. The head of the CMS in Abeokuta, Samuel Crowther,
was himself one of these recaptives. Crowther would later become the
first black Anglican Bishop. Abeokuta and Lagos both had major—in
the estimate of Paul Lovejoy majority—slave populations, and neither
the CMS in Abeokuta nor the British at Lagos challenged the local slave
economies. This may have been as much a matter of their power as of
their principles.
While many European administrators and missionaries wanted to
adjust African emancipation to fit their own political and economic aims,
slaves took the issue into their own hands. The coexistence of competing
European and African political powers in Africa, in a manner similar to
the coexistence of slave and free states in the United States, improved
the chances of escape for slaves. CMS missionaries complained that in
Abeokuta “the natives … see in Lagos a place of refuge for runaway
slaves; they see that their slave property will become without value and
that great changes and even revolutions will be the result.”22 The British
in Lagos did indeed welcome most fleeing slaves from Abeokuta, some-
times paying compensation to their owners, even while accepting, and
often benefiting, from slavery inside of Lagos. Escaped Abeokuta slaves
were also employed as laborers for Lagos merchants. Hausa escapees
were formed into the so-called Armed Hausa Police Force that defended
British sovereignty at Lagos, including against outraged slaveholders
from outside the colony seeking to reclaim escaped slaves. This British
practice of using fugitive slaves in colonial armies also built on African
traditions of military slavery. It was later imitated by French and German
colonial powers. These armies of freedpeople, though employed in colo-
nial conquest, also served as agents of emancipation, even, like African
American Union soldiers, encouraging slave escapes during campaigns,
especially in British Yoruba expeditions at the end of the nineteenth
century.23 As in the United States, both before and during the Civil War,
the relation of slave escape and insurrection to the political and mili-
tary projects of non-slaveholding elites remained vexed, amplifying the
power and the possibilities for co-optation of both political-economic
elites and enslaved workers.
***
The transformations of Atlantic slavery also created new relationships
between African Americans and Africans. This had much to do with what
 AFRICA AND THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR: THE GEOPOLITICS OF FREEDOM... 135

Ira Berlin has called the “Second Middle Passage” of the early nineteenth
century, when the massive growth of the US cotton economy drove thou-
sands of slaves into the Deep South.24 (The expanded production of US
cotton was part of the same global capitalist expansion that also fueled
the increased demand for slave- and free labor grown palm oil and other
African commodities.) Facing mass dislocation in the United States, this
migrant generation became, Berlin has argued, a less Africa-identified and
more distinctly African American and Christian population. Even if this
population identified less strongly with blacks in Africa, as Berlin sug-
gests, they shared a common experience with their African counterparts of
intensified slavery in new slave states.
The African American abolitionist Martin R.  Delany, although not
born in slavery, belonged to this generation. His 1859–1860 journey to
Abeokuta, the Yoruban town in conflict with Lagos over the fugitive slave
issue, illustrates with particular clarity the transatlantic politics of the African
diaspora in the changing political economy of the mid-nineteenth-century
Atlantic. It also suggests how the generation of the second middle passage
maintained some contacts to similar struggles in Africa. Delany hoped to
transform the well-known cotton textile production of Abeokuta into a
damaging economic competitor to the slaveholding US South with the
expertise and management of African American settlers. Of course, even
suggesting African American migration to Africa sounded too close to the
racist and insufficiently anti-slavery position of the American Colonization
Society for many, and Delany was widely criticized for this scheme.25
Delany concluded a treaty with the king of Abeokuta allowing him
to bring African American settlers to grow cotton for the world market.
Delany promised to bring from America “no heterogeneous nor promiscu-
ous ‘masses’ or companies, but select and intelligent people of high moral
as well as religious character” who would settle the land, live according to
their own laws, and bring what Delany regarded as superior moral ways
to local inhabitants. These American settlers would employ African cotton
growers at wages lower than what American slaveholders laid out to pur-
chase and maintain their human chattel. Delany concluded, “If the negro
race—as slaves—can produce cotton as an exotic in foreign climes to
enrich white men who oppress them, they can, they must, they will, they
shall, produce it as an indigene in their own-loved native Africa to enrich
themselves, and regenerate their race.” If these settlers could be afforded
“additional labor”—presumably from local African populations—“we
shall very soon cultivate our own cotton.—Slavery Doomed.”26
136 A. ZIMMERMAN

Delany acknowledged the wide practice of slavery in Abeokuta

but, following a pattern typical of missionaries and colonists, his pub-
lished report justified slavery in the region he wished to work while
condemning its existence elsewhere (in Delany’s report, in Asante and
Dahomey). To avoid condemning slavery in Abeokuta, Delany repeated
a slaveholder’s ideology common to both sides of the Atlantic: there,
according to Delany, slaves were members of the master’s family, treated
with paternal care. (While some slavery in Africa may well have corre-
sponded to some domestic ideal, this was hardly the case for the major-
ity of slaves in the staple economies of West Africa.) Of course, had
Delany come to Abeokuta promising to abolish slavery there he would
not have been able to strike bargains with African powers. Delany did
not continue his work in Abeokuta, and would soon focus his energies
on recruiting black troops for Union Army. When he was promoted
to major in 1865 he became the first African American commissioned
officer in the United States.
Delany’s Abeokuta plan suggests the increasingly complex possibilities
for collaboration and resistance and the ways multiple actors co-opted
each other in political and economic struggles in the Atlantic. That most,
if not all, foreign and domestic elites in Africa compromised with some
combination of slavery, exploitation, and colonial domination says more
about elites than about African history particularly. The driving force of
this age of revolution was the stream of escaping slaves, the constituent
power of the revolutionary Atlantic, and not any particular state, mission,
or other constituted power into which they might subsequently be fit.
Delany’s work in Abeokuta suggests that Civil-War-era African Americans
had direct knowledge of the geopolitics of slavery and freedom in West
Africa, and that the resemblances between various forms of popular anti-
slavery are not—or at least not only—coincidental but also include per-
sonal connections and networks.
***
The history of Liberia, the settlement of manumitted slaves founded by
the American Colonization Society (ACS) in 1822, similarly illustrates the
transatlantic connections of black anti-slavery in the Civil War era. It also
suggests how the complex politics of slavery and anti-slavery in the Atlantic
world could be appropriated by new forms of colonial sovereignty. Most
abolitionists detected the racism at least implicit in the white concern to
settle free blacks outside the United States. The support that many slave-
holders showed the ACS further indicated the extent to which transporting
 AFRICA AND THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR: THE GEOPOLITICS OF FREEDOM... 137

free blacks from the United States was entirely compatible with maintaining
slavery in the United States. The relation of the Americo-Liberian settlers
both to subsequent African recaptives, or “Congoes” as they were known
in the American settlement, as well as to indigenous African societies, indi-
cates the distance from which this generation of African Americans stood
from Africans.27 These American emigrants were the only residents of the
Republic of Liberia who could be citizens, and, much like European colo-
nists, they ruled indigenous inhabitants with military force in the name of
Christianity and civilization. It is important to note, however, that African
Americans did not travel to Liberia primarily out of a desire to colonize,
but rather because emigration was often a condition of their manumission.
European colonists, by contrast, were not faced with such a terrible choice
in their decision to intervene in Africa.
Central to working out this tension around the issue of migration is to
adequately theorize the political strategy of exodus, one beginning as early
as the Hebrew Bible and very much alive in much slave resistance. Elites
have also employed migration, emigration, and colonization as strategies
of oppression and control, but as a kind of parasitical subversion of a pri-
mary, emancipatory exodus.28
When the American Civil War broke out, Americo-Liberians embraced it
immediately as a war against slavery. Writing to the American Colonization
Society, Liberian President Stephen Allen Benson claimed that his fel-
low citizens were especially enthusiastic about the election of Abraham
Lincoln because “that good Christian statesman and advocate of freedom,
Hon. Mr. Seward, is to be his sec. of State.”29 Seward had been recog-
nized by friend and foe alike as the radical anti-slavery candidate for the
1860 Republican nomination. Lincoln’s nomination was a compromise
with more lukewarm opponents of slavery in the Republican Party, and
in 1860 Seward still remained a potent symbol for those who had wished
for a more radical president. Letters written to the ACS by Americo-
Liberians, including the President of the Republic, reveal an understand-
ing of the war as a divinely guided crusade against slavery.30 Some also
expressed concern that the war might inconvenience the work of the ACS,
for example, by interrupting US supplies to Liberia.31 Americo-Liberians
were delighted by the official US recognition of their Republic in 1862.
Lincoln’s well-known support for colonization surely appealed to these
Americo-Liberians, but they also expressed impatience that “contrabands”
were not sent immediately to Liberia.32 At least one Liberian also feared
that Lincoln would settle freedpeople in Central America, rather than in
138 A. ZIMMERMAN

Africa.33 The complex alliances between colonial power and anti-slavery

shaped Liberian history as it shaped much of the Atlantic. Again, the
primary movement was the revolutionary exodus of escaping slaves; the
counterrevolutionary structures in which some of these freedpeople, such
as the Americo-Liberian ruling class, found themselves was a secondary
reaction to this larger movement.
Even before Lincoln made anti-slavery a war aim in the United States,
in Africa he allowed the US Navy to take actions against the slave trade
to which it had long been obligated by treaty. When the Africa Squadron
of the US Navy began its operations in 1842, the Secretary of the Navy,
the southerner Abel B. Upshur, insisted that its main goal be promotion
of American commerce rather than suppression of the slave trade. The US
naval presence, combined with agreements forbidding mutual inspection
of British and American ships, had the paradoxical result, according to his-
torian George E. Brooks, that “nearly all vessels engaged in the slave trade
henceforth flew the Stars and Stripes.”34 Under Lincoln, the US African
Squadron, though diminished by the need to divert ships to blockade the
Confederacy, began serious efforts to suppress the slave trade. Africans
played a role in the anti-slavery patrols, as in all West African shipping,
from the slave trade to the suppression of the slave trade. Most important
were the Kru from Liberia, whose boating skills were necessary for landing
in the dangerously rough surf along much of the West African coast, and
whose linguistic skills as “proper-talk-men” were necessary to communi-
cate with African customers and merchants.
One important coup for these new anti-slavery patrols was the capture
of the slave ship Nightingale in April 1861 by the USS Saratoga. Eight
Kru participated in the operation and were awarded a share of the prize
awarded for the capture of enemy ships.35 The Nightingale was found to
contain nearly one thousand captives held in such terrible conditions that
only eight hundred survived the journey to Liberia. These survivors, now
“Congoes” in Americo-Liberian parlance, were placed in a “receptacle,”
as locals termed the building to house newly arrived recaptives. As one
Americo-Liberian reported to the ACS, these recaptives were “emaciated
nay attenuated to the last degree, living skeletons. The dying, the dead,
the sick crowded together in heaps, and the midst of filth and horrible
effluvia that cannot be pictured.” Initially the care of these dying recap-
tives was entrusted only to other African recaptives. The receptacle was
soon judged a “public nuisance” by a Liberian court and shut down. The
 AFRICA AND THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR: THE GEOPOLITICS OF FREEDOM... 139

Nightingale receptives were placed with “the citizens in whose families

and under whose care the poor creatures could be fed and made com-
fortable.”36 The emancipation of the Nightingale slaves was only the
beginning of a larger process of emancipation that, in the civilization-
ist ideologies common to Americans and Europeans, often placed these
freedpeople in a new tutelage, albeit one arguably less malign than that
from which they had been freed.
***
An emerging transatlantic anti-racism was one of the ways that Africans
and American abolitionists began to untangle the unholy alliance of colo-
nialism and abolitionism. Anti-racism represented a rejection both of slav-
ery and colonization, seeing the crime of slavery as a crime against people
of African descent that required more than racist expulsions and colonial
conquests to correct. This is the central point of one of the founding
documents of radical abolition, William Lloyd Garrison’s 1832 Thoughts
on African Colonization. The discussion of colonization of free people of
color in Liberia was, for Garrison, at best a distraction from “the sacred
duty of the nation to abolish the system of slavery now and to recognise
the people of color as brethren and countrymen.” Garrison maintained
that the United States owed Africa a debt for the crime of slavery that
it should pay by transforming “that ill-fated continent” into “the abode
of civilization, of the arts and sciences, of evangelical piety, of liberty and
of all that adds to the dignity, the renown, and the temporal and eternal
happiness of man.” Garrison, even while criticizing the ACS, endorsed a
civilizing-mission rhetoric important to colonization. Unlike most colo-
nists, however, Garrison did not believe that the ‘failure’ of the colonized
to conform to the ideals of colonizers authorized corrective violence: “Any
scheme,” he wrote, “to proselytize which requires for its protection the
erection of forts and the use of murderous weapons, is opposed to the
genius of Christianity and radically wrong. If the gospel cannot be propa-
gated but by the aid of the sword,… it were better to leave the pagan
world in darkness.”37 Garrison suggested also that slavery had made the
recently freed colonists unfit for the Christianizing and civilizing mission
they should carry out. While Garrison’s critique of colonization was limited
by his endorsement of a Christian civilizing mission, and his critique of
slavery weakened by the assumption that slaves were morally degraded by
the institution, he nonetheless points to a resolution in anti-racist solidarity
to the paradoxical combination of abolitionism and colonial rule in Africa.
140 A. ZIMMERMAN

This anti-racism also became a central aspect of African political thought,

as George Shepperson has discussed in an important article.38 Racism was
long a central element of slavery and proslavery discourse in the United
States, but not so in Africa, where ideologies of domesticity functioned
without the support of doctrines of racial superiority. Yet a number of West
African writers, above all James Africanus Beale Horton, an Igbo recaptive
from Sierra Leone who rose in the CMS, developed an African political
thought centered on disproving claims of black inferiority that emerged on
the other side of the Atlantic. Shepperson traces these writings to later cri-
tiques of colonialism from African diaspora writers, including CLR James,
Eric Williams, and George Padmore. Anti-racism would be the legacy of
the anti-slavery movement that would allow it to effectively shed the colo-
nial entanglements in which it sometimes found itself.
***
Longstanding African and African American anti-slavery politics played
a fundamental role not only in the political issues raised by the American
Civil War, not only in shaping the war aims of Union and Confederacy,
but also in the actual course of the war itself. This was especially true in
the West, which stood closer than the Eastern Seaboard to Atlantic radi-
cal traditions, both African and European. The West placed large popu-
lations of exiled European revolutionaries in proximity not only to the
struggle in Kansas but also to the Mississippi Valley, which had become an
area of intense plantation cultivation since the “second middle passage.”
Slave labor in this region generated massive surpluses, and the high level
of organization of slaves on the large plantations of this region would
become, as we shall see, central also to anti-slavery efforts in the war.
New forms of revolutionary war emerged as Union troops fought parti-
sans of slavery in Missouri and moved through Arkansas, eventually reach-
ing Helena on the Mississippi River to link up with Ulysses S.  Grant’s
Army of the Tennessee. Many, if not most, of the Union soldiers fighting
in Missouri were German émigrés who had participated in, or were radi-
calized by, the revolutions of 1848–1849. In the march toward Helena,
Arkansas, soldiers and slaves wove together longstanding international
political movements developed by free workers and longstanding interna-
tional political movements developed in the African diaspora. As early as
November, 1861, German soldiers in Missouri armed and put in uniform
self-emancipated slaves, who fought with the local home guards in the
brutal guerrilla war in that state.39
 AFRICA AND THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR: THE GEOPOLITICS OF FREEDOM... 141

The forms of political and economic autonomy that free and enslaved
workers created around the Atlantic played a central role in conquering,
controlling, and making productive for the Union the Mississippi Valley.
The rivers of the West were important avenues for moving soldiers and
war material, as well as confiscated cotton. Because the area was full of
guerrillas, however, Union shipping could never be secure if the banks
were not. Even a lone sharpshooter from the banks could explode a steam-
boat boiler, causing great loss of life among passengers and crew. Settling
black agricultural workers on the banks of the river denied that territory
to Confederate guerrillas, who nonetheless terrorized these free blacks. As
Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas publicized in a circular, “The primary
objects [of settling freedpeople along rivers] are to line the banks of the
Mississippi River with a loyal population and to give aid in securing the
uninterrupted navigation of the river at the same time to give employ-
ment to the freed negroes whereby they may earn wages and become
self supporting.”40 Free black landholding transformed the political and
economic geography of the South and also helped effectively control
the territory. As in colonial Africa, capitalist elites would also subvert the
autonomous and self-organized political and economic activities on which
their power depended.
The radical politics of the African diaspora merged with the radical
politics of European workers in the American Civil War, especially the
Mississippi Valley. Nowhere was this realized more literally than on the
plantation near Vicksburg, Mississippi owned by Jefferson Davis’s brother
Joseph and run following the cooperative principles of Robert Owen
(modified for slavery). When the remaining Davises and other local plan-
tation owners on Davis Bend fled advancing Union forces in the summer
of 1862, the now de facto free plantation workers continued to run the
enterprise cooperatively, now on their own account.41 Official regulations
by the Union Army for the Davis Bend plantation indicate that the mili-
tary recognized and endorsed this cooperative management. Plantations
elsewhere in the Mississippi Valley were usually leased to ‘loyal’ whites
who worked them with often coerced, if formally free, black labor. The
Davis Bend Plantation, by contrast, was divided into plots run by self-
organized and managed all-black companies. These companies consisted
of three to twenty five members, who elected their own head, received
parcels of land proportionate to their number, and divided the labor and
the profits among themselves.42
142 A. ZIMMERMAN

The Davis Bend plantation was not only an example of what a radi-
cal Reconstruction unbounded by capitalism might have looked like. It
also played a major role in developing the hard war strategy of Ulysses
S.  Grant, for it bolstered his enthusiasm for emancipation and his con-
fidence that mass emancipation and settlement of blacks could become
a component of Union strategy. When Grant himself first observed the
plantation, he decided that it might become a “Negro paradise.” Its con-
tinued functioning under black management, according to John Eaton,
the chaplain Grant put in charge of freedpeople, “distinctly demonstrated
the capacity of the Negro to take care of himself and exercise under hon-
est and competent direction the functions of self-government.”43 Grant
came to the head of the Union Army, and was able to win the war, thanks
in part to his ability to work with revolutionary strategies developed in
the Mississippi Valley, aided and inspired by revolutionary trends from the
black and red (that is, socialist) Atlantic.
The Davis Bend plantation illustrates in an atypically literal manner the
intermingling of African American and European American radical tra-
ditions of political and economic autonomy in the Civil War. In fact, it
suggests the outlines of a common Atlantic radical tradition, one whose
history in the eighteenth century has received brilliant treatment in Peter
Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker’s Many-Headed Hydra.44 If we have trou-
ble separating out the Fourierism from the Owenism from the Christian
utopianism from the Free Soilism from African and African American anti-
slavery politics this may be because these were in fact diverse parts of a
common Atlantic radicalism. We might follow Jacques Rancière in blam-
ing certain types of Marxism for artificially separating out these traditions
of fragmentary utopianism from some imaginary grand progress toward
communism, but we certainly should not blame Marx himself.45 At his
opening address to the First International, in 1864, Marx identified as
two of the most important movements of the day the ongoing defeat of
slavery in the United States and the cooperative movement in Europe that
demonstrated “that, like slave labor, like serf labor, hired labor is but a
transitory and inferior form, destined to disappear before associated labor
plying its toil with a willing hand, a ready mind, and a joyous heart.”46
Had Marx known about Ewe and other free African societies, he might
have included them in this account of cooperative labor.
In this chapter I have highlighted the contribution of political tradi-
tions of African anti-slavery not only to the Atlantic struggle against slavery
of which the American Civil War was such an important part but also to
 AFRICA AND THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR: THE GEOPOLITICS OF FREEDOM... 143

the military history of the war itself. Historians who see anti-slavery as a
side issue to the “real” military history of the war misdirect not only our
understanding of the larger Civil War era, but also of the “real” military
history of the conflict itself.47 The powerful revolutionary movements of
the nineteenth-century Atlantic were not available to the Confederacy,
and this must be counted among the many strategic deficits of those slave
states.48 The Union, meanwhile, enjoyed enormous support in the South,
not only from enslaved African Americans but also, in some areas, includ-
ing Arkansas, from poor whites who had little sympathy for wealthy slave-
holders. The Union victory depended on the creation of new commons,
territorial sovereignties created by African, as well as European, radicalism.
That this new common was enclosed by bourgeois elites, from African
colonization to Reconstruction to the New South and beyond, in new
movements of enclosure, has perhaps masked this. A national narrative
might split the difference between revolution and reaction, drawing a diag-
onal with a narrative of liberal progress in a United States excepted from
Atlantic Revolution. I have instead tried to offer a transnational and dialec-
tical account of the Civil War, looking past the weak forces of a nationally
bounded liberal gradualism to the stronger revolutionary currents of the
Atlantic.

NOTES

1. See, above all, John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of
the Atlantic World, 1400–1800, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1998).
2. Stephen Hahn makes important connections between Civil War era
African American politics and slave rebellions, such as that which
created Haiti, and the long tradition of marronage. See Steven
Hahn, The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2009).
3. E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the
Eighteenth Century,” Past & Present 50 (1971): 76–136.
4. See especially Robert J.  Steinfeld, The Invention of Free Labor: The
Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture,
1350–1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991)
and Robert J.  Steinfeld, Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor in the
Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
144 A. ZIMMERMAN

5. For a study especially important for this discussion, see Jessica

Krug, “They Glorify in a Certain Independence’: The Politics of
Identity in Kisama, Angola, and Its Diasporas in the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries” (PhD diss., University of Madison,
Wisconsin, 2012).
6. Karl Marx, Preface to the first edition of Capital, vol. 1, Ben
Fowkes, trans. (1867; New  York: Penguin Books, 1992), 91. I
changed the translation of Sturmglocke from its usual “tocscin” to
the simpler “alarm bell.”
7. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2009).
8. See Martin Lynn, Commerce and Economic Change in West Africa:
The Palm Oil Trade in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997).
9. A.  G Hopkins, An Economic History of West Africa, (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1973), 145–146.
10. Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in
Africa, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000),
177.
11. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery, 255. Sierra Leone, as a pro-
tectorate rather than a colony, was not bound by the anti-slavery
conventions governing European colonies in Africa. In these too,
however, slavery also continued.
12. For an excellent recent discussion of this issue, see Gareth Austin,
“Cash Crops and Freedom: Export Agriculture and the Decline of
Slavery in Colonial West Africa,” International Review of Social
History 54 (2009): 1–37.
13. Patrick Manning, Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental,
and African Slave Trades (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1990), 66–69.
14. Michel Verdon rightly cautions against generalizing about the
Ewe, which, in fact, he shows, differ significantly across three major
geographical areas. See Michel Verdon, The Abutia Ewe of West
Africa: A Chiefdom That Never Was (Berlin: Mouton, 1983). The
best contemporary accounts of Ewe political economy from the
German colonial period are Jakob Spieth, Die Ewe-Stämme:
Material zur Kunde des Ewe-Volkes in Deutsch-Togo (Berlin:
Dietrich Reimer, 1906) and Diedrich Westermann, Die Glidyi-Ewe
in Togo: Züge aus ihrem Gesellschaftsleben (Berlin: Walter de
 AFRICA AND THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR: THE GEOPOLITICS OF FREEDOM... 145

Gruyter, 1935). On the Togolese economy, see also Peter Buhler,

“The Volta Region of Ghana: Economic Change in Togoland,
1850–1914” (PhD diss., University of California, San Diego,
1975) and M.B.K.  Darkoh, “Togoland under the Germans,”
Nigerian Geographical Journal 10 (1967): 107–122 and 11
(1968): 153–168.
15. Andrew Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington,
the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).
16. Hopkins, Economic History of West Africa, 126.
17. Patrick Manning, Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental,
and African Slave Trades (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1990), 145–146; Hopkins, Economic History of West Africa,
146.
18. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery, 188.
19. On the continuing importance of slavery to the ostensibly free
colonial states, see especially Suzanne Miers, “Slavery and the Slave
Trade as International Issues, 1890–1939,” in Slavery and Colonial
Rule in Africa, ed. Suzanne Miers and Martin Klein (London:
Frank Cass, 1999), 16–37.
20. Toyin Falola, Colonialism and Violence in Nigeria (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2009).
21. David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American
Memory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001). For an
important analysis of a comparable case in East Africa, see Frederick
Cooper, From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labor and Agriculture
in Zanzibar and Kenya, 1890–1925 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann,
1997).
22. Iwe Irohin, a CMS newspaper published in Abeokuta, June 1862,
quoted in E.  Adeniyi Oroge, “The Fugitive Slave Question in
Anglo-Egba Relations, 1861–1888,” Journal of the Historical
Society of Nigeria 8 (1975): 69–70.
23. See especially Oroge, “The Fugitive Slave Question in Anglo-Egba
Relations,” and Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery, 258–259.
24. Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American
Slaves (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004).
25. See Richard Blackett, “Martin R.  Delany and Robert Campbell:
Black Americans in Search of an African Colony,” The Journal of
Negro History 62 (1977): 1–25; James T. Campbell, “Redeeming
146 A. ZIMMERMAN

the Race: Martin Delany and the Niger Valley Exploring Party,
1859–60,” New Formations 45 (Winter 2001–2002): 125–149.
26. Martin R. Delany, “Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring
Party (1861),” in The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and
Destiny of the Colored People of the United States; and, Official Report
of the Niger Valley Exploring Party, ed. Toyin Falola (Amherst, N.Y:
Humanity Books, 2004), 298–299, 309–311, 355, 372.
27. Tunde Adeleke characterizes this group bluntly in UnAfrican
Americans: Nineteenth-Century Black Nationalists and the
Civilizing Mission (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky,
1998).
28. Recently, Italian autonomisti have been especially good at theoriz-
ing the emancipatory potential of exodus. See, for example, Paolo
Virno, “Virtuosity and Revolution: The Political Theory of
Exodus,” in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, ed.
Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, Theory out of Bounds, vol. 7
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 188–209.
29. Stephen Allen Benson to Ralph R.  Gurley, April 27, 1861,
American Colonization Society records, Library of Congress, Box
I:B11, 80 (Reel 160).
30. For example, H.W.  Dennis to Wm. McLain, June 24, 1861,
American Colonization Society records, Library of Congress, Box
I:B11, 86 (Reel 160); W.S. Smith to William McLain, November
1, 1862, American Colonization Society records, Library of
Congress, Box I:B12, 55 (Reel 160); President Stephen Allen
Benson to Ralph R. Gurley, April 9, 1863, American Colonization
Society records, Library of Congress, Box I:B12, 83 (Reel 160).
31. For example, Letter to John [Suss], June 20, 1861, American
Colonization Society records, Library of Congress, Box I:B11,
85(Reel 160); B.A.  Payne to Wm. McLain, June 14, 1862,
American Colonization Society records, Library of Congress, Box
I:B12, 41 (Reel 160).
32. C.S. de Randamie to William McLain, September 8, 1862,
American Colonization Society records, Library of Congress, Box
I:B12, 50 (Reel 160); H.N.(?) Dennis to William McLain, October
11, 1862, American Colonization Society records, Library of
Congress, Box I:B12, 54 (Reel 160).
 AFRICA AND THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR: THE GEOPOLITICS OF FREEDOM... 147

33. J.J.  Roberts to Ralph R.  Gurley, February 19, 1863, American
Colonization Society records, Library of Congress, Box I:B12, 76
(Reel 160).
34. George E.  Brooks, Yankee Traders, Old Coasters & African
Middlemen; a History of American Legitimate Trade with West
Africa in the Nineteenth Century (Brookline: Boston University
Press, 1970), 123–125.
35. “Appropriation—Prize Money,” July 22, 1864, NARA, RG84,
U.S. Embassy, Liberia, vol. 14, document 13.
36. Letter to John [Suss], June 20, 1861, American Colonization
Society records, Library of Congress, Box I:B11, 85 (Reel 160).
37. William Lloyd Garrison, Thoughts on African Colonization (Boston:
Garrison and Knapp, 1832), iii-iv, 24, 32, 34.
38. George Shepperson, “Abolitionism and African Political Thought,”
Transition 12 (1964): 22–26.
39. See the complaint by the private citizen Isaac P. Jones, Boonville,
MO, to Major General Henry W. Halleck, November 30, 1861,
OR, Ser.II, vol. 1, pp. 779–781.
40. Lorenzo Thomas, “Circular,” October 27, 1863, Series III, vol. 3,
pp. 939–940, OR. Cited in Carl H. Moneyhon, “From Slave to
Free Labor: The Federal Plantation Experiment in Arkansas,” in
Civil War Arkansas: Beyond Battles and Leaders, ed. Anne J. Bailey
and Daniel E Sutherland (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas
Press, 2000), 177–193.
41. On Davis Bend Plantation, see Thavolia Glymph, “The Second
Middle Passage: The Transition from Slavery to Freedom at Davis
Bend, Mississippi” (PhD diss., Purdue University, 1994) and Janet
Sharp Hermann, The Pursuit of a Dream (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1981).
42. “Rules and Regulations for the Government of the Freedmen at
Davis Bend, Miss.,” 1865, Freedom, Ser. I, vol. 3, doc. 220,
pp. 867–869.
43. John Eaton and Ethel Osgood Mason, Grant, Lincoln, and the
Freedmen: Reminiscences of the Civil War with Special Reference to
the Work for the Contrabands and Freedmen of the Mississippi Valley
(New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1907), 85–86,
165–166.
148 A. ZIMMERMAN

44. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra:

The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (London: Verso,
2002).
45. Jacques Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor, ed. Andrew Parker
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).
46. Karl Marx, “Address of the International Working Men’s
Association (Inaugural Address)” (London, September 28, 1864),
MEGA2 I/20, 3–12.
47. See, for example, Gary W. Gallagher, The Union War (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2011).
48. As Stephanie McCurry has argued, the Confederacy failed inter-
nally and externally at least in part because of the essentially coun-
terrevolutionary nature of the white supremacist and patriarchal
polity precluded the kind of popular support and participation that
it would have needed to survive. Stephanie McCurry, Confederate
Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2010).
 PART IV

Nation Building and Social

Revolutions: The American Civil War
and Italy
 CHAPTER 9

The United States, Italy,

and the Tribulations of the Liberal Nation

Tiziano Bonazzi

On March 17, 1861, the Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed in Turin and
Vittorio Emanuele II, already the king of Piedmont and Sardinia, became
the first king of Italy. Less than one month later, Confederate forces
opened fire on Fort Sumter.
The year 1861 marks a watershed in the history of both countries—for
opposite reasons. In the United States 1861 means disunion, the birth of
the Confederate States of America, and the Civil War. In Italy, it means
independence, union, and the triumph of Risorgimento. Forty years later
events unite the two countries again. In 1900, anarchist Gaetano Bresci
killed King Umberto I. One year later, President William McKinley was
also murdered by an anarchist, Leon Czolgosz, who is thought to have
imitated Bresci. The two political murders were each preceded by severe
social crisis and followed by a period of reforms: the Progressive Era and
the Age of Giolitti. The situation, however, was at this point the reverse of
that compared to 1861. The United States was a most important indus-
trial country and a rising international power, while Italy was struggling
with fledgling industrialization, and the attempt to become an important

T. Bonazzi ( )
University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy

© The Author(s) 2016 151

J. Nagler et al. (eds.), The Transnational Significance of the
American Civil War, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40268-0_9
152 T. BONAZZI

colonial power was frustrated by defeat at the hands of Abyssinians in the

Battle of Adwa of 1896.
The contrasting trajectories the two countries followed seem to make
the usefulness of a parallel between them unlikely except for the fact that
union or reunion was obtained through military force. Nonetheless, it is
not a certain fact that American and Italian history are “other,” the one
with respect to the other. For both countries the same problem lies at
the heart of the year 1861, that is, the construction or the safeguarding
of the state and the nation. The Risorgimento was a long, bitter struggle
for independence and nationhood, legitimated, for the patriots, by the
existence of an Italian people that asked to live in an Italian sovereign
state and not in the six states that already existed in the peninsula, not
to mention the regions in the Northeast that were part of the Austrian
Empire.1 In America, the North denied the South the right to secede on
the grounds that it had been the people who ratified the Constitution,
and that this had created a nation and not a league or a confedera-
tion. The South, instead, proclaimed its right to secession not just on
the grounds of an opposing constitutional interpretation, according to
which the states had founded the Union, reserving for themselves a part
of sovereignty that allowed them to secede2; but rather proclaiming itself
a nation based on the same principle of self-determination for which the
European people had been fighting. On a par with the Greeks, Italians,
Polish, Germans, Hungarians and the Irish, the Confederates used the
language of the nation to justify the state which they aspired to.
Midway through the nineteenth century the Euro-American interna-
tional political scenario was dominated by the states; but the state, or bet-
ter still, the political institution that historians call the “modern state,”
had changed radically from the sixteenth century when Nicolò Machiavelli
and Jean Bodin identified it.3 The scientific debate on nation and national-
ism seemed to have settled by then on the “imagined” or “constructed”
nature of the nation,4 which made it possible for it to be talked about
not as an objective and natural reality, but as a historical and socially and
politically negotiated one. Equally important is the connection created by
Ernest Gellner and Eric Hobsbawm between the birth of the “modern
nation” and the processes that underlie Western modernity.5 Lastly, of
essential importance is the connection between modernity, nation, and
state, in that the state is the main institution through which for centu-
ries the Euro-American historical processes were channeled. Today, we are
not interested in identifying the state as model or ideal type, but instead
THE UNITED STATES, ITALY, AND THE TRIBULATIONS OF THE LIBERAL NATION 153

the history of the actual states and of the Euro-American system that
linked them together while allowing and preserving their great diversity.6
Similarly, after the studies carried out by Norbert Elias, Shmuel Eisenstadt
and others,7 we can no longer speak of a unilinear and teleological model
of modernization, but rather of multiple modernizations, these too, like
the states, organized in a system of inescapably linked historical processes.
Historiography dates to the second half of the eighteenth century, the
period when, owing to the acceleration of the processes of moderniza-
tion, the modern nation started to take shape in some countries and it
began to impact the state. Along with the intensification of the ensu-
ing physical and social communications, as Karl Deutsch pointed out in
the 1950s,8 socio-economic and cultural complexity and integration also
grew, and in core states such as France and England vast urban strata
gained a national political conscience. Equally strong, however, were dis-
orientation and social dislocation. The idea of the nation, which began to
be formed in England and France9 was one of the answers given to these
transformations.
The process that led to the nation and the nation-state differed from
place to place and concerned both the countries in which the state already
existed, and others, such as Germany and Italy, in which a single unified
state did not yet exist. In the latter case it was the modernizing trauma
of Napoleon’s arrival, experienced both positively and negatively,10 that
provoked a cultural need for a nation that took on the shape of a quest for
state unification. The central fact, in any case, is that the state could not
fail to change under the impetus of the birth of the nation and that, at the
same time, the nation could not do without the state.
The birth of the nation-state was not just a European phenomenon.
During the nineteenth century it also involved the states born in the
Americas as a result of the anti-British and anti-Spanish revolutions. Across
the Atlantic the events had the same reasons and outcomes as they did in
Europe, although the modalities were various and original. In the United
States, in particular, the nation-state was not born in 1776. The American
Revolution was an especially political revolution in that it created a state
founded for the first time on popular sovereignty; but the American peo-
ple of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were not
yet, either in theory or in practice, a national people. The debates among
historians on the American colonies’ degree of Americanness in the eigh-
teenth century reveal one very important thing, that is to say that the
English who had settled down in a totally new environment far from their
154 T. BONAZZI

native homeland tended to develop original characteristics, which is the

same thing that happened for every population driven to the conquest
of other continents. But this did not mean possessing an autonomous
national sense. Furthermore, the founding documents of the United
States define the American people according to the universal criteria of the
Enlightenment: a people that, founded upon the natural rights of the indi-
vidual, constitutes the ideal type of freedom. The American people were a
“universal” people, which presented itself as the revolutionary avant-garde
of a liberated humanity.11 In the United States as well, though, the rapid
processes of modernization and the influence of international events from
the French Revolution to the Congress of Vienna, in just a few decades
led to birth of a strong and assertive nationalism12 that transformed the
revolutionary freedom that had been manifested for the first time in 1776
into an American freedom.
***
In 1861, the ruling classes of the Union and the Kingdom of Italy
were forced to come to terms with huge practical problems. But equally
serious was the crisis of the idea of nation that had been imagined in the
previous decades.
In the difficult decades of the Risorgimento, the Italian patriots were
well aware of the peninsula’s social, economic, cultural, and linguistic het-
erogeneousness. Yet they believed that it was the result of the ruins caused
by centuries of division and foreign domination under which an Italian
people could be identified ready for independence.13 Based on this cer-
tainty they struggled for decades in spite of the deep-seated differences
between their political projects, and, in order to obtain the said indepen-
dence, the majority accepted the Piedmontese monarchist solution that
was being delineated between 1859 and 1860. In 1861, however, the
much-dreamed of Italian people did not materialize. The very difficult
task of unifying the different administrative, juridical, and economic sys-
tems of the six pre-unification states was added to the divergent regional
interests and to the strength of centuries-old communities impervious to
national demands, posing dramatic practical and cultural questions to the
ruling class that had founded the Kingdom of Italy. It was understood
that, contrary to the nationalistic idea according to which in the nation-
state the nation is forerunner to the state, the truth of the matter was
that the state was born, but not the nation.14 At the same time, across
the Atlantic the political and institutional fracture that had been caused
by the birth of the Confederation threw in the faces of the Unionists the
THE UNITED STATES, ITALY, AND THE TRIBULATIONS OF THE LIBERAL NATION 155

dramatic reality of an American nation believed to be solid, which instead

disintegrated within just a few months.15
The systemic approach to the themes of the construction of modernity
and the nation followed here allows us not to be blind to the huge differ-
ences between the United States and Italy, without, however, having to
interpret them as examples of two opposing historical poles. Hence, it is
true that in the first half of the nineteenth century the idea of nation was
imagined in different ways in the two countries, because their historical
conditions were very different. In America the values and political insti-
tutions of the 1776 revolution soon became a benchmark for the whole
population; while in Italy, the debate on monarchy or republic, whether
federal state or not, on the role of the Pope and Catholics was highly divi-
sive. Moreover, American nationalism achieved its most complete form as
of the 1830s, the decade of the democratic revolution, which meant that
it was nationalism with a broad social base. In Italy, instead, the patriots
who were fighting for independence, although more numerous than what
is traditionally believed, were a part of the city-based bourgeoisies and a
number of artisans and workers from various cities. Furthermore, democ-
racy did not exist in the pre-unification states and only a few among the
patriots wanted it. However, the concepts, symbols, metaphors based on
which the discourse of the nation was put together in the two countries
are similar and structured analogously.
The founding core of both ideas of nation is the freedom of the people
or, better still, an experience of freedom, which had already taken place or
was desired, from a condition of slavery. In the United States, this experi-
ence consists in the revolution against England, is reiterated in the opposi-
tion to the whole of Europe, and it has the structure, as noted by Michael
Walzer, of the Exodus toward the Promised Land.16 In the case of the
Italian Risorgimento, instead, it was the centuries of shame for serfdom
and for the suffering of a people crushed by foreigners that paved the
way for the struggle for national redemption.17 Italians were foreigners in
their homeland who had to return to their homeland. Consequently, the
comparison with Israel was also present in Italy, although, owing to the
differences between Catholics and Protestants, it did not concern Israel
as a people covenanted with God, but rather Israel torn away from their
God-given land. Suffice it to recall the famous chorus of the Nabucco by
Giuseppe Verdi, “Va pensiero,” in which the people of Israel yearn to
go back to their “native soil,” which became a sort of soundtrack of the
hopes of Italian patriots during the Risorgimento. Beyond the fracture
156 T. BONAZZI

between Protestantism and Catholicism, the common Christian culture

meant that in Italy as well as in the United States the themes of redemp-
tion and moral regeneration were constantly used, accompanied by the
idea that liberty had to pass through the young patriots’ martyrdom. At
the end of the path of liberation, Italy could enact its own civilizing mis-
sion in the world, which consisted in a fusion between ancient Rome and
Christianity.18 Both in Italy and the United States, then, the discourse of
the nation was formulated as a religious speech that justified the nation
at a metahistorical level, and interpreted in Christian terms the respec-
tive political missions, the realization of liberty for the one, the return to
Rome’s civilizing task for the other.
The subject of this discourse is the people, individualized, that is, under-
stood as a single person, and identified, that is, not exchangeable with any-
one else. The people of nationalism, however, built up as such to cement
the unity of the nation, is the starting point that leads to the naturaliza-
tion of the same, that is, to the search for objective and unchangeable,
“natural” elements that make it indissoluble. In the culturally romantic
and politically liberal climate of the first half of the nineteenth century, the
people were not imagined on the basis of la terre et les morts or Blut und
Boden. Consequently, in the United States and in Italy metaphors of ethi-
cal and natural value were used. In Italy the nation acquired the character
of a community of kinship based on a common tradition of civilization
that harked back to Rome, a cultural and linguistic one that saw Dante,
Petrarch and Boccaccio as its unifying model, and a religious, that is,
Catholic one, as well as on precise gender roles.19 But the familiar model
of the Italian nation is not the patriarchal, vertical one that would have
exalted the king’s rights over the people, but rather a horizontal model in
which the stress fell on brotherhood and on the female role of the home-
land in the national family. In recognizing each other as being Italian we
recognize each other as being brothers and therefore equal, and we are
willing to make the redemptive sacrifice of life to defend and save the
country, and at the same time mother, sister, bride. The “Inno di Mameli”
of 1847—one of the Risorgimento’s most famous songs, and now the
national anthem—begins with the words “Fratelli d’Italia” (Brothers of
Italy), and it is a battle hymn that summons the young brothers to fight
and die for the country’s redemption. In the case of the American dis-
course of the nation—whose hidden racial contents I will overlook for the
time being—the metaphor for the family is less strong, because the idea
of the people is above all built around the civic values of Republicanism
THE UNITED STATES, ITALY, AND THE TRIBULATIONS OF THE LIBERAL NATION 157

coming from the English thinkers of the eighteenth century and made
concrete by the revolution.20 The people are objectively one, in that, as
it is formed by true Christians, that is, Protestants, it is a “body” in the
meaningful twofold spiritual and material sense of all of Christian tradi-
tion, which fought together for freedom in the name of Republican vir-
tue. Yet the family enters the American discourse of the nation through
Republican motherhood, the role as the midwives of the Republican sons
and citizens assigned to women. As we said previously, the American peo-
ple is indeed a people of individuals not isolated one from the other, but
rather objectively united in a civic and religious community to which, at
the same time, Republican motherhood bestows a natural foundation.21
The discourse of the nation in Italy and in the United States is not
the same. Yet the “imagined community” built up in the two countries
is structurally similar, even if in Italy the process is top-down, in that the
élites are its authors, while in America it is also bottom-up. In both cases,
the problem represented by the extreme heterogeneousness of the two
countries was surpassed by making use of metaphors that aimed to prove
the existence of an equal community of citizens and brothers. A com-
mon imagery was at work, based on the values of personal and collective
freedom. Its main objective was to unite the population around the idea
of belonging to a brotherly community and sharing the same progressive
destiny. A political project that is wholly part of liberal nationalism and
the construction of modernity in the first half of the nineteenth century22
and whose ideal arrival point was a national community that was as indis-
soluble as it was homogeneous, inclusive, harmonious and peaceful.
***
The analysis sketched up to this point is based on the hypothesis that
a nation is a historical product, an integral part of Euro-American pro-
cesses of modernization. Within this context the liberal nation imagined
both in Italy and in the United States in the first half of the nineteenth
century had a precise function, in that it contributed to the birth in both
countries of a community committed to realizing the political project of
modernity via the nation-state. Nonetheless, the year 1861 proved that
the concrete realization of the nation-state was founded on the violence
and subsequent removal of that violence from the collective memory. This
meant the failure of the project for a liberal nation that had served as a
guide for both Italians and Americans: The nation, far from being the
all-inclusive and brotherly reality that had been imagined, was contested
terrain from which it emerged only by way of tough political clashes. The
158 T. BONAZZI

offspring of modernity, it hypothesized a perfect community designed to

deal with problems related to the growth of complexity; but it inevitably
clashed with the contradictions related to the conflicts that pervaded the
nation-state.23
In the case of the United States the process that led to imagining the
nation in the early decades of the nineteenth century had to come to terms
with an element that no longer existed in the territories of the European
states, that is, slavery. The potential conflict that stemmed from this was
muted for three quarters of a century by a series of compromises supported
by the generally accepted idea of the inferiority of black people.24 From
the very beginning, then, the American nation, counter to all its found-
ing premises, was erected upon an internal barrier that excluded a part of
the population that had been brought to its territory. Equally important,
albeit different, was the exclusion of the native people.25 Indeed, while the
black people were at the same time part of and excluded from the body of
the nation-state, the natives were gradually pushed westward by way of a
process of conquest that American nationalism both denied and concealed
by exploiting arguments such as the advancement of civilization. With
this policy the Americans, who had made their contraposition to Europe
the heart of their idea of nation, proved to be wholly European, the loyal
interpreters of faith in the superiority of European civilization and of the
corollary that stemmed from it, that is, the right to expand its own power
everywhere. A right that the powers of the Old World exerted outside of
Europe through conquest and colonization—it is no accident that slav-
ery lasted longer in the colonies than in the metropolitan territories of
the European states—and that the Americans, part of the all-conquering
Europe, instead exerted on the territory they had taken possession of, a
wholly “Europeanized” one.
The racial barriers that were created as the American nation-state
was forming were not, however, enough to give it solidity, because the
problem of slavery slowly eroded national unity and breathed life into a
particularly virulent sentiment of the South’s diversity, and to a different
interpretation of the principles on which the nation was founded, going all
the way up to the Secession.26 The North, albeit guided by men who were
more willing to speak about economic growth than war, believed that the
American nation and with it an American nation-state could not survive in
just one part of the country. Consequently, the Union, although divided
between different positions in regard to slavery, turned the country’s unity
into an inescapable ethical-political objective and chose war to safeguard
THE UNITED STATES, ITALY, AND THE TRIBULATIONS OF THE LIBERAL NATION 159

it.27 Hence, we can envision the Civil War as a war between whites about
the meaning of the American nation, which brought out into the open the
impossibility of the brotherly ideal that had been elaborated previously.
In Italy, despite the unification of the states—something that had been
achieved but not completed—the year 1861 severely tested both the idea
of a nation of patriots and the monarchical ruling class that had guided the
last stages of the Risorgimento. The Italian nation, which had to legitimate
its new state, was in fact soon undermined by what the Garibaldini and the
troops and the administrators arriving from the North in 1860–1861 wrote
upon seeing the South of the country. Awesome backwardness and a true
and proper decay that made Southern Italy appear to be alien to the ethical
and cultural image of the Italian people that had fueled the Risorgimento.
In this case as well, in spite of the diversity, there is a significant parallel
between what was taking place on either side of the Atlantic, as pointed
out by Don Doyle in Nations Divided.28 The opinion on the barbarian-
ism of the South, whose population was compared to Arabs or Africans,
brought to the fore the racism that was implicit in the Italian patriots’
Eurocentric vision of civilization. Those opinions, in fact, presupposed a
Southern otherness that went beyond its actual backwardness, in that they
were founded on the ideal of European civilization’s absolute superiority,
which excluded in principle and marginalized in practice, both inside and
outside Europe, anyone who did not wholly embrace its standards. In the
United States the internal barrier erected by slavery and racism, which was
an integral part, albeit denied, of the imagined American nation of the
first half of the nineteenth century, was more radical and ferocious than
what took place in Italy. But it belonged to the same cultural constellation
and, far from turning the American case into something that was alien to
the Old World, it situated it within the dynamics of European civilization.
The immediate outbreak of “banditry,”29 a complex phenomenon
in part caused and certainly reinforced by the lack of preparation of the
“Piedmontese,” as all the Northerners were called in the South, in dealing
with sociocultural realities that were far removed, made the matter of the
existence of an Italian people a dramatic one. On this is based a choice
parallel to the one made by the North in 1861, the no-holds-barred fight
against banditry, in many ways actual full-fledged war, that for several years
involved as many as 120,000 soldiers. On top of this was the decision to
“Piedmontize” the state and manage top-down the birth of an Italian
nation that had to exist, but that did not seem to be there. In the decades
that followed the year 1861, it was not the nation that legitimized the
160 T. BONAZZI

state; rather, it was the latter that created the conditions for the manifesta-
tion of the nation.30
***
The events of 1861 are indicative both of the discrepancy between the
imagined liberal nation and the concrete ways in which the nation-state
was constituted, and the structural similarities between what was taking
place in both America and Italy. This similarity did not end with the out-
break of Civil War in the United States and the different events of the
fledgling Italian state. Rather, it continued in the years that followed and
it could begin to be seen in the apparently unlikely similarity between the
American national ruling class and the one that had given birth to the
Kingdom of Italy. Indeed, despite the great differences in social origin,
culture, and ways of managing power, both were deeply rooted in the
ideas of nineteenth-century liberalism. They were loyal to their funda-
mental charters and believed in limited government, separation of pow-
ers and the rule of law. They pursued progress and wanted to achieve it
through liberty, individualism, and economic development in a free mar-
ket economy.
The two national political classes had similar economic projects for the
development of their respective countries, even though they were start-
ing out from situations that were very distant from each other, in that in
1861 the Italian peninsula was far from experiencing sustained economic
growth. At the heart of the ruling class’s projects in both countries was
the construction of a privately built and managed railway system that was
meant to cover the entire territory and be capable of paving the way for
a national market, as well as the reform, or the birth in Italy’s case, of a
strong banking system capable of funding the development and improve-
ment of all the infrastructures. In Italy, in adherence with the principles
of a liberal economy, a free trade policy was chosen which, however, soon
made way for the sort of protectionism that had already been instituted by
the United States.31 We can clearly see the common economic and politi-
cal matrices for the two projects. Italy and the United States were follow-
ing a common historical pathway.
In Italy until 1876 political power was in the hands of the “Destra stor-
ica,” the historical Right, the party, or rather, the alliance of regional élites,
which in 1861 had won the first Italian elections and harked back to Camillo
Benso di Cavour, who had died right after the Unification in 1861. The
Right was well aware of the difficulties it would have come up against to
realize its economic project given the conditions of Italian backwardness,
THE UNITED STATES, ITALY, AND THE TRIBULATIONS OF THE LIBERAL NATION 161

but it was certain that once banditry had been defeated and the state unified
top-down by applying the Piedmontese political and administration insti-
tutions to the entire territory—with a few adjustments—then economic
development should have taken off, thereby consolidating the nation-
state. On the other side of the Atlantic, the Republican Party, which had
also remained in power continuously until 1876, believed that the South,
whose economy had been destroyed by war, would have adhered to the
economic plan whose foundations had been laid by the Union during the
conflict, and would have accepted the political verdict issuing from defeat.
Both countries—although in 1861 it had to be accepted that the brotherly
and inclusive nation imagined in the previous decades had not been real-
ized—were confident that they had the means to create it.
The Reconstruction, nonetheless, failed in that the Southerners stuck
to their interpretation of freedom and refused to live in a brotherly, bira-
cial nation. The well-known outcome of this failure was the compromise
that followed the 1876 presidential elections with which the Democratic
Party, accepted a Republican President in exchange for the withdrawal
of Northern troops and home rule.32 As shown by David W. Blight, the
1877 agreement put an end to the blacks’ hope of being fully empow-
ered citizens, and breathed life into a profoundly racist memory of a
Civil War.33 Hence, 1877 was a racial compromise between whites, just
as the war had begun as a war between whites. But this compromise
allowed for a reconciliation between North and South and the chance to
again imagine a brotherly American nation,34 even if only between those
who had been called to take part, the winners of the Reconstruction
struggles. The American brotherhood had to be white, as emphasized
in the law of 1882 which prohibited immigration from China, with the
subsequent agreement with the Japanese government to prohibit immi-
gration from Japan as well, and in the debates that took place at the
end of the century on the whiteness of immigrants from Southern and
Eastern Europe.35 The official silence on slavery, which before the war
had allowed Americans to believe that they were a nation founded on
universal values, after 1877 paved the way to overt racism, which became
the nation’s manifest cornerstone and aligned it with the scientific natu-
ralism of the racist theories of evolution that were being voiced on both
sides of the Atlantic.
In Italy, during those same decades, a series of events occurred relat-
ing to the construction of a nation-state that were structurally the same
as the American ones. Two in particular warrant attention. In 1866 and
162 T. BONAZZI

in 1870, the conquest of Venice and Rome, respectively, led to almost

achieving national unification. Only the regions of Trento and Trieste
under Austrian rule were still excluded. At the same time the defeat of
banditry solved the problem within the fledgling Italian state which was
consolidated by 1870. The victory over banditry pacified the South and
allowed the Right to continue with its work of top-down construction
of the nation-state—a construction whose pillars were the veneration for
the monarchy and for King Vittorio Emanuele II.  The institution of a
public system of elementary education, whose goals included nurturing in
lower-class children a love for the Italian nation, and conscription, which
made it possible to move thousands of young men, mostly uneducated
peasants, from one region to another and to “nationalize” them by teach-
ing them loyalty to the king and the homeland.36 The Italian élite agreed
on all these points and when, in 1876, the “Sinistra storica,” or historical
Left took over, the establishment did not alter the policies that had been
pursued by the Right.
The nationhood that was being taught in schools and in the army,
and which scholars and politicians were dealing with, was not so dif-
ferent from the one that had been imagined during the Risorgimento,
and it upheld the characteristics of brotherhood, inclusiveness, and
love. Practically speaking, nonetheless, the case of the South shows that
things were actually quite different. The fight against brigandage, in fact,
brought the local élites of the southern countryside to the fore, which
often had not developed internally significant groups with a national and
modernizing culture. Indispensable to the management of the territory
in that they were strongly rooted there, such élites were aligned with the
unified state when they saw that it guaranteed, even implicitly, a form of
‘home rule’ that allowed them to uphold the relationships of traditional
domination which fueled their power. In vast areas of the South, the
peasant population was thus excluded from forms of participation in pub-
lic life, even limited ones, and kept in a state of forced passiveness. In par-
allel fashion to what had happened in the United States after 1876, the
political struggle raised an interior border, a barrier vis-à-vis the popula-
tion’s weaker groups, thus excluding them from nationhood, at the same
time allowing the nation and the nation-state to impose itself. This was
something that definitively characterized Italy, akin to racial segregation
in the United States, because its outcome was the continuation of forms
of rule that were not just exclusive, but that ran counter to modernity,
thereby making it difficult to enact the birth of a social and economic
THE UNITED STATES, ITALY, AND THE TRIBULATIONS OF THE LIBERAL NATION 163

structure in Southern Italy like the ones that were being developed in
other parts of the country.37
The consequences of this were evident also from a widespread ideo-
logical and cultural point of view because, as Don Doyle points out: “In
Italy, as in the United States, reconstruction and radical social reform in
each South were subordinated to the paramount goal of national unity.”38
In the case of Italy this further aggravated the split between the North
and the South. In Italy it was not possible to create a precise racial barrier
against a part of the Kingdom’s subjects. But, as we observed previously,
the comparison immediately made between the South and Africa or the
South and the Arabs made the opinion even more radical, giving it a form
that came very close to racial prejudice. In parallel to what took place in
regard to the whiteness of Italian immigrants in the United States, doubt
was cast on the whiteness, that is the capacity to be up to European civi-
lization, of the whole Southern population, and the South remained in a
borderline position within Italy itself.
Midway through the 1870s, then, Italy and the United States were both
on their way to the construction or reconstruction of the nation-state. It
is true that at this point their paths, already different, quickly diverged
even more, and that the United States enjoyed a degree of success that
Italy could not replicate. In our case, however, the question is whether
the American Civil War and the Unification of Italy can be interpreted as
events that have nothing to do with each other or whether they are part
of a common and recognizable pattern. Andre M. Fleche has shown that
from 1848 Americans did not feel alien to the events of European revolu-
tionary nationalism, and they carefully observed the Risorgimento, just as
the American consuls in the Italian states did.39 Geyer and Bright, in turn,
have identified a common thread between the wars that from Europe, to
the United States, to South America to China studded the mid-nineteenth
century,40 and have called them all wars of nationalization or renationaliza-
tion against the regional states or parts of the country that sought to be
autonomous. The latter indication is important, but it is still too generic.
They fail to discuss in depth the reasons why the nation was believed to be
so essential that the existence of regional states and the regional yearning
for autonomy were not acceptable. And this is the central point of events
that would otherwise have very little to do with one another.
The hypothesis advanced in this chapter is to begin from the transfor-
mation of the state into a nation-state in answer to the changes triggered
by modernization. The paradox that we are all familiar with is to envision
164 T. BONAZZI

the nation as a self-enclosed entity, as homogeneous and brotherly inside

as it is greatly different from every other one. In fact, the discourse of
the nation is founded on the presence of an outside enemy that is con-
stantly endangering the nation’s independence. England was like this
for France, France for England and Germany, Austria for Italy and all of
Europe for the United States.  The guarantee of national survival con-
sisted in defending one’s own culture and borders against such enemies,
thus carrying forward one’s special and unique mission of civilization,
whether it was the American Manifest destiny, Rome’s legacy in Italy,
or Imperial England, Republican France or the German Sonderweg. At
the same time, to add paradox to paradox, every national mission was
believed to be the purest expression of a common European civilization
in turn superior to every other one. These paradoxes reinforce every-
thing we have seen in regard to Italy and the United States and lead
to two different conclusions. The first of these is that not only were
the processes of modernization multifarious, but far from being linear
and progressive, they were conflictual and, instead of breathing life into
inclusive social and political institutions, they created barriers and exclu-
sions in the individual nation-states. The second conclusion concerns
the fact that, although nationalisms tend to present each single nation
as being autonomous and unlike every other one, in truth they form a
system and belong to the same European civilizing process pervaded
by the wars and contradictions that were clearly present in the liberal
nationalism of the United States and Italy.
Hence, 1861 is much more than merely an important date for two
different nations. It is a date that brings to light a crucial passage in the
construction of modernity via the nation-state in two countries belonging
to a common historical system that joins Europe and the Americas and
that I am fond of calling the system of the Greater Europe.41

NOTES

1. Alberto Maria Banti, La nazione del Risorgimento (Torino: Einaudi,

2000).
2. Alfred H. Kelly et al., The American Constitution: Its Origins and
Development (New York: Norton, 1983), ch. 15 and 16; Andre
M. Fleche, The American Civil War in the Age of Nationalist Conflict
(Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 2012), chs. 3 and 4.
THE UNITED STATES, ITALY, AND THE TRIBULATIONS OF THE LIBERAL NATION 165

3. Christopher Pierson, The Modern State (New York: Routledge,

1996); Brian R.  Nelson, The Making of the Modern State. A
Theoretical Evolution (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
4. Benedict R.  Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso,
2006).
5. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell,
1983); Eric J.  Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
6. By “system” I understand a group of necessarily interrelated, inter-
acting elements forming a collective entity. See Immanuel
Wallerstein, The Modern World System (London: Academic Press,
1976).
7. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (Oxford and Cambridge, MA:
Blackwell, 1994); Shmuel Eisenstadt, ed., Multiple Modernities
(New Brunswick: Transactions Publishers, 2002).
8. Karl Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1953).
9. Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism, 1740–1830
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997); Linda Colley, Britons.
Forging the Nation, 1707–1837(New Haven: Yale University Press,
1992); Max Gallo, L’âme de la France (Paris: Fayard, 2007).
10. Gilles Pécout, Il lungo Risorgimento, transl. Marco Di Sario
(Milano: Mondadori, 1999), 42–70; Antonino De Francesco,
L’Italia di Bonaparte (Torino: UTET, 2011); Louis Dumont,
L’idéologie allemande. France-Allemagne et retour (Paris: Gallimard,
1991); James J. Sheenan, “State and Nationality in the Napoleonic
Period,” in The State of Germany, ed. John Breuilly (London:
Longman, 1992).
11. Jack P. Greene, The Intellectual Construction of America (Chapel
Hill: North Carolina University Press, 1993); Timothy H. Breen,
“Ideology and Nationalism on the Eve of the American
Revolution,” Journal of American History 84 (1997): 13–39;
Tiziano Bonazzi, “Il ‘popolo universale’ e il corso degli umani
eventi. ‘Noi’ e ‘l’altro’ nella storia statunitense,” in Riconoscimento
ed esclusione, ed. Tiziano Bonazzi (Roma: Carocci, 2003),
59–85.
12. George Dangerfield, The Awakening of American Nationalism,
1815–1828 (New York: Harper & Row, 1965); Elise Marienstras,
Nous le peuple. Lesik origines du nationalisme américain (Paris:
166 T. BONAZZI

Gallimard, 1988); Arnaldo Testi, Capture the Flag. The Stars and
Stripes in American History (New York, New  York University
Press, 2010), part 2.
13. The plays and poems by Alessandro Manzoni are the best example
of the patriots’ faith in the rebirth of the Italian people.
14. Giorgio Candeloro, La costruzione dello stato unitario, 1860–1871
(Milano: Feltrinelli, 1968); Adrian Lyttleton, “The National
Question in Italy,” The National Question in Europe in Historical
Context, ed. Mikulas Teich and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 1993), 63–105; Ernesto Galli Della Loggia, L’identità itali-
ana (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1998), ch. 3.
15. P C.  Nagel, The Union in American Thought, 1776–1861 (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1964).
16. Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution (New York: Basic Books,
1985).
17. Banti, La nazione; Paolo Bagnoli, L’idea dell’Italia, 1815–1861
(Reggio Emilia: Diabasis, 2007); Silvana Patriarca, Italianità
(Roma Bari: Laterza, 2010).
18. Galli Della Loggia, L’identità, ch. 2.
19. Giulio Bollati, L’Italiano (Torino: Einaudi, 1996); Alberto
M.  Banti, Sublime madre nostra (Roma Bari, Laterza, 2011),
ch. 1.
20. Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–89
(Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 1969); Liah
Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), ch. 5.
21. Linda K.  Kerber, Women of the Republic (Chapel Hill: North
Carolina University Press, 1980).
22. Yael Tamir, Liberal Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1995).
23. Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class:
Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1991); Kathrin A. Manzo,
ed., The Politics of Race and Nation (London: Boulde, 1996).
24. John H. Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom. A History of American
Negroes (New York, Knopf, 1947); James O.  Horton and Lois
E. Horton, Hard Road to Freedom: The Story of African America
(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001); Eric Foner, The
Fiery Trial: Lincoln and American Slavery (New York London:
Norton, 2010).
THE UNITED STATES, ITALY, AND THE TRIBULATIONS OF THE LIBERAL NATION 167

25. Philip Weeks, Farewell, My Nation: The American Indian and the
United States in the Nineteenth Century (Arlington Heights:
Davidson, 1990).
26. John McCardell, The Idea of a Southern Nation (New York:
Norton, 1979); Drew G.  Faust, The Creation of Confederate
Nationalism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1988);
Paul Quigley, Shifting Ground: Nationalism and the American
South, 1848–1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
27. Paul C.  Nagel, One Nation Indivisible: The Union in American
Thought, 1776–1861 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964); Earl
J. Hess, Liberty, Virtue, and Progress: Northerners and their War for the
Union (New York: New  York University Press, 1988); Susan-Mary
Grant, North over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity
in the Antebellum Era (Lawrence: Kansas University Press, 2000).
28. Aurelio Lepre, Italia, addio? Unità e disunità dal 1860 a oggi
(Milano: Mondadori, 1994), 3–6; John Dickie, Darkest Italy: The
Nation and Stereotypes of the Mezzogiorno, 1860–1900 (New York,
St. Martin’s Press, 1999); Nelson Moe, Un paradiso abitato da
diavoli. Identità nazionale e immagini del Mezzogiorno (Napoli:
L’Ancora del Mediterraneo, 2004); Don H.  Doyle, Nations
Divided: America, Italy, and the Southern Question (Athens,
Georgia University Press, 2002), ch. 4.
29. Franco Molfese, Storia del brigantaggio dopo l’Unità (Milano:
Feltrinelli, 1979); Fulvio Cammarano, Storia politica dell’Italia
liberale (Roma Bari: Laterza, 1999), 56–62; Aldo De Jaco, Il brig-
antaggio meridionale (Roma: Editori Riuniti, 2005); Giordano
B.Guerri, Il sangue del Sud (Milano: Mondadori, 2010).
30. Raffaele Romanelli, L’italia liberale, 1861–1900 (Bologna: Il
Mulino, 1979), 13–62; Fulvio Cammarano, Storia politica
dell’Italia liberale (Roma Bari: Laterza, 2011), ch. 1.
31. Patrick K.  O’Brien, The Economic Effects of the Civil War
(Houndsmills, UK: Macmillan, 1968); Jeremy Atack, A New
Economic View of American History (New York: Norton, 1994),
ch. 13; Romanelli, Italia, 63–86; Giovanni Toniolo, Storia eco-
nomica dell’Italia liberale, 1850–1918 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1988);
Sergio Fenoaltea, L’economia italiana dall’unità alla Grande
guerra (Roma Bari: Laterza, 2006).
32. Kenneth Stampp, The Era of Reconstruction (New York: Vintage,
1968); Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution
168 T. BONAZZI

(NewYork: Harper & Row, 1988); Eric Foner, Forever Free. The
Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction (New York, Knopf,
2005).
33. David Blight, Race and Reunion. The Civil War in American
Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
34. Cecilia E. O’Leary, To Die For: The Paradox of American Patriotism
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
35. Ronald Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 19th Century
America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); M. Jacobson,
Whiteness of a Different Color (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1998).
36. Piero Pieri, Le forze armate nell’età della Destra (Milano, Giuffré,
1962); Simonetta Soldani and Gabriele Turi, eds., La nascita dello
stato nazionale, vol. 1 of Fare gli italiani, Scuola e cultura nell’Italia
contemporanea, 2 vols. (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1993); Christopher
Duggan, Creare la nazione: Vita di Francesco Crispi (Roma Bari:
Laterza, 2000), 510–530.
37. Piero Bevilacqua, Breve storia dell’Italia meridionale dall’Ottocento
a oggi (Roma: Donzelli, 1993).
38. Doyle, Nations, 70.
39. Fleche, Revolution, ch. 1; Daniele Fiorentino, Gli Stati Uniti e il
Risorgimento d’Italia, 1848–1901 (Roma: Gangemi, 2013).
40. Michael Geyer and Charles Bright, “Global Violence and
Nationalizing Wars in Eurasia and America. The Geopolitics of
Wars in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” Comparative Studies in
Society and History 38 (1996): 619–657; see also: “Interchange:
Nationalism and Internationalism in the Era of the Civil War,”
Journal of American History 98 (2011): 455–489.
41. Tiziano Bonazzi, “Europa, Zeus e Minosse, ovvero il labirinto dei
rapporti euro-americani,” Ricerche di storia politica 7 (2004):
3–24; Bonazzi, “Constructing and Reconstructing Europe:
Torture of an American Prometheus or Punishment of a New
World Sisyphus?,” in The Place of Europe in American History, ed.
Maurizio Vaudagna (Torino: Otto editore, 2007), 11–17.
 CHAPTER 10

Nation-Building, Civil War, and Social

Revolution in the Confederate South
and the Italian Mezzogiorno, 1860–1865

Enrico Dal Lago

The nineteenth century was an age characterized by experiments in

nation-building throughout the Euro-American world, and beyond.
An established historiography has documented and interpreted the vari-
ety of these experiments, connecting it to the rise of modern types of
nations, primarily in Europe and the Americas. Since the publication
of the classic works by Eric Hobsbawm, Ernest Gellner, and Benedict
Anderson, more and more American historians—among them James
McPherson, Drew Faust, and Susan-Mary Grant, to cite but a few—have
transferred some of those ideas onto the mid-nineteenth-century United
States and have used them to add a new dimension to research on the
American Civil War.1 In these studies, scholars have seen the American
Civil War either through its features of “crisis in nationalism” or as a
process of consolidation of the American nation through the Union’s
defeat of the Confederacy and the making of emancipation. At the same

E. Dal Lago ( )
National University of Ireland, Galway, Galway, Ireland

© The Author(s) 2016 169

J. Nagler et al. (eds.), The Transnational Significance of the
American Civil War, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40268-0_10
170 E. DAL LAGO

time, though, a very important influence has come also from the recent
“transnational turn” in US history, and particularly from the work of
Thomas Bender, Carl Guarneri, and Ian Tyrrell, and also of scholars
such as Charles Bright and Michael Geyer, C.A.  Bayly, and Nicholas
and Peter Onuf, all of whom have clearly placed the American Civil
War in relation to contemporary processes of nation-building in mid-
nineteenth-century Europe and the Americas.2
Despite these very important developments, though, very few scholars
have attempted full-fledged, sustained comparisons between the American
Civil War and the nineteenth-century processes of formation of Europe’s
nation-states. Among them, both Carl Degler, and Stig Förster and Jörg
Nagler have made comparisons with German Unification, while Don Doyle
has treated the “southern question” in the United States and Italy.3 In this
connection, studies focusing on the American South and southern Italy, the
Italian Mezzogiorno, have demonstrated not only the comparability between
the two regions but also the potentials for a novel appreciation of the prob-
lem of formation of the nineteenth-century American and Italian nation-
states when seen through the lenses of the two southern peripheries.4 In
this chapter, I will focus primarily on establishing a comparison between
the southern regions of the United States and Italy specifically at the time
of the American Civil War and of the “Great Brigandage,” southern Italy’s
own civil war, in 1860–1865. I will do so by focusing on the nature of the
two conflicts as “inner civil wars,” one within the Confederate South, and
the other within the Italian Mezzogiorno.5 The comparative perspective will
serve to highlight the similarities and differences between two internecine
struggles that, for different reasons and on different scales, unfolded in the
southern regions of two different countries in the same period of the first
half of the 1860s.6
In establishing the grounds for this type of comparison, it is impor-
tant to acknowledge the convergence of two crucial elements in both the
Confederacy’s experience and the Mezzogiorno’s experience of inner civil war
during that five-year period. The first element is represented by the struggle
between regional elites and national governments and the two opposing
types of nationalism that they represented. This struggle was, ultimately, part
of a parallel process of national consolidation in the United States and Italy
within the wider context of nation-building efforts in the nineteenth-century
Euro-American world, specifically if we think that this was a time when
attempts at imposing forms of national governmental centralization upon
regional ruling classes were common in the processes of nation-building.
 NATION-BUILDING, CIVIL WAR, AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION... 171

Thus, while in America, southern supporters of Confederate and Unionist

nationalisms fought against each other, in the Mezzogiorno southern
supporters of Bourbon and Italian nationalisms faced each other in a
comparable way. This particular point ties in with several recent studies—
among which the ones by Don Doyle, Timothy Roberts, Paul Quigley, and
Andre Fleche—that have sought to look at issues related to the existence of
different versions of nation-building in the formation of the United States
and of different European and American nation-states in the Civil War era.7
Conversely, the second element of my comparison relates to the fact that,
in both the cases of the Confederate South and of the Italian Mezzogiorno,
the inner civil war had an enormous impact on the dimension of rural
labor and on social relations in the countryside. In the Confederacy, the
slaves were instrumental in taking advantage of the opportunities offered
by the American Civil War in order to shatter the slave system and gain
their own freedom, helped by the Union government. In southern Italy,
the peasants, initially helped by anti-Italian supporters of the former
Bourbon king, were instrumental in transforming the “Great Brigandage”
into a war against the landowners supported by the Italian government.
In both the Confederate and the southern Italian cases, the ultimate result
of the civil war was a social revolution in the southern countryside, with
a fatal irreparable blow to the slaveholding economy in the American
South and a temporary, but powerful blow to the landowning economy
of the Italian Mezzogiorno.8 This second aspect of the comparison also
ties in with much current scholarship that has moved increasingly toward
an emphasis on comparative and transnational dimensions in investigat-
ing American slavery and its demise within a Euro-American and a world
context of economic, social, and political transformation, as in important
studies by scholars such as Edward Rugemer, Brian Schoen, Sven Beckert,
Steven Hahn, Michael Bush, and Peter Kolchin.9
All the above scholars have broadened this perspective and have
extended the comparison of US slave emancipation to the end of other
forms of unfree labor in the Americas and Europe. The study that I intro-
duce in the present chapter intends to follow in the footsteps of these
scholars and to build on the crucial nuances of their works, even though it
differs substantially from them in that it focuses on a comparison between
the impact of inner civil wars on a slave society, the Confederacy, and on a
society characterized by nominally free labor, as southern Italy was during
the nineteenth century.
***
172 E. DAL LAGO

In both the US South and the Italian Mezzogiorno, the initial impulse
toward the creation of a new nation—the Confederacy in one case, and
the Italian Kingdom in the other case—came from the peripheral agrar-
ian elites’ opposition to the centralizing policies of the previous national
government. In the US South, slaveholders opposed the politics of the
Republican Party, which in the second half of the 1850s succeeded in
gathering the consensus of the majority of the northern antislavery forces,
in a crescendo of sectional conflicts that reached its peak with the election
of Lincoln, the first declared antislavery president, and the consequent
crisis of 1860–1861 and the Secession of the Confederate South from the
Union. In the Italian Mezzogiorno, landowners opposed the absolutist pol-
icies of the Bourbon dynasty, which after the failed 1848–1849 Revolution
had increased the measure of suppression of civil liberties and of adminis-
trative centralization, leading eventually to the southern Italian elites’ sup-
port for the 1860–1861 movement for Italian national unification and the
consequent end of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Yet, from the start of
the American Civil War, it was clear that, in the American South, the citi-
zens were divided between supporters of the Union and supporters of the
Confederacy. Comparably, in the Italian Mezzogiorno, from the start of the
period of the “Great Brigandage,” southern Italian people were divided
between supporters of the Kingdom of Italy and of the Savoy dynasty and
“legitimist” supporters of the Bourbons. As a result, from 1861, both the
Confederate South and the Italian Mezzogiorno were caught in inner civil
wars, and the divide between the competing groups of southerners in the
two regions, and their opposing views of nation-building, increased in the
course of the period 1861–1863.
In the United States, on 20 December 1860, the South Carolina
legislature gathered in a special convention and unanimously approved
the “ordinance of Secession,” with which South Carolina’s representa-
tives dissolved the state’s ties with the Union. South Carolina’s act was,
effectively, the catalyst that triggered the process of secession throughout
the US South, and yet the unfolding of that process showed clearly that
there were numerous fault lines between those southerners who wished
to remaining loyal to the Union, and those who, instead, wished to create
a new nation dedicated to the protection of slavery. In a relatively short
time, during the winter of 1860–1861, one after the other, the five Lower
South states of Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and
Texas followed South Carolina in seceding from the Union.10 Then, on 4
February 1861, little more than a month after South Carolina’s Secession,
 NATION-BUILDING, CIVIL WAR, AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION... 173

delegates of the seven seceding states met at Montgomery, Alabama,

where they proclaimed the birth of a new nation called Confederate States
of America, and two weeks later, on 18 February 1861, Jefferson Davis
was inaugurated President of the Confederacy. Yet, despite the best efforts
by Confederate southerners to rally the majority of the people, both by
consent and by force, even later, at the start of the American Civil War,
as Paul Escott has pointed out, “a few pockets of Unionism remained in
the Lower South.”11 At the same time, in the Upper South, in Virginia’s
capital Richmond, still according to Paul Escott, “pro-Union sentiment,
written in chalk, had appeared on walls a few days after Davis’s inaugura-
tion.”12 Similar manifestations of pro-Union sympathy characterized the
other states of the Upper South, and yet, only a few months later, after
the siege and battle of Fort Sumter, with the Confederacy’s first victory
over Union forces on 14 April 1861, the majority of those states joined
the Confederacy in Secession from the Union.13
A few months later, the Confederate South commenced its epic struggle
with the Union effectively caught within its own inner civil war between
pro-Union supporters, and pro-Confederate supporters, that is, mostly
the planter elite and the smaller slaveholders. The fault lines between the
two characterized many different areas, since, even where Confederates
were the majority, as in the original seven secessionist states, pro-Union
sympathies that dated to the pre-war era and had been suppressed dur-
ing the secession crisis had the possibility to resurface once the war com-
menced and the Union looked for support within the Confederacy. In
general, though, the regions where Unionist sympathies were stronger
were also the most difficult to control, since they were first and foremost
in the mountainous areas of North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, and
Alabama. Here, mostly fiercely independent non-slaveholding yeomen
lived, and they resented the Confederacy as a creation of the planters and
of the slave system that guaranteed the latter’s wealth.14 A major turning
point came with the Union’s resounding victory on the Confederacy at the
battle of Antietam on 17 September 1862. By then, pro-Union activities
and anti-Confederate sentiment had literally generated miniature civil wars
between Unionist guerrilla forces and the Confederate authorities in areas
of several states, particularly in western North Carolina, in East Tennessee,
in northern Alabama and Florida, and in Jones County, Mississippi.15 In
East Tennessee, for example, the area of Greenville was a major center of
Unionist activities, and there pro-Union guerrilla forces held their ground
for two years, also conquering the town of Knoxville, until most of the
174 E. DAL LAGO

region fell under the Union’s control in 1863.16 In all the areas men-
tioned above, though, the fault lines created a situation of inner civil war in
which, while the Confederacy as a whole fought the war with the Union,
“the Confederate States—according to Stephanie McCurry—waged war
against its domestic enemies and they did not spare the women.”17
In both the United States and Italy, 1860 was a crucial year in relation
to the impending civil wars. In particular, the Secession of South Carolina
in the United States in December 1860, which triggered a chain of events
that led to the creation of the Confederacy and civil war with the Union,
was mirrored by the culmination of Sicily’s separatist movement, which
led to the success of Giuseppe Garibaldi’s and his Thousand’s military
expedition and his effective control of the island by August 1860.18 At the
start of his expedition, Garibaldi could equally count on the support of the
majority of Sicily’s landowners and also on the peasants, who thought that
he would have introduced a much needed land reform. Yet, these hopes
vanished quickly when Garibaldi showed he had no intention to harm the
interests of the landed elites, and therefore opposition to his rule grew
and led to episodes of repression of peasant rebellious activities, as in the
famous one in Bronte on 2 August 1860.19 During the entire period lead-
ing to the annexation of the Mezzogiorno to the Piedmontese Kingdom of
Sardinia, peasant activity against the process of Italian national unification
consistently increased in intensity and spread in different areas, with a rep-
lication of events similar to the ones in Sicily. At the same time, the “legiti-
mist” circles, which wished to restore Bourbon King Francis II, joined
forces with the peasant revolt engaging in the first phase of the anti-Italian
inner civil war that characterized the “Great Brigandage.” In fact, start-
ing from the moment Francis II was under siege in Gaeta, the remaining
Bourbon soldiers and the rebel peasants effectively engaged together in a
large-scale guerrilla warfare with the purpose of undoing Italian national
unification.20
As a result, in 1861, comparably to the Confederate South’s inner civil
war, southern Italy was caught in the middle of an inner civil war between
the pro-Bourbon “legitimist” supporters and their ally peasant rebels on
one side, and the Italian army and government, supported by the land-
owners, on the other side—a civil war that, in both cases, was fought
almost exclusively on southern territory.21 For the next year-and-a-half,
until the end of 1862, Francis II and his advisers hatched out different
plans to restore the Bourbon King to his throne, involving also help from
military experts from abroad, especially Spain. The most celebrated of
 NATION-BUILDING, CIVIL WAR, AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION... 175

these military experts was Spanish officer José Borjés, who coordinated
his actions with brigand leader Carmine “Crocco” Donatelli, and fought,
for several months, between September and December 1861, against
the Italian army conquering village after village between the regions of
Campania and Basilicata.22 Yet, there were several other areas where peas-
ant guerrilla activity had joined forces with the Bourbon “legitimist”
efforts. This was especially the case of the region of Apulia, which was the
center of the activities of a famous leader of mounted bands called Pasquale
Domenico Romano and nicknamed significantly “Sergente Romano.”23 In
June 1861, Romano became a member of a Bourbon Committee, which
was dedicated to the aim of restoring “Francis II, King by the grace of
God, defender of religion and beloved son of our Holy Father Pius IX …
and defeat the infernal Lucifer of Victor Emmanuel [the Italian King] and
his followers.”24 In fact, much more than Crocco’s case, Romano’s case
shows how, in the first phase of the “Great Brigandage,” the inner civil war
within southern Italy involved southern Italians fighting against the Italian
army and government and the landowners who supported them, mostly
over Bourbon “legitimist” pretensions, but with an important compo-
nent in the alliance between the latter and the anti-Italian peasant guerrilla
activities that had started as early as 1860.25
There is little doubt that, in 1860–1861, at the time of the secession
crisis in America and of national unification in Italy, most American slave-
holders in the US South supported the creation of the Confederate States
of America, while most southern Italian landowners in the Mezzogiorno
supported the creation of the Kingdom of Italy. Yet, the parallel processes
of creation of the two new nations and the subsequent attempts to estab-
lish the legitimacy of the Confederate and Italian governments in the midst
of the American Civil War and of southern Italy’s “Great Brigandage” led
to increasingly larger movements of opposition to the two agrarian elites’
projects of nation-building during the period 1861–1863. The conse-
quences of these increasing oppositions showed particularly in the form of
anti-Confederate and anti-Italian guerrilla warfare, which pro-Union sup-
porters in one case and pro-Bourbon supporters in the other case engaged
in, and whose activities encompassed large areas of the Confederacy and of
the Italian Mezzogiorno. From 1862 to 1863, though, the guerrilla move-
ments against the Confederate and the Italian governments were joined
on an increasingly larger scale by anti-Confederate and anti-Italian activi-
ties originally initiated and carried on by the agrarian masses of the two
southern regions for different, but comparable, social and political reasons.
176 E. DAL LAGO

***
In both the American Civil War and the southern Italian “Great
Brigandage,” the period between autumn 1862 and the start of 1863
proved a veritable turning point. On the one hand, in the United States
that period saw Lincoln’s release of the Preliminary Emancipation
Proclamation in September 1862 and then of the final Emancipation
Proclamation, which freed slaves in the Confederate areas, on 1 January
1863. Conversely, in Italy, the same period saw the effective end of the
last realistic plans for the restoration of Francis II as a result of the death
or arrest of important pro-Bourbon supporters, including “Sergente
Romano,” between November 1862 and January 1863. As a result,
within the context of the two inner civil wars that characterized the
Confederate South and the Italian Mezzogiorno, the numerous and wide-
spread episodes of unrest caused by the agrarian masses—American slaves
and southern Italian peasants—assumed increasingly and rapidly more
and more importance over the struggle between competing projects of
nation-building. In both cases, the duration of agrarian unrest, until the
end of both civil wars, in 1865, and its geographical extension, which
encompassed large areas of both southern regions, make this phenome-
non particularly difficult to both conceptualize and analyze. What is clear,
though, is that the rebellious actions of American slaves and of southern
Italian peasants affected deeply the course of the Confederate South’s and
the Italian Mezzogiorno’s inner civil wars, creating the preconditions for a
social revolution in both regions.
In the Confederacy, by the autumn of 1862, the inner civil war within
the white South increased in motivation and intensity as the fault lines
between Confederates and Unionists showed in increasingly larger areas of
most southern states. In particular, in the wildest areas of North Carolina,
Florida, and Mississippi, ever increasing numbers of Unionists and desert-
ers found their refuge, and here the fight with anti-Confederate guerrillas
kept occupied the local Confederate authorities for many months.26 As far
as we know, for the most part, the slaves’ own anti-Confederate struggle
was unrelated to the white Unionists’ fight against the Confederacy. Yet,
the slaves’ struggle for freedom inserted itself within the Confederate
South’s inner civil war, and ultimately the slaves’ activities represented
the single most important factor that led to the Confederate collapse.
Through their anti-Confederate activities, the slaves literally transformed
the Confederacy’s inner civil war, unmasking the contradiction of a
nation that fought both for its own freedom and for the freedom to keep
 NATION-BUILDING, CIVIL WAR, AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION... 177

African Americans enslaved. From the very beginning of the war, slaves
had resisted this notion with a variety of anti-Confederate actions, among
which the most extreme were plots leading to open rebellion against the
slaveholders. Already starting from 1861, rumors of imminent slave insur-
rections were heard in different areas of several southern states, as in the
famous case of the slave conspiracy investigated by Winthrop Jordan in
Adams County, Mississippi, and similar rumors would continue through-
out the Civil War, adding another crucial dimension to the Confederate
South’s inner civil war.27
More generally, throughout the Confederacy, slaves “worked less,
questioned more, and increasingly took to running away, not only singly
or in pairs, as had been common before the war, but in large groups as
well,” as Peter Kolchin has noted.28 Especially in the areas bordering the
Union lines, such as Virginia and Tennessee, and in those areas where
the Union had made its first territorial gains, slaves ran away and fled to
Union camps. The massive scale of the phenomenon of slaves running
away and fleeing to Union camps, together with the pressure of radical
Republicans, in turn, had forced Congress to pass a First Confiscation
Act in August 1861, about the seizure of all rebel property, and then
a Second Confiscation Act, in July 1862, which declared all the slaves
of Confederate masters free. Two months later, Lincoln released the
Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, and, on 1 January 1863, he
signed the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared immediately,
“thenceforward and forever free” all the slaves in areas under Confederate
control. The Proclamation also provided the Union army with the legal
means to support the freedom acquired by the slaves and the legal basis
for the enlistment of African Americans.29
Yet, during the entire period of the Confederate South’s inner civil
war, the slaves’ resistance expressed itself in many more ways than sim-
ply running away and perhaps joining the Union Army. In The Political
Worlds of Slavery and Freedom (2008), Stephen Hahn has asked, in a pro-
vocative essay, whether we should acknowledge the massive number and
variety of slave rebellious acts, even though mostly unconnected, as if it
were a single large-scale slave rebellion that occurred during the American
Civil War, and thus similar and comparable to the Haitian Revolution;
if this were the case, Hahn reasons that we might have missed the larg-
est slave rebellion in history.30 However, in The Fall of the House of Dixie
(2013), Bruce Levine has portrayed a picture of the collapse of slavery in
the Confederate South in many ways antithetic to Hahn’s own; in fact, for
178 E. DAL LAGO

Levine, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was, effectively, the indis-

pensable trigger without which the slaves’ resistance would have never
transformed into a mass phenomenon and the American Civil War would
have never become a social revolution, while it was the Union armies that
“began to put Lincoln’s revolutionary policy into action,” as they probed
deeper and deeper into Confederate territory.31 Yet, even if the debates
and controversies on the collective interpretation of the slaves’ actions in
the American Civil War will, undoubtedly, continue, it is still important to
encourage researchers to investigate better and deeper the slaves’ multi-
form acts of rebellion within the contest of the Confederate South’s inner
civil war, particularly from 1863 onwards, and also in giving these rebel-
lious acts more significance than it has been often the case, as Stephanie
McCurry has done in her Confederate Reckoning (2010). In this sense,
McCurry’s book has broken important ground, providing at the same
time the first scholarly monograph that has placed the slaves’ rebellion at
the center of a study on the Confederacy, and also a basis for further, more
detailed studies at the regional level, which will be crucial in determining
the actual scope and significance of the slaves’ rebellious actions within the
context of the Confederate South’s inner civil war.32
While in the Confederate South the inner civil war went through a new
phase with the transformation of the war to preserve the Union into a war
for the liberation of the slaves, in the Italian Mezzogiorno the inner civil war
went through a new phase with the transformation of the struggle between
the Italian Kingdom and the “legitimist” forces supporting the restoration
of the Bourbons into a social war between peasant rebels and the Italian
army and government. The result of the end of the “legitimist” phase
of the “Great Brigandage,” thus, was the recrudescence of the southern
Italian civil war, as the peasants and brigands who had collaborated with
the pro-Bourbon forces now fought their own war on their own terms
against the Italian state. As it became progressively a social war, the “Great
Brigandage” increased in size and intensity, enveloping in a spiral of per-
manent state of guerrilla warfare the majority of the southern Italian prov-
inces, and forcing the Italian government to deploy an ever larger number
of soldiers to suppress the widespread peasant rebellion. Starting from the
summer of 1862, the activities of the brigands moved well beyond the two
original regions of Basilicata and Capitanata and extended to large areas
of Campania and Apulia. Here, according to Franco Molfese, “numerous
bands organized themselves in the provinces of Bari, Terra d’Otranto, and
Taranto, where until then there had been only sporadic brigand activities
 NATION-BUILDING, CIVIL WAR, AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION... 179

‘imported’ from neighbouring Basilicata,” creating the impression of

large-scale “offensive” launched by the brigands against the Italian state,
which deployed over 100,000 troops to suppress them.33
In turn, the increasingly larger scale of the very effective peasant guer-
rilla warfare led the Italian government not just to deploy larger numbers
of troops, but also to promulgate special laws, starting with the enforce-
ment of the state of siege in the Mezzogiorno, whose regions in the sum-
mer of 1862 were placed under martial law. On 1 June 1863, Left MP
Giuseppe Massari recommended even more repressive measures to defeat
the peasants’ guerrilla warfare against the Italian army and to end the
inner civil war in the Mezzogiorno.34 Following Massari’s speech, accord-
ing to John Davis, “on 6 August the government ended prematurely the
debate [on the “Great Brigandage”] approving the law proposed by [MP]
Giuseppe Pica, which entailed the establishment of special military tribu-
nals that were to deal with all the issues related to brigandage and were to
collaborate with the local powers in the task of punishing with the death
penalty whoever was caught rebelling against the authorities or helping
the rebels.”35 These measures, in turn, led to countless atrocities and sum-
mary executions, and ultimately caused a number of casualties that oscil-
lated between the official figure of 5,212 deaths found in governmental
documents and a figure “between 18,250 and 54,750 shot or killed oth-
erwise,” calculated by Roberto Martucci.36
In a comparable way to the scholarship on the interpretation of the
slaves’ actions in the Confederate South during the American Civil War, the
scholarship on the “Great Brigandage” has varied widely in its interpreta-
tions of the phenomenon. In L’unificazione italiana (Italy’s Unification,
2011), Salvatore Lupo has pointed out that, even though the element of
peasant revolt was clearly paramount, loyalty to the former Bourbon dynasty
was still strong among large sections of the southern Italian population in
1861–1865, giving, thus, the “Great Brigandage” an ongoing character of
Italian civil war.37 For his part, in Darkest Italy (1999), John Dickie has
looked at the civil war at the heart of the “Great Brigandage” as a way for
the Italian state to construct a perception of “otherness” with the character-
ization of the peasants as “brigands,” or as rebellious and treasonous out-
laws to suppress.38 Also Roberto Martucci, in L’invenzione dell’Italia unita
(The Invention of a United Italy, 1999) has characterized clearly southern
Italy’s “Great Brigandage” as a civil war, and, in particular, he has gone as
far as arguing about “a massacre still not exactly quantifiable today … [and]
an operation of ethnic cleansing.”39 Therefore, it is clear from the recent
180 E. DAL LAGO

studies of these and other scholars, that the inner civil war at the heart of
the “Great Brigandage” in the Italian Mezzogiorno, especially in the period
1862–1865, was essentially a mass phenomenon of armed peasant revolt
against both the Italian government and those landowners who supported
it. Yet, the particular modes and features of the inner civil conflict and its
impact on southern Italian society still need to be investigated by scholars
through specific and detailed studies at the regional level.40
In both the Confederate South and southern Italy, the period between
1862 and 1865 saw crucial changes in the ongoing inner civil war that
ultimately created the premises for mass rebellion and social revolution in
the majority of the rural areas. As a result of these changes, in both south-
ern regions, the agrarian masses—American slaves and southern Italian
peasants—came to the forefront of the inner civil wars. In the case of the
Confederate South, the transformation of the American Civil War into a
war for slave emancipation created the preconditions for a massive slave
rebellion, which was aided by the Union government’s policy and by the
actions of the Union army. In the case of the Italian Mezzogiorno, the effec-
tive end of realistic “legitimist” chances to restore the Bourbon dynasty led
to the transformation of the “Great Brigandage” into a social war of peas-
ants against the landowners, brutally repressed by the Italian government
and army. Thus, while in the American Civil War, runaway slaves joined
the Union Army in increasing numbers, in the southern Italian “Great
Brigandage” peasants were left fighting against Italian military repression
without the help of the pro-Bourbon forces—a crucial difference that con-
ditioned heavily the different courses and outcomes of the two civil wars.
In sum, between 1861 and 1865, the Confederate South and the Italian
Mezzogiorno underwent the ordeals of horrific inner civil wars. In the first two
years of the American Civil War and of southern Italy’s “Great Brigandage,”
between 1861 and 1863, the inner civil wars in the two southern regions
focused mostly on competing ideas and intents for nation-building. In the
Confederate South, supporters of the Confederacy fought to suppress the
minority of supporters of the Union, who waged guerrilla warfare especially
in the mountainous areas of several southern states. Conversely, in the Italian
Mezzogiorno, the Italian government fought to suppress the minority of
“legitimist” supporters of the Bourbon dynasty, who waged guerrilla warfare
in different areas of southern Italy. Then, in the later part of the American
Civil War and of southern Italy’s “Great Brigandage,” between 1862 and
1865, the inner civil wars in the two regions saw the transformation of
the two conflicts into social revolutions, as a result of the increasing and
 NATION-BUILDING, CIVIL WAR, AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION... 181

widespread rebellious actions of American slaves against Confederate author-

ities and of southern Italian peasants against Italian authorities. However,
while in the Confederate South the slaves’ rebellion received the help of the
Union government’s emancipationist policy, in the Italian Mezzogiorno the
rebellion of the southern Italian peasants received little or no support from
the pro-Bourbon forces and was, instead, brutally repressed by the Italian
government. Yet, in both cases, the end of the inner civil wars, in 1865, and
the aftermath of the rebellion did not lead to all the changes that American
slaves and southern Italian peasants had hoped for—remaining, therefore,
“unfinished revolutions,” to adopt Eric Foner’s words.41 At the same time,
the elites of the two southern regions faced, effectively, a situation of lack
of power and of enduring opposition to the national government, which
continued, in both cases, until 1876, with the end of Reconstruction in the
United States and the rise of the Left in liberal Italy.

NOTES

1. See Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780:

Programme, Myth, and Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1990), Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1983); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities:
Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London:
Verso, 1983); James McPherson, Is Blood Thicker than Water? Crises
of Nationalism in the Modern World (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1999); Drew Faust, The Creation of Confederate Nationalism:
Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 1988); and Susan-Mary Grant, North over
South: Northern Nationalism and America Identity in the Antebellum
Era (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2000).
2. See Thomas Bender, A Nation among Nations: America’s Place in
World History (New York: Hill & Wang, 2006); Carl Guarneri,
America in the World: United States History in Global Context (New
York: McGraw-Hill, 2007); and Ian Tyrrell, Transnational Nation:
United States History in Global Perspective since 1789 (New York:
Palgrave, 2007). See also Charles Bright and Michael Geyer, “Global
Violence and Nationalizing Wars in Eurasia and America: The
Geopolitics of War in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” Comparative
Studies in Society and History 38 (1996): 619–657; C.A. Bayly, The
182 E. DAL LAGO

Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Connections and Comparisons

(Oxford: Blackwell, 2004); and Nicholas and Peter Onuf, Nations,
Markets, and Wars: Modern History and the American Civil War
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006).
3. See Carl Degler, One among Many: The Civil War in Comparative
Perspective (Gettysburg, PA: Gettysburg College, 1990); Stig Förster
and Jörg Nagler, eds., On the Road to Total War: The American
Civil War and the German Wars of Unification, 1860–1870 (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Don H.  Doyle,
Nations Divided: America, Italy, and the Southern Question (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 2003).
4. See Enrico Dal Lago, Agrarian Elites: American Slaveholders and
Southern Italian Landowners, 1815–1861 (Baton Rouge, LA:
Louisiana State University Press, 2005); and Susanna Delfino, “The
Idea of Southern Economic Backwardness: A Comparative View of
the United States and Italy” in Susanna Delfino and Michelle Gillespie,
eds., Global Perspectives on Industrial Transformation in the American
South (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005), 105–130.
5. For a definition of “inner civil war,” see David Williams, Bitterly
Divided: The South’s Inner Civil War (New York: Norton, 2008).
6. See Enrico Dal Lago, “States of Rebellion: Civil War, Rural Unrest,
and the Agrarian Question in the American South and the Italian
Mezzogiorno, 1861–1865”, Comparative Studies in Society and
History 47 (2005): 403–432.
7. See Don H.  Doyle, ed., Secession as an International Phenomenon:
From America’s Civil War to Contemporary Separatist Movements
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010); Timothy Roberts,
Distant Revolutions: 1848 and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism
(Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2009); Paul Quigley,
Shifting Grounds: Nationalism and the American South, 1848–1865
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Andre Fleche, The
Revolution of 1861: The American Civil War in the Age of Nationalist
Conflict (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).
8. The idea of social revolution in the Confederate South and in south-
ern Italy’s “Great Brigandage” is at the center of two of the most
important recent studies on the topics: Bruce Levine, The Fall of the
House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution that
Transformed the South (New York: Random House, 2013); and
Salvatore Lupo, L’unificazione italiana. Mezzogiorno, rivoluzione,
guerra civile (Rome: Donzelli, 2011).
 NATION-BUILDING, CIVIL WAR, AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION... 183

9. See Edward Rugemer, The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean

Origins of the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 2008); Brian Schoen, The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton,
Federal Politics, and the Global Origins of the Civil War (Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); Sven Beckert,
“Emancipation and Empire: Reconstructing the World Wide Web
of Cotton Production in the Age of the American Civil War,”
American Historical Review 109 (2004): 1405–1438; Steven
Hahn, “Class and State in Postemancipation Societies: Southern
Planters in Comparative Perspective,” American Historical Review
95 (1990): 75–98; Michael L.  Bush, Servitude in Modern Times
(Cambridge: Polity, 2000); and Peter Kolchin, “Some Controversial
Questions Concerning Nineteenth-Century Abolition from
Slavery and Serfdom” in Michael L. Bush, ed., Slavery and Serfdom:
Studies in Legal Bondage (London: Longman, 1996), 42–68.
10. On the Secession of the Lower South, see especially William
Freehling, The Road to Disunion, Vol. 2: Secessionists Triumphant
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 427–499; and
Stephanie McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in
the Civil War South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2010), 38–63.
11. Paul Escott, The Confederacy: The Slaveholders’ Failed Venture
(Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2010), 14.
12. Escott, The Confederacy, 31.
13. Freehling, Secessionists Triumphant, 532; see also 499–530. See
also Aaron Sheehan-Dean, Why Confederates Fought: Family and
Nation in Civil War Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2007).
14. See especially William W. Freehling, The South vs. the South: How
Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); and John C. Inscoe
and Robert Kenzer, eds., Enemies of the Country: New Perspectives
on Unionists in the Civil War South (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2004).
15. See Victoria Bynum, The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern
Dissent and its Legacies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2010).
16. See W. Todd Grace, Mountain Rebels: East Tennessee and the Civil
War, 1860–1870 (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press,
1999).
184 E. DAL LAGO

17. McCurry, Confederate Reckoning, 117. See also Paul Escott, After
Secession: Jefferson Davis and the Failure of Confederate Nationalism
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978).
18. See Dal Lago, Agrarian Elites, 336–339. See also Giorgio
Candeloro, Storia dell’Italia moderna, Vol. 5: Dalla rivoluzione
nazionale all’Unità (1849–1860) (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1964).
19. See Lucy Riall, Under the Volcano: Revolution in a Sicilian Town
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 94–110. See also
Lucy Riall, Sicily and the Unification of Italy, 1859–1866 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1998).
20. See Alfonso Scirocco, Il Mezzogiorno nella crisi dell’unificazione
(1860–1861) (Naples: Società Editrice Napoletana, 1981).
21. See especially Lupo, L’unificazione italiana; and Alfonso Scirocco,
Il Mezzogiorno nell’Italia unita (1861–1865) (Naples: Società
Editrice Napoletana, 1979).
22. See Gigi Di Fiore, Controstoria dell’Unità d’Italia. Fatti e misfatti
del Risorgimento (Milan: Rizzoli, 2007), 199–201. See also Aldo
Albonico, La mobilitazione leggitimista contro il Regno d’Italia. La
Spagna e il brigantaggio meridionale postunitario (Naples: Giuffrè,
1979).
23. See Lupo, L’unificazione italiana, 99–106.
24. The quote is in Lupo, L’unificazione italiana, 100.
25. See Marco Meriggi, “Dopo l’Unità. Forme e ambivalenza del leg-
ittimismo borbonico,” Passato e Presente 29 (2011): 39–56.
26. See especially Gary Gallagher, “Disaffection, Persistence, and Nation:
Some Directions in Recent Scholarship on the Confederacy,” Civil
War History 55 (2009): 329–353; and Daniel E. Sutherland, ed.,
Guerrilla, Unionists, and Violence on the Confederate Home Front
(Little Rock: University of Arkansas Press, 1999).
27. See Winthrop Jordan, Tumult and Silence at Second Creek: An
Inquiry into a Civil War Slave Conspiracy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 1995).
28. Peter Kolchin, “Slavery and Freedom in the Civil War South” in
James McPherson and William J. Cooper, eds., Writing the Civil
War: The Quest to Understand (Columbia: University of South
Carolina Press, 1998), 245.
29. See especially Ira Berlin et  al., Slaves No More: Three Essays on
Emancipation and the Civil War (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1992), 1–76; and Louis Gerteis, “Slaves,
 NATION-BUILDING, CIVIL WAR, AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION... 185

Servants, and Soldiers: Uneven Paths to Freedom in the Border

States, 1861–1865” in William A.  Blair and Karen Fischer
Younger, eds., Lincoln’s proclamation; Emancipation Reconsidered
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009),
170–194.
30. See Steven Hahn, The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 55–114.
31. Levine, The Fall of the House of Dixie, 153.
32. See McCurry, Confederate Reckoning. See also an important syn-
thesis of these issues in Steven Hahn, “But What Did the Slaves
Think of Lincoln?” in Blair and Younger, eds., Lincoln’s
Proclamation, 102–119.
33. Franco Molfese, Storia del brigantaggio dopo l’Unità (Milan:
Feltrinelli, 1964), 171.
34. See Tommaso Pedio, ed., Inchiesta Massari sul brigantaggio
(Manduria: Lacaita, 1983); and Tommaso Pedio, Brigantaggio
meridionale (1806–1863) (Cavallino di Lecce: Capone, 1987),
128–130.
35. John A.  Davis, “Le guerre del brigantaggio” in Mario Isnenghi
and Eva Cecchinato, eds., Fare l’Italia. Unità e disunità nel
Risorgimento (Turin: UTET, 2008), 746.
36. Roberto Martucci, L’invenzione dell’Italia unita (1855–1864)
(Florence: Sansoni, 1999), 314. See also Daniela Adorni, “Il brig-
antaggio” in Luciano Violante, ed., Storia d’Italia, Annali 12: La
criminalità (Turin: Einaudi, 1996), 283–319.
37. See Lupo, L’unificazione italiana, 99–150; and Salvatore Lupo,
“Il Grande Brigantaggio. Interpretazione e memoria di una guerra
civile” in Walter Barberis, ed., Storia d’Italia, Annali 18: Guerra e
Pace (Turin: Einaudi, 2002), 465–504.
38. See John Dickie, Darkest Italy: The Nation and the Stereotypes of the
Mezzogiorno, 1860–1900 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999);
and John Dickie, “A Word at War: The Italian Army and
Brigandage, 1860–1870,” History Workshop Journal 33 (1992):
1–24.
39. Martucci, L’invenzione dell’Italia unita, 295.
40. On some of these issues, see Dal Lago, “States of Rebellion,”
403–432.
41. See Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution
(New York: Harper & Row, 1988).
 PART V

Race and Nationalism in Latin

America and the Caribbean During
the American Civil War Era
 CHAPTER 11

Race and Revolution: The Confederacy,

Mexico, and the Problem of Southern
Nationalism

Andre M. Fleche

In July 1859, Henry Watkins Allen, a prominent sugar planter from

Louisiana, boarded a steamer in New York bound for Liverpool, England.
He found himself in the company of several notable traveling companions,
including future Confederate Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin and the
Irish nationalist Richard O’Gorman. For Allen, though, the most interest-
ing personage aboard was the recently ousted president of Mexico, Ignacio
Comonfort. After Allen made Comonfort’s acquaintance, the two talked
about the future of the Mexican nation. Allen found his new friend “down
upon his native country,” convinced that the United States would “be
doing God’s service to go at once and take possession of the whole.” Allen
enthusiastically agreed. “Unless something is done, and that quickly,” he
exclaimed, the Mexican people, “like the Kilkenny cats,” will “eat up one
another, and leave the Anglo-Saxon land-robber nothing but the tail end
of a once beautiful and rich country.”1

A.M. Fleche ( )
Castleton University, Castleton, VT, United States

© The Author(s) 2016 189

J. Nagler et al. (eds.), The Transnational Significance of the
American Civil War, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40268-0_11
190 A.M. FLECHE

Anglo-Saxon land-robbers would not get their chance to devour Mexico.

Within two years of Allen’s trip to Europe, the United States would join
Mexico in facing dissolution. European imperialists, not American expan-
sionists, would further their territorial ambitions by taking advantage of
the chaos in North America. In 1861, while Henry Watkins Allen and
other white Southerners fought to establish an independent slaveholding
republic, French soldiers invaded Mexico as part of Emperor Napoleon
III’s “grand design” to “regenerate” the New World through the rees-
tablishment of European colonial rule. Still, Allen’s diagnosis of Mexico’s
problems found echoes in the thought of his fellow Confederates. Indeed,
Confederate impressions of Mexico worked in part to shape an incipi-
ent ideology of Southern nationalism. In Mexico, Confederate spokesmen
detected a failed multiracial republic, a nation, they believed, in which
leadership by mixed-raced peoples had resulted in anarchy. For white
Southerners, the Confederacy represented a viable alternative—a nation
that combined democracy for white men with slavery and subordination
for African Americans.2
In contemplating the lessons that Mexico’s plight offered for the
prospects of Southern independence, the supporters of the Confederacy
embarked upon a conversation regarding the meaning and nature of
nationalism in the nineteenth-century world. The Confederacy’s bid for
nationhood came at a moment of transition in global politics. For the
almost one hundred years since the American Revolution, nation-builders
had equated the achievement of nationalism with the protection of liberal
values. By the 1850s and 1860s, however, the European monarchies that
had weathered the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century storms
of republican revolution had returned to the project of imperialism, espe-
cially in India, Africa, and Asia. By the early 1870s, the conservative leader
Otto von Bismarck had achieved the unification of Germany, not in order
to establish a liberal constitution, but in order to construct a powerful and
prestigious nation. In the midst of these developments, white Southerners
fought to found a republic based on racial slavery.3
Confederate leaders struggled to square their conservative revolution
with what might be termed the “problem” of Southern nationalism. As
defenders of the right of self-determination, Confederate nation-builders
had much in common with the revolutionaries of Europe and the Americas.
The social system Confederate armies defended, however, appeared to
be shockingly outdated to liberals of the mid-nineteenth-century world.
Nonetheless, Confederate thinkers claimed that their peculiar institution
 RACE AND REVOLUTION: THE CONFEDERACY, MEXICO, AND THE PROBLEM... 191

alone provided the order and hierarchy needed to sustain long-lasting

nations. The failures of the European revolutions of 1848 and the strug-
gles of Mexico and America’s other emerging republics offered white
Southerners proof that their social system could best guarantee stabil-
ity for nineteenth-century nation-builders. In contemplating a world in
which many people were not white, Confederates even came to question
the fitness of much of the world for republican government, causing them
to rethink the principles of American foreign policy originally outlined
in the Monroe Doctrine. The resulting theory of Confederate national-
ism came close to prefiguring the “white man’s burden” by arguing that
imperial tutelage might be a necessary step on the road to nationhood. In
this way, white Southerners who had once been committed republicans
became committed nationalists, and as nationalists, brought themselves to
defend the goals of imperialists.
Confederate doubts about Mexican fitness for self-government drew
on a body of negative writings about Mexico by European and American
authors. The French, especially, held a pessimistic view about Mexico’s
prospects as an independent nation. The first French ministers to arrive
in the newly independent country in the 1830s sent back negative reports
about the character of the Mexican people. The role of race figured promi-
nently in French assessments. Many French observers commented on the
large population of Native Americans and mestizos, and others reflected
unfavorably on stereotypes associated with the Spanish “race” in gen-
eral. Most of these visitors characterized Mexicans as simple, dissolute,
and ultimately incapable of governance. The representatives of France
almost universally reached a single conclusion: Mexico was best suited for
a monarchical or imperial government led by white Europeans. “There
are seven million inhabitants in Mexico, but there is no nation,” a French
commercial agent asserted in 1828, “and without nationality it is difficult
to comprehend the existence of a popular Government.”4
In the years before the Civil War, white Southern observers echoed
these assessments. Joel Poinsett of South Carolina was among the first
American diplomats to travel to independent Mexico, and in 1824 he
published an account of his experiences. Poinsett favored a republican
government for Mexico, but he was disappointed to find that the nation
had turned to an emperor, Augustín de Iturbide, as its first independent
ruler. Poinsett believed that the white Mexican creoles possessed “good
natural talents, and great facility of acquiring knowledge,” but found it
“difficult to describe, accurately, a nation composed of…so many different
192 A.M. FLECHE

casts.” He frequently, though not always, characterized the “Indians,”

“mestizos,” and “mulattoes” he had encountered as “indolent and poor.”
Poinsett concluded that “measures must be taken to educate them, and
land distributed among them, before they can be considered as forming
part of the people of a free government.” Waddy Thompson, US envoy in
Mexico between 1842 and 1844 proved less sanguine. In his Recollections
of Mexico, published in 1846, Thompson decried the effects of the aboli-
tion of slavery in the country. He denounced free blacks in Mexico as the
“same lazy, filthy, and vicious creatures that they inevitably become where
they are not held in bondage,” concluding that “bondage or barbarism
seems to be their destiny.” Thompson asserted that American slaves were
better off than Mexican laborers held to debt service on the haciendas. He
came away from Mexico wishing the Mexicans “ultimate success in estab-
lishing Republican institutions on a permanent basis,” but sounding less
than convinced that such goals would be achieved. Brantz Mayer, secretary
of the US legation in Mexico between 1841 and 1843, offered a much
blunter analysis. In his monumental two-volume history, Mexico, Aztec,
Spanish, and Republican (1851), he attributed Mexico’s failure to estab-
lish a national identity, especially when compared to the United States, to
the presence in the former of widespread racial “amalgamation.”5
Though Poinsett, Thompson, and Mayer all remained at least nomi-
nally committed to advancing the cause of republican government any-
where in the world, as the Civil War approached, white Southerners
grew increasingly pessimistic about the political future of the Americas.
Southern nationalists continued to revere the legacy of the American
Revolution as they interpreted it, a revolution which they believed had
secured self-government for white men by establishing the right of an
aggrieved minority to cast off central authority. In the years since 1776,
however, many Southerners worried that subsequent revolutions had only
worked to free non-white peoples from bondage to what they considered
disastrous results, as had occurred in Haiti, in much of Spanish America
in the years after independence, and in the French Caribbean in 1848. As
the Confederate states seceded from the United States in the winter of
1860–1861, many of the new nation’s supporters proclaimed that only
the preservation of slavery could ensure national prosperity and stability. A
few even suggested that, if republican governments could not, monarchical
or imperial government might be necessary to maintain racial hierarchies.6
During the early years of the Civil War, the prominent Southern intel-
lectual George Fitzhugh called for such a solution to be employed in
 RACE AND REVOLUTION: THE CONFEDERACY, MEXICO, AND THE PROBLEM... 193

Haiti. The nation of Haiti had been the focus for white Southern fears
ever since a slave revolt and ensuing war had finally secured the coun-
try’s independence in 1804. In the years afterward, white Southerners
watched with self-satisfaction as the island nation endured a succession of
governments and struggled to afford indemnity payments demanded by
the French. In 1859, on the eve of the Civil War, a military coup led by
Guillaume Fabre-Nicholas Geffrard deposed the emperor Faustin I, which
Fitzhugh believed had proven Haitian unfitness for self-government.
“The civilized world,” Fitzhugh wrote, “will not much longer permit the
naturally paradisiacal isle of Hayti to remain a useless waste, infested by a
horde of idle savages and pagans, and ruled over by despots more cruel
and blood-thirsty than the King of Dahomey himself.” The island nation,
he believed, “must and will be conquered, law and order re-established,
and industry restored to its civilized course.” Since the Confederacy was
preoccupied by the Civil War, Fitzhugh called upon the French to take
the lead. Fitzhugh professed to welcome a French reconquest of Haiti
if it were followed by what he believed was a proper subordination of
people of African descent. “Whether as slaves, or peons, or apprentices,
or peasants,” he wrote, “they would be compelled to work, but their lives
would be secure, and their physical comfort and well-being very greatly
enhanced.” Only in that event, Fitzhugh believed, would a Haitian gov-
ernment avoid anarchy and achieve stability.7
The French did not invade Haiti, but Fitzhugh came close to predict-
ing a turn of events that would befall the Confederacy’s closest neigh-
bor. As Confederates fought to establish a Southern nation, the people of
Mexico also found themselves in the midst of a violent nationalist strug-
gle. In 1855, a Liberal government came to power after a successful revolt
planned at the town of Ayutla de los Libres overthrew the authoritar-
ian government of Antonio López de Santa Anna. The following years
were exciting ones for the supporters of reform. Benito Juárez drafted a
law that subordinated the Catholic church to civil law, Miguel Lerdo de
Tejada passed a statute outlawing church ownership of land, and Ignacio
Comonfort became president under a newly drafted constitution. In 1857,
however, alarmed conservatives organized a coup, to which Comonfort
acquiesced, though he was eventually forced to resign. Comonfort’s ouster
initiated the War of the Reform, led by Benito Juárez, who, as president
of the supreme court under Comonfort, claimed rightful succession to the
presidency. The Liberals emerged victorious, and in 1861 Benito Juárez
was officially elected president.8
194 A.M. FLECHE

Confederate foreign policy makers initially made moves to open rela-

tions with the Juárez government. In May 1861, Confederate Secretary
of State Robert Toombs dispatched John T. Pickett to Mexico on a mis-
sion to enter into negotiations with the fledgling administration. Toombs
instructed Pickett to make common cause with Juárez by appealing
to the “principles of constitutional government” for which, Toombs
implied, both Juárez and the Confederacy fought. Pickett’s instructions
also included a guarantee that the Confederacy would support any nation
struggling to defend those values “against the tyranny of both the Old and
the New World.”9
Despite the friendly rhetoric, subsequent events made clear that the
Confederate government’s feelings of friendship toward, and ideological
approval of, Juárez’s government were far from sincere. A few short months
later, Confederate diplomats reached out to Santiago Vidaurri, a sectional
caudillo who, at the time, governed the northern states of Coahuila and
Nuevo Leon with almost complete autonomy. The Confederate govern-
ment dispatched José Agustín Quintero, a native Cuban and adopted
Southerner who had fought for both Cuban and Confederate indepen-
dence, to form an alliance with Vidaurri, who would eventually come to
oppose Juárez’s efforts at centralization. Confederates evidently found
Vidaurri’s cause analogous to their own. The state department assured
Quintero that “the Government of the Confederate States feels a deep
sympathy with all people struggling to secure for themselves the blessings
of self-government,” and, in subsequent dispatches, praised Vidaurri for
defense “of the sovereignty of his State.”10
Caudillos like Vidaurri continued to evade the authority of the cen-
tral government because Juárez’s victory in the War of the Reform had
left the Mexican nation weakened, bankrupt, and divided. Juárez’ gov-
ernment especially struggled to pay off loans to foreign bankers, and in
July 1861, payments on the debt were suspended. In late autumn of that
year, France, Spain, and Great Britain mounted a military expedition to
collect the money that was due. Though Britain and Spain abandoned
the effort shortly after it began, French Emperor Napoleon III hoped
to use the expedition as a pretext to establish a French empire in the
Americas. Napoleon III, once known by his given name, Louis-Napoléon
Bonaparte, had come to power in the aftermath of the revolutions of
1848. In December 1852, he declared himself head of the Second French
Empire, an empire that Louis hoped would recapture the glories France
had known under his illustrious uncle. The Second Empire certainly
 RACE AND REVOLUTION: THE CONFEDERACY, MEXICO, AND THE PROBLEM... 195

embraced overseas adventurism. Under Napoleon III, France heightened

its administrative control over Algeria, established rule over Cambodia
and Cochinchina, and encouraged the construction of the Suez Canal. In
Mexico, Napoleon hoped that strong leadership by “civilized” Europeans
would “regenerate” the Latin “race” in the Americas, which many French
observers believed had descended into barbarism. A redeemed and rein-
vigorated Mexico, Napoleon believed, would develop mines, facilitate
trade with the Pacific, counter Anglo-American hegemony, and attract the
Spanish American republics to monarchy.11
Citizens in the United States and the Confederacy closely followed
the situation in Mexico. The Lincoln administration and many average
Northerners viewed the French incursion as a violation of the Monroe
Doctrine. The Civil War, however, prevented the Union from responding
with force. As for the Confederacy, cooperation with the French raised the
prospect that Napoleon III might intervene in the Civil War and recog-
nize Southern independence. The incipient Confederate nation certainly
stood to gain by welcoming a friendly French government on its southern
border, but the attraction was also ideological. Napoleon III proposed to
establish an imperial government in which white Europeans would rule
over a multiracial population. Benito Juárez, by contrast, offered the pros-
pect that a nation led by a Native American and guaranteeing liberal values
and the abolition of slavery would share a border with the Confederacy.
Not surprisingly, many Confederate thinkers regarded the French venture
as a step toward the realization of the principles embodied in their white,
slaveholding republic. Although the French aimed to establish a monarchy
in Mexico, Southern leaders welcomed the stability Napoleon promised
to bring to their southern neighbor, whose chronic “anarchy” Southern
whites blamed on Mexico’s multiracial character. Mexicans, they argued,
could only achieve a viable and prosperous nationality under the tutelage
of a white ruling class.12
The French initially struggled to impose the Confederacy’s preferred
model of governance on the Mexican republic. The joint forces of Britain,
Spain, and France had initially seized the port of Vera Cruz with ease in
December 1861. When the British and the Spanish learned of Napoleon’s
intention to continue with an invasion of the country, however, they with-
drew their troops, leaving French forces to march on toward the capital,
Mexico City, alone. On May 5, 1862, just a month after the Confederate
reversal at the bloody battle of Shiloh, in Tennessee, the Mexican Army
halted the French advance at Puebla. Despite the uncertain progress of the
196 A.M. FLECHE

French, the Confederate press hailed Napoleon’s endeavors in Mexico.

Weeks after the Battle of Puebla, the Index, the Confederacy’s mouth-
piece in London, insisted that the new Southern nation continued to sup-
port French plans in Mexico not only out of self-interest and desire for
recognition, but also out of commitment to what the paper proclaimed
the “historical truth” that “two races cannot coexist in the same country
without one being subservient to the other.” The editorial insisted that
all Mexico’s problems could be solved by acting on the brief phrase—
“Mexico needs a white man’s government.”13
Though white Southerners remained committed to a republican form
of government for the Confederacy, some thinkers proved willing to see a
monarchy established in Mexico. Indeed, some thinkers mused, perhaps
an imperial monarchy was the only form of government that could bring
stability to a multiracial nation like Mexico. “Too much democracy is not
good, even for the white man,” the Index reasoned. The paper found
democratic institutions even less suitable for a population “composed of
Indians, negroes, and the hybrid offspring of the crossing and re-crossing
of half-a-dozen different races.”14
Confederate racial theorists believed that their analysis of Mexico
offered lessons for the nation-builders of the nineteenth century. A
racially diverse population, the Confederacy’s advocates argued, repre-
sented the biggest obstacle to the achievement of national stability. Some
white Southern thinkers believed that perhaps only a country made up of
racially homogenous citizens would ever be able to enjoy an independent
national existence. An editor for the Index believed that the “greatest diffi-
culty” facing those who wished to accomplish the task of uplifting Mexico
was “the absence of anything that can properly be termed the nucleus
of a nation.” “Of the eight millions that are loosely termed Mexicans,”
the author asserted, “scarcely one and a half million are white, that is of
pure European descent. The rest are Indians, Negroes, and the infinite
mongrel breeds produced by the mixture of the races.” An article in the
Richmond Examiner blamed Mexico’s problems on “the present Liberal
Government,” which, the author believed, was “made up mainly of men
who are not of pure Castilian blood, but almost pure Indians.” The Liberal
policy of reform, the author argued, was based completely on “jealousy of
the white race.” Indeed, asserted one editorial, “in Mexico the inferior
races have asserted their equality and the result has been anarchy.”15
Confederate editors applauded Napoleon III for moving to replace
this “anarchy” in Mexico with a stable government. The editors of the
 RACE AND REVOLUTION: THE CONFEDERACY, MEXICO, AND THE PROBLEM... 197

Richmond Enquirer argued that the triumph of French arms in Mexico

would mark “the triumph of civilization and regular responsible govern-
ment; all of which Mexico sorely needed.” The Richmond Dispatch, for
its part, looked forward to “the change of affairs in Mexico—with its
prospect of order and security in that country, and its control, at least
during pupilage, by a power altogether friendly to us.” Confederate lead-
ers did not mind that a monarchical power took up the task of tutor-
ing the Mexican nation. In fact, establishment of a monarchy might, in
the eyes of some white Southerners, mark the essential first step toward
achieving viable, stable nationhood in Mexico. “Mexico has, through
a long series of convulsions and revolutions,” asserted an article in the
Index, “reached a point of imbecility where to reject the monarchy would
be to court dissolution.”16
Despite the reverse at Puebla, Napoleon did not abandon his attempt
to bring monarchy to Mexico. In late 1862, the French forces regrouped
along the coast, and in March 1863, an army under General Élie Frédéric
Forey returned to the city and laid siege. In May, Mexican forces in Puebla
capitulated. French troops entered Mexico City the following month.
In London, the Confederacy’s supporters hailed “the fall of Puebla” by
declaring that the “first and greatest need of Mexico is ‘a white man’s
government.’” In an interview at the Tuileries Palace, John Slidell chatted
with Napoleon III about American reactions to the capture of Puebla.
The emperor professed to have heard that the news occasioned “disap-
pointment and hostility” in the North, while the streets of Richmond
were “illuminated on the occasion.” Although Slidell suspected that those
reports were exaggerated, he did not endeavor to correct the French
leader, assuring him that “there could be no doubt of the bitterness of
the Northern people at the success of his arms in Mexico, while all our
sympathies were with France.” Slidell may not have been far off the mark,
given reports from a Staunton, Virginia, paper that “widespread popu-
lar support” for the new government in Mexico could be noted among
Virginians during the summer of 1863.17
As French troops suppressed all Mexican resistance, Napoleon invited
Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian of Austria to become Emperor of Mexico.
He arrived in May 1864, planning to “regenerate” the Mexican nation
by establishing an empire in the New World. Confederate policy makers
asserted that Maximilian’s empire would, like the Confederate republic,
impart a stable nationality on a multiracial population. In order to dis-
pel any thoughts that the Confederacy’s republican-leaning citizens might
198 A.M. FLECHE

object to the presence of an emperor in the New World, an author for the
Richmond Dispatch declared that “the South is content, nay, pleased with
the change of affairs in Mexico—with the prospect of order and security
in that country.” Even before Maximilian had accepted the throne, Judah
P. Benjamin dispatched General William Preston as envoy plenipotentiary
to Mexico. Benjamin’s excitement at the new order south of the border
was palpable. In his instructions to Preston, he asserted that “the seces-
sion of [the Confederate] States” and “the regeneration of Mexico from
a state of almost ceaseless anarchy into a strong and settled government”
will change the geopolitical situation in the Americas. He looked forward
to the establishment of a “balance of power” in which any two strong
states might align against the hegemony of the third. James Mason spoke
for many white Southerners the preceding September when he pointed
out to Benjamin that, in the event of peace, the Confederacy “must have
for years a licentious and irresponsible mob government as our neighbor
in the North.” “It would seem to me of no little moment,” he wrote, “to
have France, through its interests in Mexico, as our ally against it.”18
Confederate officials believed that they would gain more than an ally in
a regenerated Mexico; the Southern nation would also acquire a lucrative
trading partner. White Southerners, like Napoleon III, assumed that social
stability would bring commercial development. If Maximilian adopted the
racial hierarchies espoused by the Confederacy’s white republic, many
white Southerners believed, then Mexico might join the Confederacy in
becoming a prosperous nation. “With a strong and steady government,
and security to person and property, Mexico will become a great produc-
ing country,” asserted one article in the Richmond Dispatch. Under the
tutelage of a white ruling class, the author argued, “the industry of the
nation will improve, and the tide of commerce and of power in the Gulf
be immensely swelled in volume.” The Richmond Examiner imagined that
the French Empire and the Confederacy, joined by the principles of white
supremacy, could overcome the “disorganization and disintegration” of
the Mexican nation and link the two neighbors with railroads “instead of
the long mule trains” emblematic of the “simplicity of a barbaric race.”19
According to Confederate editorialists, only the Northern war effort
stood in the way of the French project that promised to establish strong
nations throughout the Americas. Confederate publications in Europe
were filled with reminders of Northern hostility to monarchy and empire.
The North’s attachment to doctrines of universal equality, one article
in the Index declared, stood in the way of “any stable government in
 RACE AND REVOLUTION: THE CONFEDERACY, MEXICO, AND THE PROBLEM... 199

Mexico.” Scores of articles recalled the commitment of the US govern-

ment to enforcing the Monroe Doctrine, and predicted unending trouble
for the ambitions of European heads of state in the event of a Union vic-
tory. The Memphis Daily Appeal warned that a restoration of the Union
would sound the “death knell” of French hopes on the American conti-
nent since it would reestablish a power capable of enforcing the Monroe
Doctrine. Though in June 1863 the Memphis paper had suggested that
the Confederacy might adopt the doctrine, by the end of the summer it
opined that Monroe’s famous foreign policy pronouncement lay in “ruins.”
One Confederate correspondent residing in New  York agreed, point-
ing out that John C. Calhoun himself had understood that the Monroe
Doctrine was never to be taken as an absolute. According to Calhoun,
the letter writer insisted, Monroe had opposed European interference in
the Americas only if it threatened the stability of the United States. As for
the supposed duty to countenance nothing but republican governments,
Calhoun pointed out that the United States tolerated without complaint
Mexico’s first imperial government led by Augustín de Iturbide.20
Even as Confederate military fortunes waned, many supporters of
Southern independence argued that a victory in the Civil War would
reverberate throughout the Americas. Indeed, some thinkers argued that
the Confederacy’s success might prove crucial to the nationalist hopes
of white peoples, at least, throughout the world. One editorial asserted
that “the South alone” could maintain republican forms of government
since it had based its “social fabric” upon the “principle of subordina-
tion of one race to the other.” Inspired by the Confederate example, the
“white man’s government” under construction in Mexico might join the
Confederacy in reclaiming the Americas from the “barbarism” into which
much of the hemisphere had descended. The author concluded with an
assertion that might well sum up Confederate understandings of the sig-
nificance of the conflicts of the 1860s: “The establishment of monarchy in
Mexico is the beginning of a new, and, we hope a better era in the history
of the New World.”21
The French incursion into Mexico, like the Confederacy’s bid for inde-
pendence, did not succeed in the end. After the last Confederate armies
surrendered, the US government rushed troops to its southern border in
a show of force designed to intimidate Maximilian’s French backers. The
action proved successful. In 1866, anxious to avoid a war with the United
States, Napoleon III withdrew all remaining French troops from Mexico.
Without French support, Maximilian’s forces quickly crumbled in the face
200 A.M. FLECHE

of mounting republican resistance. In 1867, forces loyal to Benito Juárez

regained control of the country. In May, Maximilian was captured and
sentenced to death. He was executed the next month. Napoleon’s dream
of a French empire in Mexico ended with the demise of the slaveholding
Confederacy and the death of Maximilian. Confederate faith in achieving
national stability through racial subordination proved to be misplaced.
Unfortunately, Confederate doctrines lived on. In the years after the Civil
War, nationalist thinkers in Europe and America continued to link nation-
alism and racism, as the tragic history of imperialism and the two world
wars made abundantly clear.

NOTES

1. Henry Watkins Allen, Travels of a Sugar Planter, or Six Months in

Europe (New York: John F. Trow, 1861), 1–3.
2. For a study that portrays the French intervention in Mexico as
part of a wider “North American Crisis,” see Patrick J. Kelly, “The
North American Crisis of the 1860s,” Journal of the Civil War Era
2 (2012): 337–368. For more on Napoleon’s “grand design” for
the Americas, see Nancy N.  Barker, “Monarchy in Mexico:
Harebrained Scheme or Well-considered Prospect?” Journal of
Modern History 48 (1976): 51–68; Alfred Jackson Hanna and
Kathryn Abbey Hanna, Napoleon III and Mexico: American
Triumph Over Monarchy (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1971), 3–20, 58–68; Thomas Schoonover,
“‘Napoleon is Coming! Maximilian is Coming?” The International
History of the Civil War in the Caribbean Basin,” in Robert May,
ed., The Union, The Confederacy, and the Atlantic Rim (West
Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 1995), 104–121.
3. See Don Doyle and Marco Pamplona, eds., Nationalism in the New
World (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006), 1–3.
4. French commercial agent quoted in Nancy N. Barker, “Monarchy in
Mexico, 53. See also Barker, “The Factor of ‘Race” in the French
Experience in Mexico, 1821–1861,” Hispanic American Historical
Review 59 (1979): 64–80.
5. Joel Roberts Poinsett, Notes on Mexico, Made in the Autumn of
1822 (Philadelphia: H.C.  Carey and I.  Lea, 1824), 119–121;
Waddy Thompson, Recollections of Mexico (New York: Wiley and
RACE AND REVOLUTION: THE CONFEDERACY, MEXICO, AND THE PROBLEM... 201

Putnam, 1846), vi, 6–7. Mayer quoted in Michael O’Brien,

Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South,
1810–1860 2 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2004), 1:207. For in-depth analysis of all three works, see
O’Brien, 1:196–207.
6. For the reaction of slaveholders to emancipation in the Caribbean,
see Matthew Pratt Guterl, American Mediterranean: Southern
Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2008), 35–46; Edward Bartlett
Rugemer, The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the
American Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 2008), 42–143, 180–221, 258–290. For further discussion
of the “rightward shift” in wartime Confederate thinking, see
Robert E. Bonner, Mastering America: Southern Slaveholders and
the Crisis of American Nationhood (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2009), 263–271, 300.
7. George Fitzhugh, “Hayti and the Monroe Doctrine,” DeBow’s
Review 31 (1861): 131–132. See also Matthew J. Clavin, Toussaint
Louverture and the American Civil War: The Promise and Peril of a
Second Haitian Revolution (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 98–121, 144–162.
8. For the political situation in Mexico and its connection to the
French intervention, see Hanna and Hanna, Napoleon III and
Mexico, 10–28.
9. Robert Toombs to John T.  Pickett, May 17, 1861, in James D.
Richardson, ed., A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the
Confederacy Including the Diplomatic Correspondence, 1861–1865,
2 vols. (Nashville: United States Publishing Company, 1905),
2:25.
10. William M. Brown to J. A. Quintero, September 3, 1861, January
14, 1862, in ibid., 2:78, 152. See also, Ronnie C. Tyler, Santiago
Vidaurri and the Southern Confederacy (Texas State Historical
Association, 1973), 11, 13, 14, 45–46.
11. See Barker, “Monarchy in Mexico,” 51–68; Hanna and Hanna,
Napoleon III and Mexico, 3–9, 38–46, 58–68; Schoonover,
“‘Napoleon is Coming! Maximilian is Coming?,” 104–121.
12. For Union and Confederate reactions to intervention, see Hanna
and Hanna, Napoleon III and Mexico, 47–57, 116–130, 155–166,
209–220; Kathryn Abbey Hanna, “The Roles of the South in the
202 A.M. FLECHE

French Intervention in Mexico,” Journal of Southern History 20

(1954): 3–21; Howard Jones, Blue and Gray Diplomacy: A History
of Union and Confederate Foreign Relations (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 285–320; Kelly, “The
North American Crisis of the 1860s,” 337–362; Schoonover,
“‘Napoleon is Coming! Maximilian is Coming?” 104–121;
Schoonover, Dollars Over Dominion: The Triumph of Liberalism in
Mexican-United States Relations, 1861–1867 (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1978); Jay Sexton, The Monroe
Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America
(New York: Hill and Wang, 2011), 123–158.
13. “French Diplomacy in America,” Index, May 22, 1862. See also,
Hanna and Hanna, Napoleon III and Mexico, 40–45, 69–83.
14. Ibid.
15. “The Fall of Puebla,” Index, June 18, 1863; Richmond Examiner,
October 7, 1861, p1; “Mexican Prospects,” Index, October 15,
1863.
16. “France in Mexico,” Richmond Enquirer, July 10, 1863; article
from the Dispatch reprinted in “The Mexican Empire,” Index,
October 29, 1863; “The Mexican Empire,” Index, March 24,
1864.
17. “The Fall of Puebla,” Index, June 11, 1863; John Slidell to Judah
P.  Benjamin, June 21, 1863, enclosure C, in Richardson, ed.,
2:516; Staunton Spectator, August 18, 1863, Valley of the Shadow
Project, Virginia Center for Digital History, University of Virginia,
Charlottesville, Virginia, http://valley.lib.virginia.edu/news/
ss1863/va.au.ss.1863.08.18.xml#01; Hanna and Hanna, Napoleon
III and Mexico, 77–96.
18. Article from the Dispatch reprinted in “The Mexican Empire,”
Index, October 29, 1863; James Mason to Judah P.  Benjamin,
September 4, 1863, Judah P. Benjamin to General William Preston,
January 7, 1864, in Richardson, ed., 2:557, 616. For more on
Napoleon’s choice of Maximilian, see Nancy Nichols Barker,
“France, Austria, and the Mexican Venture, 1861–1864,” French
Historical Studies Vol. 3, no. 2 (Autumn 1963): 224–245; Hanna
and Hanna, Napoleon III and Mexico, 96–115.
19. “The Mexican Empire,” Index, October 29, 1863; Richmond
Examiner, October 7, 1861.
RACE AND REVOLUTION: THE CONFEDERACY, MEXICO, AND THE PROBLEM... 203

20. “The Empire of Mexico,” Index, March 24, 1864; “Mexico as an

Empire, and the United States, Memphis Daily Appeal, August 7,
1863; “The World in Trouble,” Memphis Daily Appeal, October 3,
1863. See also, “France Threatened,” Index, January 7, 1864.
Correspondent quoted in “The Federal Government and the
Monroe Doctrine,” Index, October 1, 1863. To track the evolu-
tion of opinion in the Memphis Daily Appeal, see “European
Position in Regard to the American War,” June 13, 1863; “Self
Reliance,” August 7, 1863. For more on Confederate abandon-
ment of the Monroe Doctrine, see Sexton, The Monroe Doctrine,
137–139.
21. “The Empire of Mexico,” Index, August 13, 1863.
 CHAPTER 12

Tocqueville’s Prophecy: The United States

and the Caribbean, 1850–1871

Nicholas Guyatt

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the islands of the Caribbean were
at the crossroads of two great questions: How should people be governed
in an age in which empires and nations coincided? And how would racial
differences affect society and politics in an era of emancipation? One might
imagine that, given its proximity and power, the United States would have
an enormous bearing on these questions, and that the American Civil War
would transform the racial and political landscape of the Caribbean. In
fact, when the US went in search of territory and influence after 1865,
the results were modest. Not a single West Indian harbor was annexed to
the US in the 30 years after Appomattox. Slavery survived until 1873 in
Puerto Rico and 1886 in Cuba; Spanish rule endured until 1898, in spite
of Cuba’s cherished status among American expansionists.1
By the early twentieth century, US legislators and propagandists had
embraced technologies of empire that projected American power throughout
the region. But before the sweeping campaigns of 1898 came a halting and
conflicted US involvement. Americans struggled to understand the complex
politics of the region; they debated whether particular peoples were “white,”
and what those peoples might be capable of if they were not; and they pon-
dered the limits of the federative principle by which the Danish West Indies,

N. Guyatt ( )
University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

© The Author(s) 2016 205

J. Nagler et al. (eds.), The Transnational Significance of the
American Civil War, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40268-0_12
206 N. GUYATT

Cuba or Santo Domingo (as they called the Dominican Republic) might
become integral parts of the United States. This thinking took place against
the backdrop of sectional conflict, and was eventually shaped by the furious
racial politics of Reconstruction. Would the United States absorb the former
colonies of the Caribbean, and could blacks and whites live alongside each
other in a free society? Alexis de Tocqueville, in the first part of Democracy in
America (1835), was pessimistic on both counts. It was folly to imagine that
freed slaves would be satisfied with second-class citizenship after slavery. The
choice facing white Americans was “either to emancipate the negroes, and to
intermingle with them; or, remaining isolated from them, to keep them in a
state of slavery as long as possible.” The likeliest outcome was a calamitous race
war. With an eye on both the Haitian Revolution and the 1831 uprising of Nat
Turner in Virginia, Tocqueville anticipated “the most horrible of civil wars”
and “the extirpation of one or other of the two races” before the restoration of
equilibrium on either side of the Florida Straits.2
In this respect at least, Tocqueville was a lousy prophet. America got a
different civil war to the one he had predicted, and neither the Caribbean
nor the mainland experienced racial Armageddon. But his vision resonated
through the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Tocqueville doubted
that abolition would resolve “the struggle of the two races in the United
States,” and thought that a durable armistice between blacks and whites
would require physical separation on a vast scale. This thesis received its
sternest test on the mainland, but it also haunted US dreams of expansion.
***
In the mid-nineteenth the Caribbean presented a varied picture to
American observers. The peoples of Hispaniola had broken entirely with
empire, though Haiti and the Dominican Republic struggled to defend
their sovereignty from outside powers and from each other. Britain and
France abolished West Indian slavery in the 1830s and 1840s, but Spain
moved in the opposite direction. After the Haitian Revolution terminated
Saint-Domingue’s career as the world’s most profitable sugar producer,
Spanish officials and creoles positioned Cuba (and, to a lesser extent,
Puerto Rico) to take its place. By 1850, with empire, slavery, and cash crops
in retreat across the Caribbean, Cuba had become a startling exception to
the regional pattern. The canniness of Spanish development strategies—
which brought foreign capital and expertise to Cuba, but not American
settlers—piqued the interest of observers in the United States. The slave
system drew admiration from southerners, but Cuba’s investments in
communications and industry—not to mention its harnessing of the latest
TOCQUEVILLE’S PROPHECY: THE UNITED STATES AND THE CARIBBEAN, 1850–1871 207

innovations in the international labor market, like indentured Chinese

workers—made it seem to some northerners like a perfected version of
the South. While Spain worked to retain the loyalty of its bustling colony,
American observers—statesmen, financiers, journalists—closed in on “the
Queen of the Antilles.”3
Politically, the peoples of the Caribbean struggled in the nineteenth
century for meaningful participation. In the British and French West
Indies, tiny white minorities attempted to contain the effects of emanci-
pation while former slaves worked to expand the limits of their freedom.
Slavery had been abolished in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, but
those neighboring regimes developed a deep enmity based on territorial
disputes and racial distinctions. The Dominicans, a Spanish-speaking peo-
ple estranged from both their former empire and the mythology of the
Haitian Revolution, bounced between Spain and Haiti until finally win-
ning independence in 1844. While creoles and peninsulares chafed against
each other in Cuba and Puerto Rico, local elites were important com-
ponents of the imperial machinery. To these diverse peoples, the United
States before 1861 took on several meanings: to disaffected creoles, it
stood as a republican example that embarrassed the claims of empire; to
Haitians, its free black population was a promising source of potential
immigrants; to ambitious Dominican leaders, it might confer protection
and legitimacy on a shaky regime; and to free blacks across the region, it
was a slaveholding nation that could not be trusted.4
In the United States, the Caribbean became a theater in the war
between abolitionists and the defenders of slavery, and a canvas for the fer-
vid dreams of American expansionists. The Caribbean had been a testing
ground for black ability since the Haitian Revolution: abolitionists insisted
that Haiti disproved the old canard about black inferiority, while proslav-
ery writers emphasized the political and economic problems of the new
nation. A similar pattern developed in the 1830s, as both sides sculpted
the evidence of British emancipation to fit their arguments. Abolitionists
rejected the claim that former slaves had simply stopped working after
1838, and promoted a more positive image of post-slavery societies in
the Antilles. Black and white radicals like James McCune Smith and
Wendell Phillips praised Toussaint Louverture’s achievements; the New
York Evening Post journalist John Bigelow visited Jamaica in 1850, and
supplied an upbeat account of emancipation and free black prospects in
the British West Indies. Charles Sumner, the leading anti-slavery force
in the US Senate, pushed successive American administrations to offer
208 N. GUYATT

diplomatic recognition to Haiti, and quietly asked British politicians to be

more forceful in their defense of West Indian emancipation.5
Over the course of the 1850s, meanwhile, US diplomats and poli-
cymakers focused on two contrasting opportunities for extending
American sovereignty into the Caribbean: Cuba and the Dominican
Republic. From 1852, US negotiators courted General Pedro Santana,
the Dominican leader. Santana had led his country to independence
in 1844, but continuing tensions with Haiti—and the challenges of
his domestic rival, Buenaventura Báez—made him see annexation as
a means of consolidating his rule. American strategists looked hun-
grily toward Samaná Bay, the great natural harbor on the northern
coast of the Dominican Republic, while land speculators and steam-
ship operators envisaged a steady stream of American migrants after the
absorption of the entire republic. This was, predominantly, a north-
ern initiative—an extension of free labor ideology into the tropics. The
mixed-race Dominican population was finessed in General Santana’s
official dealings with Washington: he spoke of the “white Dominicans”
and “Spanish inhabitants” who were threatened by Haitian aggression.
But American enthusiasm was checked by the messiness of the broader
political situation, with Spain and France adamantly opposed to any ces-
sion of Dominican territory.6
US expansionists refused to abandon these hopes, and James Buchanan
made another tilt at Dominican annexation in 1859. But for most of the
period between 1854 and 1860, American policymakers targeted Cuba
instead. This was, in some ways, a still more quixotic obsession: Spain
showed no interest in selling the island, and Cuban creoles preferred inde-
pendence to American statehood. Most Congressional supporters of an
American Cuba came from the South, and slavery played a prominent role
in debates about annexation. But it would be a mistake to view Cuban
annexation as a proslavery initiative. The Caribbean had been an early fixa-
tion of “manifest destiny” proponents, and in the 1850s both Democrats
and Republicans offered gymnastic arguments linking the geography of
the hemisphere to American expansion. (Republican senator William
Seward insisted in 1859 that “every rock and grain of sand in that island
were drifted and washed out from American soil.”) Congressmen also
noted the quickening progress of Britain, France, Russia, and the other
great powers, and insisted that the United States had to expand to keep
pace with these rivals. That Cuba could, in the process, be saved from the
debilitating rule of Spain added considerable force to this argument.7
TOCQUEVILLE’S PROPHECY: THE UNITED STATES AND THE CARIBBEAN, 1850–1871 209

Some southerners embraced proslavery arguments for annexation,

though the sectional accent of this language limited its reach. Judah
P.  Benjamin, US senator from Louisiana, suggested that Cuban slaves
would benefit from the “milder” forms of slavery that had been perfected
in the South, and that an American Cuba would destroy the last remnants
of the African slave trade. But the island was more often imagined within
a hemispheric slave system that was fluid and dynamic. Robert Walker, the
Mississippi senator, had argued in the 1840s that slavery would eventually
be spirited away from the South through the slow migration of forced
labor into the tropical zone. His fellow Mississippian, the House mem-
ber Albert Brown, applied this logic in 1853 to Cuba. Slavery had flour-
ished in America because of its essential mobility, Brown argued. It moved
southward into new soils, drawing white planters and black slaves toward
the siren song of profit. Brown feared that, without expansion into Cuba
or Mexico, the music might stop while millions of blacks remained in the
Deep South. He was loath to deny to his constituents the same release
from blacks that, he argued, every northern state had been granted in
earlier decades. For precisely the same reason, slavery stalwarts like James
Henry Hammond of South Carolina viewed the acquisition of Cuba with
intense suspicion. How could the defenders of slavery benefit from four or
even six Cuban senators, if Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland—perhaps even
Virginia—shed their slaves and moved into the free labor column?8
Northerners and southerners struggled with another question: Were
the Cuban creoles white? Or, perhaps, the wrong kind of whites? William
Boyce of South Carolina warned Congress in 1855 that the Spanish had
encouraged equality between Cuba’s sizeable free black population and
its white creoles. Their supposed denial of racial hierarchies could only
end badly: in the amalgamation of the races, in the terrible scenes of
the Haitian Revolution, or in the slow erosion of slavery’s hold on the
rest of Cuba’s black population. Even the “pure” creoles were “inferior
whites,” in Boyce’s assessment, a category that drew upon the sup-
posed backwardness of Spanish culture and Catholicism. Republicans
also doubted creole ability: Cubans were “ignorant, vicious, and
priest-ridden” (Zachariah Chandler of Michigan); “entirely unintel-
ligent” (Jacob Collamer of Vermont); “different in language, differ-
ent in race, different in habits, […] and radically different in religion”
(William Seward of New York).9
The issue of Cuban ability was crucial because virtually everyone who
discussed annexation agreed that the island would enter the Union as
210 N. GUYATT

a state rather than a colony or protectorate. Miles Taylor of Louisiana

insisted that the United States “cannot acquire and retain territory
occupied by any distinct portion of the human family” without “mak-
ing that community part and parcel of ourselves.” This point united
Whigs, Democrats, Know Nothings and, eventually, Republicans. It
focused minds on the citizenship potential of Cubans, but prompted
a broader question: did the United States have the power to absorb
and transform the peoples in its path, or was it a vehicle for a special
people—white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant—to overwhelm their less dis-
tinguished neighbors? Many Republican lawmakers took the conser-
vative view that “free institutions” (in the words of James Dixon of
Connecticut) were “not a cause, but an effect. They are produced by
the character of the people previously; they do not create the people.”
Expansionists, on the other hand, depicted Cuban creoles as doughty
freedom fighters who shared America’s aversion to European empire.
Easy agreement on the question of creole ability proved elusive, even
before legislators determined how they could incorporate Cuba’s sub-
stantial slave minority.10
It was Republicans, rather than Democrats, who helped to craft a dif-
ferent version of expansion in the midst of the Cuba debate. Since the
formation of the party in the mid-1850s, Republicans had couched their
hostility toward slavery in an embrace of black colonization. But the prac-
tical difficulties of removing huge numbers to Liberia persuaded leading
Republicans to seek an alternative to the American Colonization Society.
James Doolittle of Wisconsin raised this issue during the 1859 debate over
Cuban annexation. Given the Spanish government’s reluctance to sell the
island, Doolittle asked his fellow senators to focus instead on the “two
great questions” of the age:

One is the solution of the Anglo-American question, the other the solution
of the Africo-American question. In the solution of these great questions the
men of our own race, from the temperate zones of the Old World, mingling
with us and being Americanized, will hold, in the end, exclusive possession
of the temperate zones of the New; while the descendants of the man of the
tropics of the Old World now among us will find their homes in the tropics
of the New; and, sir, they will not go there as slaves, but as freemen, to live
among freemen, and where color is no degradation. They will go, under our
instrumentality, not to overturn the Governments to which they emigrate,
but to aid in developing the most productive regions of the whole earth.
TOCQUEVILLE’S PROPHECY: THE UNITED STATES AND THE CARIBBEAN, 1850–1871 211

Doolittle’s vision of tropical homesteading quickly won converts among

Republicans. Francis P.  Blair, the Missouri Congressman, traveled the
Midwest and Northeast promoting a chain of black dependencies incorpo-
rating “all the nations and islands of the gulf.” Linking territorial expan-
sion to black colonization would give the United States “our India,”
thought Blair. (Though “under happier auspices.”) Although the precise
territorial arrangements remained unclear, Doolittle and Blair had placed
the spirit of Tocqueville’s prophecy at the heart of their party’s thinking
about slavery. Continental segregation was no longer mooted as the con-
sequence of racial apocalypse, but as a policy to be secured through the
ascendancy of the Republican party.11
The prospect of Caribbean expansion played an important role in the
battles over slavery in the 1850s. Charles Sumner, among others, urged
Americans to view Cuba in the same light as Kansas; Abraham Lincoln,
in explaining his rejection of the Crittenden Compromise in early 1861,
envisaged that, without an explicit ban on the extension of slavery, the
South would soon demand Cuba as a condition for remaining in the
Union. The Cuba debate, though, was more than a dry run for the Civil
War. James Buchanan and other leading Democrats recognized that even
anti-slavery stalwarts like Gerrit Smith and William Seward had a weak-
ness for American expansion. Hence Buchanan’s otherwise-baffling belief
in 1859 that Caribbean expansion might unite the nation—or, at least,
his party. Buchanan’s hope was demolished even before Lincoln’s cele-
brated inflexibility in the winter of 1860–1861, though the issue of slav-
ery was hardly the only factor that would determine American relations
with the Caribbean in the coming years. In the 1850s, an aggressive US
nationalism had been married to profound confusion about the power of
American institutions, the complex politics of the Caribbean, and the abil-
ity of Cubans and Dominicans to embrace republican ideas. These unre-
solved questions would attain a new urgency at the war’s end.12
***
On April 1, 1861, less than two weeks before the start of the Civil
War, the new Secretary of State William Seward sent Abraham Lincoln
an astonishing memo. Despite the gathering war clouds, the administra-
tion was “yet without a policy either domestic or foreign.” In order to
“change the question before the public” from slavery to national honor,
Lincoln should “send agents into Canada, Mexico and Central America,
to rouse a vigorous continental spirit of independence on this continent
212 N. GUYATT

against European intervention.” He should also demand explanations

from France and Spain about their American intentions and, if those
proved wanting, “convene Congress and declare war against them.” The
event that prompted Seward’s outburst was the Spanish annexation of
the Dominican Republic. Threatened once more by a Haitian invasion in
1859, Dominican leader Pedro Santana confessed to the Spanish queen
Isabel that his people should never have declared independence in the
first place. Isabel, like Seward, was already looking to silence her domestic
critics with foreign adventures. When Santana asked the Cuban governor
Francisco Serrano to send troops to bolster his defenses against Haiti,
annexation became a fait accompli. Isabel was delighted that, despite the
shrill republicanism of the age, a threatened people looked to empire to
secure their liberties. In Eugenio Matibag’s striking term, Spain became a
proud pioneer of “retrocolonization.”13
France initially objected to re-annexation, but by April 1861 Napoleon
III had concluded, as James Cortada puts it, that “the Monroe Doctrine
finally should die.” (Mexico would soon be the theater for Napoleon’s
ambitions.) While European threats to kill the Doctrine remained private,
the diplomatic machinations of France and Spain were enough to stir the
most palsied Young American from his armchair. But unless one followed
Seward’s course and embraced all-out war with Europe—a prospect that
Lincoln viewed as deranged—diplomatic options were limited. American
troops would be needed to combat the rebellion in the South, and the
Union was desperate to prevent European nations from recognizing the
Confederacy. Newspaper editor Carl Schurz urged Lincoln to “make short
work of the secession movement and then to make front against the war
abroad,” but this was easier said than done. Seward tried in vain to unite
Britain and France in opposition to the re-annexation of the Dominican
Republic, and Lincoln sent Schurz to Madrid in a futile attempt to plead
the American case. By the summer of 1861, Bull Run had offered a pain-
ful demonstration of the North’s limited reach. If the Union army could
not intervene successfully in Virginia, was it likely to drive Spanish troops
from Santo Domingo? Lincoln and Seward dropped the Dominican issue,
leaving the door open for European powers to embarrass American excep-
tionalism in the years ahead.14
While the war effort limited American military and diplomatic options
in the Caribbean, it hastened the advance of the Republicans’ tropical
homesteads policy. In his first weeks in office, Lincoln began developing
plans for free black colonies in Central America and the Caribbean. By the
TOCQUEVILLE’S PROPHECY: THE UNITED STATES AND THE CARIBBEAN, 1850–1871 213

summer, as Congress approved the confiscation of slaves serving in the

Confederate armies, Lincoln extended the reach of black colonization to
freed people as well, and encouraged the Border States to enact emancipa-
tion schemes in tandem with federal colonization efforts. In his message
to Congress in December 1861, Lincoln envisaged that blacks should be
colonized “at some place or places in a climate congenial to them,” which
meant that the United States would require new territory in the tropi-
cal zone. Although this would surely rankle those who insisted that “the
only legitimate object of acquiring territory is to furnish homes for white
men,” the results of colonization would answer its critics: “the emigra-
tion of colored men leaves additional room for white men remaining or
coming here.” Lincoln used this opportunity to urge the diplomatic rec-
ognition of Haiti and Liberia, the two nations that had received the most
African American emigrants before the war.15
While Liberia had been largely discarded by Republicans as a destina-
tion for mass black emigration, Haiti had the advantage of proximity
and a preexisting enthusiasm on the part of African Americans. Since the
late 1810s, free black communities had viewed Haitian emigration in a
more favorable light than the murky plans of the Colonization Society. In
the early 1820s, around 6000 people left for the black republic, though
many returned in disappointment. Three decades on, in the shadow of
the Fugitive Slave Act, black leaders organized a national convention
in Cleveland to revive the Haitian option. James Holly, a teacher and
newspaper editor, opened negotiations with Haiti’s rulers to secure a for-
mal emigration agreement. The new regime of Fabre Geffrard warmly
embraced Holly’s proposal in 1859, and within months the Haitian
Emigration Bureau had been established under the direction of the (white)
anti-slavery activist James Redpath.16
Free blacks were torn over whether emigration would undermine or bol-
ster southern slavery. Holly and Redpath targeted the staunch abolitionist
Frederick Douglass as the public figure who could contribute most to their
cause, and Douglass—a firm foe of Liberia—initially judged the Haitian
option as “a possible necessity to our people.” Having pledged to visit the
Caribbean in 1861, Douglass changed his mind at the outbreak of the Civil
War. In June, he protested that “this simple overture of benevolence has
hardened into a grand scheme of public policy,” and lamented the “doc-
trines of races, of climates, of nationalities and destinies” that would locate
blacks and whites in separate countries. James Redpath was undeterred.
He asked Charles Sumner, the abolitionist senator, to speed diplomatic
214 N. GUYATT

recognition of Haiti from Congress. (This “would give a greater impetus to

emigration than anything that the Cabinet would do,” Redpath insisted.)
More than 2000 black emigrants left the United States for Haiti between
1860 and 1862 under the auspices of the Emigration Bureau, even as the
Lincoln administration struggled to find overseas partners for its removal
schemes.17
But the onset of war had helped to “change the question” among free
blacks in ways that William Seward could not have envisaged. An increasing
number shared Douglass’s insight that the war would transform the United
States, and that black people should fight for their rights in the restored
republic rather than accept the inevitability of racial separation. Lincoln
resisted this conclusion. After a clumsy attempt to persuade a delegation of
black Washingtonians in 1862 that they had a duty to accept colonization
in the Caribbean or Central America, Lincoln directed his removal plans
to the swelling ranks of freed people surrounding the Union armies. Latin
American governments responded coolly to his requests for territory, reason-
ing that a colony of African Americans might easily allow the United States to
project its power into their midst. Lincoln canvassed the British government
about sending freed people to its plantations in Belize and Guyana, but the
complications of the ongoing war effort prevented the sides from reaching
agreement. The only federal colonization plan to leave the drawing board
was implemented on Île à Vache, an island off the southern coast of Haiti.
More than 450 freed people were recruited from Fort Monroe in Virginia
in July 1863, but the experiment was a disaster. The contractor chosen by
the federal government, Bernard Kock, displayed an “avarice” which later
stunned American investigators, and the effort quickly collapsed amidst pri-
vation and recrimination. The colonists who survived the experience were
restored to the United States in March 1864, and the federal government
made no further progress on colonization before the Confederate surrender
at Appomattox.18
We might conclude at this point that the war had inflicted a double blow
on Tocqueville’s prophecy: the federal government failed in its efforts to dem-
onstrate the practicability of large-scale colonization, and the course of the war
suggested the advent of a race-blind citizenship within the United States. In
fact, the Civil War’s impact on ideas of racial separation was more modest.
During the debates over the Thirteenth Amendment and Reconstruction in
1864 and early 1865, Democrats and Republicans clung to the idea that,
when free, the black population would gravitate toward the tropical regions.
Some legislators even suggested that black soldiers could march into Mexico
and expel the invasion forces of Napoleon III. The government investigation
TOCQUEVILLE’S PROPHECY: THE UNITED STATES AND THE CARIBBEAN, 1850–1871 215

into Île à Vache, meanwhile, confirmed that the plan had rested on solid foun-
dations: it was the management of the effort that was to blame for its failure.19
If William Seward failed to change the question from slavery to patrio-
tism, the war years at least marked a belated shift in the debate over black
prospects. From the summer of 1861, it was clear to many Republicans
that slavery would not survive the conflict. But the issue of black citizen-
ship was still unresolved in 1865. When American policymakers looked
again at the Caribbean after Appomattox, they did so with a parallax view.
Expansionists could reprise their claims that the islands of the Caribbean
would be transformed by American influence, or that they belonged to
the Union because they had originally been washed from the Mississippi
River. But the place of non-white people in a reconstructed nation was
anything but secure, and the lure of a tropical divide between white and
non-white populations endured.
***
We owe the term “Latin America” to the Civil War era. In the mid 1850s,
Spanish American critics of US imperialism invoked a common identity
and interest south of the Rio Grande in opposition to US expansion. But
by 1862 Napoleon 111 had appropriated the term to promote the impe-
rial ambitions of Spain and France in Mexico. With the United States dis-
tracted by its Civil War, Napoleon surmised, French- and Spanish-backed
regimes in Mexico, Santo Domingo, Cuba, and Puerto Rico could dem-
onstrate the benefits of empire in humiliating proximity to the American
republic. Things did not work out this way. In Santo Domingo, oppo-
nents of Pedro Santana teamed up with the Haitian government to forge
a powerful resistance movement. Queen Isabel reluctantly signaled the
end to “retrocolonization” on March 3, 1865—the day before Lincoln’s
second inaugural. Later that year, Andrew Johnson sent 50,000 troops
to the Mexican border, while William Seward (who remained as secretary
of state) asked Napoleon to withdraw his forces from the hemisphere.
In 1866, the fall of Emperor Maximilian, Napoleon’s puppet leader in
Mexico, seemed to confirm a republican resurgence.20
Cuba and Puerto Rico became the last redoubts of Spanish control
in the hemisphere. Among Americans, the notoriety of the former was
enhanced by news that Confederate exiles like Judah Benjamin had taken
refuge there. (In one of the war’s many ironies, this former expansionist
had gained Cuba but lost the United States.) But the reactionary appear-
ance of the Spanish Caribbean masked a burgeoning anti-slavery move-
ment. In 1865, the Puerto Rican Julio Vizcarrondo helped to found the
Abolition Society of Madrid. The Spanish poet Carolina Coronado, a
216 N. GUYATT

favorite of Isabel, became the Society’s vice-president. Coronado and

Vizcarrondo, who were both married to Americans, belonged to a trans-
national anti-slavery network that spanned the Atlantic. Its Spanish-
speaking members labored against significant political headwinds,
however. In 1868, weakened by economic failure and military disap-
pointments, Queen Isabel was overthrown by a coalition of generals and
republicans. This in turn prompted creoles in the Caribbean to ques-
tion their attachment to empire, even as anti-slavery sentiment gathered
momentum. For American observers, mapping the ensuing debates over
empire and slavery proved especially challenging.21
William Seward witnessed this unusually plastic moment from close
quarters. In January 1866, he left Washington for a month-long tour of
the Caribbean. He sailed first to the Danish West Indies, where he com-
plimented local officials on their successful emancipations, mooted the
possibility of American annexation, and bumped into the exiled Mexican
leader, Antonio López de Santa Anna. In Port-au-Prince, Seward toured
the Haitian Senate and House of Representatives, spoke warmly with
Fabre Geffrard in the state drawing room, and admired a portrait of
Abraham Lincoln. In Havana he met with the Spanish captain-general
and a carefully selected group of American expatriates. But it was in Santo
Domingo that he gave a sense of where American policy was headed. The
new president, Buenaventura Báez, begged Seward for diplomatic recog-
nition, and the secretary was happy to oblige. The Dominican Republic
had an important role to play in the future of the hemisphere. The United
States had become an “imposing, possibly a majestic empire”:

Like every other structure of large proportions, it requires outward but-

tresses. These buttresses will arise in the development of civilization in this
hemisphere. They will consist of republics like our own, founded in adja-
cent countries and islands, upon the principle of the equal rights of men.
To us it matters not of what race or lineage these republics shall be. They
are necessary for our security against external forces, and, perhaps, for the
security of our internal peace. We desire those buttresses to be multiplied,
and strengthened, as fast as it can be done, without the exercise of fraud or
force on our own part.

With this in mind, Seward really had “no choice but to recognize the
Republic of Dominica.”22
Similar ideas coursed through Washington after the Civil War.
Republican leader Thaddeus Stevens expected the Caribbean to form a
TOCQUEVILLE’S PROPHECY: THE UNITED STATES AND THE CARIBBEAN, 1850–1871 217

republic “not less powerful than was the Achaean League;” unless, of
course, the islands were “added to our dominion by our enterprising
Foreign Secretary.” Báez, with an eye on his domestic opponents, viewed
an American annexation of Samaná Bay or the entire republic as a means
of consolidating his power—in the short term, at least. But the political
instabilities that gave the United States an opening in the region had a
powerful undertow. By the end of 1868, six Dominican regimes had come
and gone since the Spanish retreat of 1865, and Haitians and Dominicans
continued to nurture their long enmity. Britain had put down an uprising
in Jamaica, and major rebellions had broken out in Puerto Rico and Cuba.
American expansionists suggested that a US advance into the region would
itself secure stability. But the region’s unsettled politics fed the anxieties of
annexation opponents. Meanwhile, the deepening domestic struggles over
Reconstruction, which had ravaged the presidency of Andrew Johnson,
suggested that the United States should consolidate its existing territory
before broadening its horizons. “I think that we shall both of us live to
forget the smaller troubles of these days,” wrote Seward to Thad Stevens
in 1867, “and see the continual development of our country.” But the
prospects of expansion into the Caribbean were clouded by tensions at
home and abroad.23
When Ulysses S.  Grant entered the White House in March 1869,
Cuba demanded his immediate attention. Spain had poured troops into
the island, and Cuban exiles in New York and Washington were steering
American opinion toward the rebels. Should the United States intervene,
by recognizing the rebels? If it did, would it become the midwife of Cuban
independence, or swallow Cuba whole? During the last months of Andrew
Johnson’s administration, Congress had confirmed that any new territories
would enter the Union under the terms of the 1787 Northwest Ordinance:
an American Cuba or Dominica could expect statehood rather than colo-
nialism from Washington. Many Cuban exiles in the United States were
prepared to accept annexation as the price of American intervention in the
struggle with Spain, but this prospect failed to unite the American public.
One Southern newspaper bemoaned the addition of “another large negro
constituency, petted and favored at the expense of white society.” The New
York Times thought that Cuba had been a “splendid milch cow” under
slavery, but would meet the same fate as Jamaica or Haiti if it became “a
state of the American union.” “Why should we trouble ourselves about the
blacks of the West Indies,” the paper asked, “while the problem involved in
the emancipation of the Southern blacks is not half solved?”24
218 N. GUYATT

When American abolitionists squeezed the Cuban revolution into an

anti-slavery frame, the details became harder to see. Were the rebels aboli-
tionists, or were they trying to defend slavery from imperial Spanish reform-
ers? Rebel leaders initially shied from a commitment to immediate abolition,
looking to recruit planters to the cause of independence. They became more
strident in their opposition to slavery as they became aware of American
concerns, but their initial uncertainty allowed celebrated American aboli-
tionists to traduce the rebel cause. Charles Sumner claimed that the rebels
had “a proslavery constitution to be read at home, and an antislavery con-
stitution to be read abroad.” For William Lloyd Garrison, the Cubans had
resolved “to unfurl the standard of secession” only when abolition senti-
ment had taken hold in Europe. Garrison conceded that Spain had been
slow to adopt the cause of immediate emancipation, but hadn’t northern-
ers been equally reticent in their own battle with slaveholding separatists?
He cheerily predicted that, if Americans left the island alone, Spain would
eventually be forced to adopt military emancipation—“in imitation of our
own tardy example”—and destroy Cuban slavery. With patience, Americans
would see that the causes of empire and abolition were aligned.25
Grant kept alive the prospect of Cuban recognition throughout 1869,
and Republicans were split evenly on the issue. Those who favored
extending belligerent status to the rebels claimed that the American public
demanded action, and that a rebel victory in Cuba would secure abolition.
Republicans who opposed recognition cataloged the practical problems
of American involvement in the conflict. John F.  Farnsworth of Illinois
lamented the prospect that “semi-civilized, semi-barbarous men who can-
not speak our language” would soon be permitted “to help to legislate
for us.” The American eagle had flown far enough, he claimed, and the
“poor wearied bird” now deserved a rest. (Unless Canada was available.)
As the prospect of Cuban intervention receded, Grant switched his focus
to the Dominican Republic, and to Buenaventura Báez’s offer of a treaty
of annexation. In the spring of 1870, Grant began a concerted effort to
promote the benefits to his party: Annexation would resolve the deep-
seated tensions among Dominicans and Haitians, draw countless settlers
from the American mainland, and emulate Cuba’s pell-mell development
in every respect but one: it would sustain free labor rather than slavery.26
What followed was a frantic year of controversy which brought the nation
closer to a Caribbean acquisition than at any previous moment, but revealed
deep divisions among Republicans and alumni of the abolition movement.
Given their skepticism toward Cuba, northern newspapers were surprisingly
TOCQUEVILLE’S PROPHECY: THE UNITED STATES AND THE CARIBBEAN, 1850–1871 219

supportive of Grant’s plan. The New York Times, which had changed its
editor in 1869, provided a steady stream of pro-annexation pieces in 1870;
so did the New York Tribune and the Independent. Resistance came from
southerners wary of absorbing a non-white population, and from an unlikely
source: Charles Sumner and Carl Schurz, veterans of the abolition strug-
gle. Sumner insisted that Dominican annexation would threaten Haitian
independence and the principle of black self-determination. But in exalting
Haitian history and decrying any Caribbean intrusion by the United States,
Sumner revived the separatist arguments that had upset Frederick Douglass
during the debates over Haitian emigration. “To the African belongs the
equatorial belt,” Sumner told the Senate, “and he should enjoy it undis-
turbed.” As Schurz joined Sumner in linking race to “the unalterable laws
of climate,” an alliance of white and black abolitionists pushed back against
their efforts. Frederick Douglass presented annexation as an opportunity
for the nation to discard its old ideas about race and climate. Samuel Howe,
the Boston abolitionist, had “no more sympathy with the cry of ‘a black
man’s government’ for Haiti than with that of a ‘white man’s government’
for the United States.” For Howe, white Americans had a debt to repay to
blacks after centuries of slavery and oppression, but “we cannot do it by the
scheme of building up a great negro confederacy in the tropics. That implies
the converse—to wit, a white republic in the temperate zone; and we want
no conditions of color.”27
The strangest element of the annexation craze, though, was the quiet
presence of an old idea about racial separation. When, in 1868, the New
York Times judged Cuba to be worthless without slavery, the paper made
one exception:

Cuba would be an excellent place to which the negroes from the South
could be shipped, purging the Southern States of an element which could
be advantageously replaced by emigrants and settlers from the older States.
[…] It would undoubtedly prove the ruin of the Island, but that would be
a matter of small importance to the people who bought it, if by these same
means they could improve the Southern States to such an extent as to make
them the equals of the Northern and Western States in the value of their
productions and the increase of population.

Under these circumstances, Cuban creoles would abandon Cuba, the “old
race will die out, and the island will belong to the negroes, verifying De
Tocqueville’s prophecy.” As American attention shifted to Santo Domingo,
the idea was modified by the New York Tribune. In all likelihood, an
220 N. GUYATT

American Dominica would benefit Southern blacks: it would “encourage

and strengthen them in every way” to see “a State occupied and controlled
by men of their own race and color.” But if Reconstruction spiraled away
from its benevolent sponsors in Washington, the State of Dominica could
play a different role: “If the worst came to the worst, the island could be to
them a harbor of refuge.”28
This idea held a special attraction for Ulysses Grant, who noted pri-
vately in 1869 that the Dominican Republic would support “the entire
colored population of the United States, should it choose to emigrate.”
As the prospects of annexation receded in 1871, with Sumner and Schurz
successfully dividing the Republican majority in the Senate, Grant kept
alive two visions for Santo Domingo: it could be a republican paradise
in which racial distinctions would dissolve, or a Republican lifeboat in
which African Americans would be evacuated from white prejudice. The
press mocked the President for his “amazing obstinacy,” especially when
Santo Domingo popped up in his farewell address in 1876. But Grant had
confronted an intractable question about race and nation—the question
of whether blacks and whites could live together in equality—and thought
that an American Dominica promised a fudge, if not an answer. When he
dictated his memoirs in 1885, just a few weeks before his death, he seemed
finally to have fallen on one side of the question: “I took it that the colored
people would go there in great numbers, so as to have independent states
governed by their own race,” he recalled. “They would be still be States
of the Union, and under the protection of the General Government; but
the citizens would be almost wholly colored.” Blacks had as much right
to remain in the United States as anyone else, he conceded, but the pros-
pect of a “a conflict between races” was now very real. “It was looking to
a settlement of this question that led me to urge the annexation of Santo
Domingo.”29
***
The American Civil War resonated throughout the Caribbean. Crowds
gathered in Havana in the spring of 1865 to mourn the passing of
Abraham Lincoln; slaves in the Cuban sugar fields sang “Avanza, Lincoln,
avanza” under the noses of their masters; the Haitian government grate-
fully commissioned portraits of Lincoln and Charles Sumner. The war’s
outcome, though, was more ambiguous than it initially appeared. By the
time that the rebels of Morant Bay in Jamaica launched their uprising in
October 1865, demanding access to Crown land and an opportunity to
TOCQUEVILLE’S PROPHECY: THE UNITED STATES AND THE CARIBBEAN, 1850–1871 221

consolidate their freedom, Andrew Johnson had already aborted General

William T.  Sherman’s transfer of confiscated Confederate land to freed
slaves; the promise of “forty aces and a mule” was stillborn. Cubans who
wore black ribbons for the slain Lincoln, or who imagined that the United
States would hasten the demise of slavery throughout the hemisphere,
were frustrated by the failure of the American government to take a
decisive stand during the Ten Years’ War. José Martí, who had idolized
Lincoln as a child, came to think that the United States of the 1870s and
1880s had lost its way, that the “country of Lincoln” had become some-
thing less noble. Even the Haitian diplomats who feted Charles Sumner
for his stand against the annexation of Santo Domingo, striking a medal
in his honor and promising that his birthday would forever be a national
holiday in Haiti, had to confront the fact that his principal ally in the fight
against Grant—Carl Schurz—viewed the black republic as an object lesson
in tropical debility.30
The Civil War disrupted the world economy and the politics of the
Caribbean and Central America, but its ideological influence is harder to
determine—partly because its meaning was never decisively established
within the United States.  In 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville had identified
America’s demography and republican ethos as a combustible mixture:
If slavery was not maintained, an epic race war would ensue. The only
alternative was abolition with amalgamation, and Tocqueville claimed
that neither North nor South would accept this. Empires could manage
these problems dexterously, as Tocqueville discovered in his work on the
French colonization of Algeria. But in the American case, black freedom
could only be achieved through violence and continental segregation.
The end of American slavery came in very different circumstances than
Tocqueville had envisaged, but his accounting of the challenges of eman-
cipation proved prescient. Frederick Douglass believed that the defeat of
the Confederacy had opened the prospect of race-blind citizenship, and
that Caribbean expansion would consolidate and extend this egalitarian
vista. Critics of Dominican annexation doubted that the United States
could manage the racial diversity of the South, let alone the Caribbean.
Carl Schurz spoke of the former Confederacy as a zone of “semi-tropical
States,” whose membership of the Union was more a “continental neces-
sity” than a republican boon. While Ulysses Grant understood Douglass’s
proposition—that an American state in the tropics would buttress black
citizenship on the mainland—he eventually consoled himself with a crude
222 N. GUYATT

alternative: African Americans could enjoy perfect equality with whites in

a state of the Union which would be exclusively black.31
The American engagement with the Caribbean in the 1860s and
1870s coincided with two political developments in the eastern hemi-
sphere: the consolidation of peoples into new nation-states, especially in
Germany and Italy; and the reaffirmation of empire by Britain and France,
which looked to bolster their rule over India and Algeria respectively. In
the American debates over Cuba and Santo Domingo, these develop-
ments were often conflated. When the question was put directly, empire
remained unappealing. It upset the mythology of American expansion,
in which territorial governments had supposedly extended liberty to
everyone in their path, and it stirred fears of centralization and tyranni-
cal government. The radical proponents of Reconstruction—including,
most plangently, Charles Sumner—had invoked the language if not the
practices of empire to claim dominion over the South during the Johnson
administration. In 1867, Sumner had insisted that “no local claim of self-
government can for a moment interfere with the supremacy of the nation,
in the maintenance of human rights.” He welcomed the Southern charge
that Congressional radicals had trampled on the defeated states: “Call it
imperialism if you please; it is simply the imperialism of the Declaration
of Independence, with all its promises fulfilled.” But his unwillingness
to extend this empire into the Caribbean made him an unwitting ally
of southerners and Democrats who opposed any federal promotion of
racial justice. Sumner’s most notorious attack on Grant—in which he
insisted that the President was pioneering “a new form of Ku Klux on
the coasts of St. Domingo”—delighted white conservatives and appalled
Republican radicals.32
The alternative to empire—equality—brought its own challenges and
burdens. Despite the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments,
which proclaimed the universality of American citizenship, the advocates
of extending the Union into the Caribbean confronted a maze of race and
climate theories. They had also to explain how an expanded non-white
population could alleviate the problems of integration that were already
visible in the South. The boldest answer to this—that the republic could
confirm its transcendence over race by adding more non-white citizens—
was ultimately too strong for Congress, especially given the defection
of Sumner and Schurz from the radical cause. After so much American
interest in the Caribbean, the choice between empire and equality was
postponed for a generation. When it reemerged at the century’s end,
TOCQUEVILLE’S PROPHECY: THE UNITED STATES AND THE CARIBBEAN, 1850–1871 223

the brightest boasts of the Reconstruction era—the promises that defied

Tocqueville’s prophecy—were a distant memory.

NOTES
1. I have overlooked the handful of (very small) islands claimed by
American citizens under the eccentric provisions of the Guano
Islands Act of 1856. See Natsu Taylor Saito, Meeting the Enemy:
American Exceptionalism and International Law (New York:
New York University Press, 2010), 139–142.
2. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeve,
2 vols. (New York: J. & H.G. Langley, 1841), 1: 406–407, 409.
3. Franklin W. Knight, The Caribbean: The Genesis of a Fragmented
Nationalism, second edition (New York: Oxford University Press,
1990); Luis Martínez-Fernández, Torn Between Empires: Economy,
Society, and Patterns of Political Thought in the Hispanic Caribbean,
1850–1878 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994); Eugenio
Matibag, Haitian-Dominican Counterpoint: Nation, State, and
Race on Hispaniola (New York: Palgrave, 2003); Lars Schoultz,
Beneath the United States: A History of U.S.  Policy toward Latin
America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998),
39–58; Brian Loveman, No Higher Law: American Foreign Policy
and the Western Hemisphere since 1776 (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2010), 40–52; Jay Sexton, The Monroe
Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America
(New York: Hill and Wang, 2011), 47–84; Louis A. Pérez Jr., On
Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality & Culture (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 17–38; Robert E. May,
The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 1854–1861 (Gainesville:
University Press of Florida, 2002), 3–21.
4. Knight, The Caribbean, 159–192; Matibag, Haitian-Dominican
Counterpoint, 81–130; Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom:
Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1938
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).
5. Alfred N.  Hunt, Haiti’s Influence on Antebellum America:
Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 1988), 107–192; Edward Bartlett Rugemer,
The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American
Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008);
224 N. GUYATT

Gale L.  Kenny, Contentious Liberties: American Abolitionists in

Post-emancipation Jamaica, 1834–1866 (Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 2010); Matthew J.  Clavin, Toussaint Louverture
and the American Civil War: The Promise and Peril of a Second
Haitian Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2010). John Bigelow, Jamaica in 1850: Or, the Effects of
Sixteen Years of Freedom on a Slave Colony (New York: George
P.  Putnam, 1851). Sumner to Brougham, Apr. 11 and June 20,
1858, in The Selected Letters of Charles Sumner, ed. Beverly Wilson
Palmer, 2 vols. (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990), 1:
506, 503.
6. Matibag, Haitian-Dominican Counterpoint, 114. Martínez-
Fernández, Torn Between Empires, 28–30, 40–49. Hudson, Mistress
of Manifest Destiny: A Biography of Jane McManus Storm Cazneau
(Austin: Texas State Historical Society, 2001), 148–156. “Our
Relations with Dominica,” New York Daily Times, Oct. 20, 1855,
p. 1.
7. Martínez-Fernández, Torn Between Empires, 49–57; Schoultz,
Beneath the United States, 51–58; Congressional Globe, 35 Cong.,
2 sess., February 17, 1859, 1084; ibid., Jan. 24, 1859, 539.
8. ibid., February 11, 1859,  961–962. Congressional Globe, 32
Cong., 2 sess., Jan. 3, 1853, 193–195. James Henry Hammond,
“Speech at Barnwell Court House, Oct. 29, 1858,” in Selections
from the Letters and Speeches of the Hon. James H.  Hammond
(New York: John F.  Trow, 1866), 323–357. Even the North
American Review concluded that acquiring Cuba’s slave system
would enable Virginia, Kentucky, and Delaware “the more speed-
ily [to] become free.” “Cuba and the Cubans,” North American
Review 79 (1854): 109–137, 133. On Walker and the diffusion
of slavery, see Thomas R.  Hietala, Manifest Design: American
Exceptionalism and Empire (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
2003), 26–54.
9. Appendix to the Congressional Globe, 33 Cong., 2 sess., Jan. 15,
1855,  91–94 (Boyce); ibid., 35 Cong., 2 sess., February 17,
1859,  1080 (Chandler); ibid., February 21, 1859,  1181
(Collamer); ibid., Jan. 24, 1859, 538 (Seward).
10. Appendix to the Congressional Globe, 35 Cong., 2 sess., February
10, 1859, 148. Congressional Globe, 35 Cong., 2 sess., February
25, 1859, 1337.
TOCQUEVILLE’S PROPHECY: THE UNITED STATES AND THE CARIBBEAN, 1850–1871 225

11. Congressional Globe, 35 Cong., 2 sess., February 9, 1859, 907;

Frank P.  Blair Jr., The Destiny of the Races of this Continent
(Washington, D.C.: Buell & Blanchard, 1859), 23–24. See also
Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American
Slavery (New York: Norton, 2010), 123–131; Mark E.  Neely,
“Colonization and the Myth that Lincoln Prepared the People for
Emancipation,” in Lincoln’s Proclamation: Emancipation
Reconsidered, ed. William A.  Blair and Karen Fisher Younger
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 45–74;
and Elbert B. Smith, Francis Preston Blair (New York: Free Press,
1980), 249–255, 319–324.
12. Charles Sumner to the Duchess of Argyll, Mar. 30, 1858, in
Palmer, ed., Selected Letters, 1: 497. Lincoln to James T. Hale, Jan.
11, 1861, in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy
E.  Basler, 8 vols. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,
1953–1955), 4: 172.
13. Seward to Lincoln, Apr. 1, 1861, in ibid., 4: 316–318. James
W. Cortada, Spain and the American Civil War: Relations at Mid-
Century, 1855–1868 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical
Society, 1980), 30–33; Matibag, Haitian-Dominican
Counterpoint,  119–121; William D.  Phillips Jr. and Carla Rahn
Phillips, A Concise History of Spain (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010), 220; Martínez-Fernández, Torn Between
Empires, 208–222.
14. Cortada, Spain and the American Civil War, 34–37. Carl Schurz
to Abraham Lincoln, 5 Apr. 1861, Abraham Lincoln Papers, Series
1. General Correspondence, 1833–1916, Library of Congress.
Howard Jones, Abraham Lincoln and a New Birth of Freedom: The
Union and Slavery in the Diplomacy of the Civil War (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 40–41.
15. Abraham Lincoln, “Annual Message to Congress,” Dec. 3, 1861,
in Basler, ed., Collected Works, 5: 48, 39. See also Foner, Fiery
Trial, 171–189.
16. Proceedings of the National Emigration Convention of Colored
People (Pittsburgh: A.A.  Anderson, 1854). James Holly, A
Vindication of the Capacity of the Negro Race (New Haven: William
H. Stanley, 1857). See also James T. Campbell, Middle Passages:
African American Journeys to Africa, 1787–2005 (New York:
Penguin, 2006), 57–98; and Chris Dixon, African America and
226 N. GUYATT

Haiti: Emigration and Black Nationalism in the Nineteenth

Century (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000), 87–175.
17. Ibid., 129–141, 145–167. Douglass’ Monthly, Jan. 1861,
pp.  386–387. Frederick Douglass, “The Haytian Emigration
Movement,” Independent, 27 June 1861, p. 1. John R. McKivigan,
Forgotten Firebrand: James Redpath and the Making of Nineteenth-
Century America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), 61–71.
Hunt, Haiti’s Influence, 173–177.
18. Lincoln, “Address on Colonization to a Deputation of Negroes,”
Aug. 14, 1862, in Basler, ed., Collected Works, 5: 370–375. Foner,
Fiery Trial, 223–227, 239–240. Kate Masur, “The African
American Delegation to Abraham Lincoln: A Reappraisal,” Civil
War History   56 (2010): 117–144. Willis D.  Boyd, “The Île à
Vache Colonization Venture, 1862–1864,” The Americas 16
(1859): 45–62.
19. Phillip W.  Magness and Sebastian N.  Page, Colonization After
Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011); Green Smith of
Kentucky proposed sending black troops to expel the French
regime in Mexico: Congressional Globe, 38 Cong., 2 sess., Jan. 12,
1865, 236–237. For Republican endorsements of black migration
to the tropics in Jan. 1865, see the speeches of William D. Kelley,
ibid., Jan. 16, 1865,  287; and James Patterson, ibid., Jan. 28,
1865, 484. On the investigation into the Île à Vache debacle, see
Boyd, “Île à Vache,” 56.
20. John L.  Phelan, “Pan-Latinism, French Intervention in Mexico
(1861–1867) and the Genesis of the Idea of Latin America,” in Juan
A. Ortega y Medina, ed., Conciencia y autenticidadhistóricas(Mexico
City: Universidad Autónoma de México, 1968), 279–298. Michel
Gobat, “The Invention of Latin America: A Transnational History of
AntiImperialism, Democracy, and Race,” American Historical Review,
118, 5 (2013): 1345–1375. Matibag, Haitian-Dominican
Counterpoint, 121–124. Loveman, No Higher Law, 122–123; Thomas
David Schoonover, Dollars Over Dominion: The Triumph of Liberalism
in Mexican-United States Relations, 1861–1867 (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 178–211.
21. Matthew Pratt Guterl, American Mediterranean: Southern
Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2008), 84–113; Caroline P. Boyd, “A Man for All
Seasons: Lincoln in Spain,” in The Global Lincoln, ed. in Richard
TOCQUEVILLE’S PROPHECY: THE UNITED STATES AND THE CARIBBEAN, 1850–1871 227

Carwardine and Jay Sexton (New York: Oxford University Press,

2011), 189–205; and Lisa Surwillo, “Poetic Diplomacy: Carolina
Coronado and the American Civil War,” Comparative American
Studies 5 (2007): 409–422; Luis A.  Figueroa, Sugar, Slavery, &
Freedom in Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 107–108; Cortada,
Spain and the American Civil War, 89–93; Phillips Jr. and Phillips,
Concise History of Spain, 220–221; Martínez-Fernández, Torn
Between Empires, 187–208. Christopher Schmidt-Nowara has
argued that the abolition movement in the Spanish Caribbean was
dominated by Puerto Ricans rather than Cubans: Schmidt-Nowara,
“Emancipation,” in The Oxford Handbook of Slavery in the
Americas, ed. Robert L.  Paquette and Mark M.  Smith (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2010), 589–590, 595n; and Schmidt-
Nowara, Empire and Antislavery: Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico,
1833–1874 (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 1999),
14–50.
22. Frederick W.  Seward, Seward at Washington as Senator and
Secretary of State (New York: Derby and Miller, 1891), 306–318.
23. Congressional Globe, 40 Cong., 2 sess., Mar. 18, 1868,
pp. 1967–1968. Stevens to Seward, Apr. 11, 1867, and Seward to
Stevens, Apr. 11, 1867, in The Selected Papers of Thaddeus Stevens,
ed. Beverly Wilson Palmer and Holly Byers Ochoa, 2 vols.
(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997–1998), 2:
303–304. Martínez-Fernández, Torn Between Empires, 222–224;
Matibag, Haitian-Dominican Counterpoint, 124–126.
24. “Cuba Forbidden Fruit,” Atlanta Constitution, Apr. 14, 1869, p. 2.
“The Isles of the Sea,” New York Times, Oct. 17, 1868, p. 4. “Cuba—
Sale of the Island to the United States,” ibid., Dec. 15, 1868, p. 11;
“The Annexation Mania—Cuba and Santo Domingo,” ibid., Apr. 8,
1869, p. 4. Pérez Jr., Cuba and the United States, 50–53.
25. Rebecca J. Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to
Free Labor, 1860–1899 (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1985), 45–62; Scott, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba
After Slavery (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005),
94–104; Louis A. Pérez Jr., Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution,
third edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 83–93;
and Ada Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution,
1868–1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1999), 22–42; Charles Sumner, “National Affairs at Home and
228 N. GUYATT

Abroad,” in The Works of Charles Sumner, 15 vols. (Boston: Lee

and Shepard, 1870–1883), 13: 123. William Lloyd Garrison,
“Spain and Cuba,” Independent, Jan. 27, 1870, p. 1.
26. Appendix to the Congressional Globe, 41Cong., 2 sess., Feb. 5,
1870, p. 89; Congressional Globe, 41 Cong., 2 sess., June 14, 1870,
p. 4437. Charles C. Tansill, The United States and Santo Domingo,
1798–1873: A Chapter in Caribbean Diplomacy (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins Press, 1938), 338–464; Allison L. Sneider, Suffragists in
an Imperial Age: U.S.  Expansion and the Woman Question,
1870–1929 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); 19–55;
and Nicholas Guyatt, “America’s Conservatory: Race,
Reconstruction, and the Santo Domingo Debate,” Journal of
American History 97 (2011): 974–1000.
27. Frederick Douglass, “Santo Domingo—No. 4,” New National
Era, Apr. 27, 1871, p.  2. “Memorandum Accompanying
Proposition for Annexation, Sept. 4, 1869,” New York Times, Apr.
30, 1870, p. 2.Guyatt, “America’s Conservatory,” 978–985, 995.
28. “Cuba: Sale of the Island to the United States,” New York Times,
Dec. 15, 1868, p.  11. “The San Domingo Government in
Congress,” New York Tribune, Feb. 10, 1869, p. 4.
29. Ulysses S.  Grant, “Reasons Why Santo Domingo Should be
Annexed to the United States,” in The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant,
ed. John Y.  Simon, 30 vols. (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1967–2008), 10: 74–76; Grant, “Eighth Annual
Message to Congress,” Dec. 5, 1876, in ibid., 28: 68–69. “The
President’s Message,” New York Tribune, Dec. 6, 1876, p.  6.
Ulysses S.  Grant, Personal Memoirs of U.S.  Grant, 2 vols.(New
York: Charles Webster & Company, 1892), 2: 550; Grant,
“Interview with the New York Herald,” July 24, 1878, in Simon,
ed., Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, 28: 431–32.
30. Emeterio S.  Santovenia, Lincoln in Martí: A Cuban View of
Abraham Lincoln, trans. Donald F.  Fogelquist (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1953), 3–4; Rebecca Scott,
Slave Emancipation in Cuba, 38. Holt, The Problem of Freedom,
263–264; Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished
Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 158–160,
176–184. Esther Allen, ed. and trans., José Martí: Selected
Writings (New York: Penguin, 2002), 176–182, 261–267. Mary
Clemmer Ames, “Personal Traits of Charles Sumner,”
Independent, Apr. 23, 1874, p. 1.
TOCQUEVILLE’S PROPHECY: THE UNITED STATES AND THE CARIBBEAN, 1850–1871 229

31. See, especially, Tocqueville’s 1841 “Essay on Algeria,” in Jennifer

Pitts, ed. and trans., Alexis de Tocqueville: Writings on Empire and
Slavery (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001),
59–116; and Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial
Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2006), 204–239; Appendix to the Congressional Globe, 41
Cong, 3 sess., Jan. 11, 1871, 28–29. For other Republican schemes
promoting colonization/segregation in this period, see Nicholas
Guyatt, “‘An Impossible Idea?’ The Curious Career of Internal
Colonization,” Journal of the Civil War Era, 4, 2 (2014):
234–263.
32. Charles Sumner, Are We a Nation? Address of Hon. Charles Sumner
(New York: New  York Young Men’s Republican Union, 1867),
33–34; Congressional Globe, 42 Cong., 1 sess., Mar. 27, 1871,
p.  305. David Donald, Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), 517.
 CHAPTER 13

Reconstructing Plantation Dominance

in British Honduras: Race and Subjection
in the Age of Emancipation

Zach Sell

At the 1868 Louisiana State Fair, a large crowd gathered at an exhibition

dedicated to the display of colonial products from British Honduras. At
one table, spectators looked at exemplary lumber. At another table sat sev-
eral jars of different grades of sugar—“all of Colonial manufacture.”1 The
cane was “enormous,” a journalist wrote, adding that “planters should
see it.”2 For planters in New Orleans to see such sugar in the wake of the
American Civil War was to imagine the process of plantation production.
To see sugar in Louisiana was to know the possibility of sugar planta-
tions in the aftermath of emancipation in the American South. The visceral
impact that such sights had on individuals who thought that their lives as
planters and as white people had been destroyed by Civil War could not
be represented in print.
In April 1868, two months after the Louisiana State Fair, The British
Honduras Colonist noted that for the past four or five months, vessels con-
tinuously arrived at the wharf of Belize with passengers from the southern
United States. Following the Civil War, hundreds of Southerners migrated

Z. Sell ( )
University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Champaign,
IL, United States

© The Author(s) 2016 231

J. Nagler et al. (eds.), The Transnational Significance of the
American Civil War, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40268-0_13
232 Z. SELL

to British Honduras.3 Perhaps few, if any, of these passengers attended the

fair. Yet, many imagined sugarcane growing on plantations and estates that
they would manage or own. In British Honduras, already settled whites,
colonial officials, and landholding companies engaged in similar imagina-
tions. A columnist for the British Honduras Colonist described his vision
of arriving planters transforming the small colony, causing sugar to depose
mahogany (then the colony’s most important export) as king.4 Arriving
white Southerners would transform British Honduras into a colony of
“rich fields of the world-famed golden cane.”5 If capital and labor could
be obtained, these rich fields of cane would reach vast export markets and
“capitalists” would have no reason to be concerned about the safety of
their investments.
In 1866, Samuel McCutchon, a former slave-owning planter and
Confederate Army colonel, relocated from south Louisiana to British
Honduras. In British Honduras, McCutchon worked as a sugar planta-
tion manager for the England-based Young, Toledo and Company on the
Regalia Estate along the Sittee River. In St. Charles Parish, Louisiana,
McCutchon was known for his methodical management and organization
of Ormond plantation.6 His success in business as a slave-owning planter
made him seem crucially important to Young, Toledo and Company.
Along with the British Honduras Company, the company was the largest
landowning company in British Honduras; both owned nearly a million
acres of land each by the 1860s.7
Following the defeat of the Confederacy, McCutchon’s move from the
American South to British Honduras was the result of the interlocking
histories of race, colonialism, and capital spanning continents and empires.
In British Honduras, McCutchon’s organization of plantation labor,
practices of land management, and development of plantation machin-
ery were part of an effort to reconstruct relations of social domination in
British Honduras following African American emancipation. Slavery and
slave-owning in the American South, through which McCutchon made
himself, had been destroyed and would never return. Yet, in moving to
British Honduras to manage the Regalia Estate, McCutchon moved into
a profession where his skills as both a planter and settler would continue
to have currency. McCutchon’s movement from plantation slavery in the
American South to colonial plantation management in British Honduras
reveals the continuing significance of US planters to projects of colonial
economic transformation following African American emancipation.
***
 RECONSTRUCTING PLANTATION DOMINANCE IN BRITISH HONDURAS: RACE... 233

The Civil War is often framed as a clash between two competing, nation-
bound modes of production. Within this narrative, the North, based upon
burgeoning industrial capitalism, diverges from the slaveholding South
which is defined by pre-capitalist paternalism.8 During the American Civil
War, southern pre-capitalism is defeated by northern capitalism consoli-
dated around the settler ideology of “free soil, free labor, and free men.”
When situated in relation to the transnational circuits of capital,
this history appears much different. The particularity of black exploita-
tion through settler slavery in the American South made it integral to
factory production in Lancashire, England, the center of the Industrial
Revolution. The singular relationship between the American South and
the British Empire engendered searches for other domains for planta-
tion production not least because of the explosive instability of enslaving
regimes. From India, Natal, Fiji, Egypt, to the American West and else-
where, industrial and colonial interests such as the Manchester Cotton
Supply Association sought to further incorporate colonized regions into a
capitalist order through the expansion of cotton cultivation.9
Scholars have been attentive to this dynamic and the Civil War’s
impact upon “the worldwide web of cotton.”10 Yet the Civil War and
black emancipation’s impact upon other transnational circuits of agricul-
tural commodity production is often less apparent and less understood.
Though cotton was king in the American South, the region was also
central to the production of sugar, wheat, tobacco, and rice. The Civil
War and black emancipation unevenly impacted all of these commodity
chains. In Australia, the first major increase in tobacco production was
brought about by the Civil War.11 Rice plantations in North and South
Carolina provided most of Britain’s rice before the Civil War. When culti-
vation in North and South Carolina decreased dramatically with the out-
break of the Civil War, there was a global response.12 The British Empire,
having annexed Burma in 1855, began to work toward the introduction
of large rice paddy plantations in the face of decreased supply caused by
the Civil War.13
Sugar cultivation in the United States offers a striking example of
how regionally cultivated plantation commodities produced for national
consumption engendered transnational transformations following black
emancipation in the United States. Before the Civil War, south Louisiana
was among the wealthiest plantation districts in the United States.14
Throughout the nineteenth century, Louisiana’s sugar-producing planta-
tions accounted for 90 percent of US production.15 Though the United
234 Z. SELL

States did not generally export sugar, when the sugar economy of south
Louisiana collapsed during the Civil War, so did one of the most con-
centrated sites of sugar production in the world. In a section entitled
“To Capitalists” from a report on the productivity of sugar plantations,
Louis and Alcée Bouchereau noted that the Civil War had caused produc-
tive sugar plantations to cease operations. As one planter noted, “With
Capital in the hands of our planters, we would rapidly recuperate, and
progress with the giant strides peculiar to all American enterprise.”16
At the same time, sugar production did not decrease. In 1860, the
amount of global cane sugar production was estimated at 1,510,000
tons increasing in 1870 to 1,585,000.17 The increase in production was
accompanied by the expansion of plantation enterprise. This occurred
in both small and dramatic ways. In Hawaii, for example, sugar produc-
tion increased significantly between 1860 and 1870 from approximately
750 tons to roughly 7,700.18 This increase was the result of technological
developments and price increases from the Civil War and a product of
the depression in supply from south Louisiana.19 The establishment of
such new sugar plantations was based upon the extension, expansion, and
refinement of forms of indigenous and Chinese labor exploitation.
British Honduras was united with other mid-nineteenth-century colo-
nial domains such as Fiji, India, Natal, Burma, New Zealand, Australia,
Hawaii, and the American West not only through commodity chains but
also through rules of colonial and racial difference. These regimes were
impacted by black emancipation in the United States just as enslavement
in the United States transformed in relation to black emancipation in the
Caribbean. The Haitian Revolution, after all, in part made the ascent of
sugar production through black enslavement in south Louisiana possible.20
In and beyond the United States, settlers were integral to projects for
the extension of colonial and national rule. In a letter sent to The British
Honduras Colonist, white Texan settler Z. N. Morrell wrote of his first day
in British Honduras: “you would have been reminded of Texas 30 years
ago, in examining the maps of the country, and to see emigrants scatter-
ing in every direction.”21 Morrell’s memory draws attention to the settler-
expansionist impulse of the American South. Sugar and cotton planters
needed constantly to relocate because of soil depletion caused by plantation
cultivation. In order to secure white planters’ safety, British Honduras
policed an ever-shifting frontier region to prevent attacks by the Maya.
These efforts to police the frontier and the arrival of war-hardened planters
became increasingly bound together. White Southerners seemed necessary
 RECONSTRUCTING PLANTATION DOMINANCE IN BRITISH HONDURAS: RACE... 235

not only for managing labor but also for protecting landed property inter-
ests against the Santa Cruz Maya. As the manager for the British Honduras
Company wrote, “the importation of energetic Americans accustomed to
arms” would provide an example of “self-reliance in securing safety to life
and property within the Colony.”22
While white Southerners were seen as necessary for challenging Maya
claims against colonial interests, planters also believed it was necessary
to remove Maya cultural influences to ensure efficient sugar cultivation.
Maya culture was seen as deleterious to plantation culture and settler sug-
gestions argued the necessity of reshaping colonial culture in a way that
replicated the United States.  In particular, Xaibe, a Maya festival that
occurred in May, was seen by planters as an impediment to plantation
production that should be eliminated.23 According to one Sugar Cane
observer, laborers took a week off to participate in the festival. Though
planters recognized the celebration as an “odious saturnalia,” they felt
that they were forced to accept laborers participation in order to maintain
labor control. The Sugar Cane writer continued:

However much this necessity might have been felt in the infancy of the
colony, when the staple of the country was mahogany and logwood, which
required no continuous labour save at one season of the year; now that
attention is to be turned to agriculture, and especially to the cultivation of
the cane and the manufacture of sugar, which, more than any other spe-
cies of industry, require constant application and uninterrupted labour; to
submit to such a sacrifice at the shrine of Bacchus, and countenance and
encourage a usage whose advent occurs at a critical time, in the midst of
crop, when the utmost energy and exertion are required to reap the reward
of all the planter’s previous toil—is a suicidal policy that must subvert his
best interests, and entail ruin in the end.24

The anonymous author further suggested that Xaibe be substituted

with another holiday celebration around Christmas time. Such a sug-
gestion to reorganize time mirrored the holiday practice of the antebel-
lum South where it was custom for enslaved people to receive a week
off during Christmas. Frederick Douglass noted that the holiday which
lasted a week in the American South was “part and parcel of the gross
fraud, wrong, and inhumanity of slavery” because it was a mechanism
of social control that presented planters as benevolent while obscuring
their brutality.25 Undergirding the suggestion that Xaibe be revoked
in favor of a Christmas celebration is an acknowledgement that such a
236 Z. SELL

transformation would enact white control over celebratory leisure time

giving whites the power to revoke the holiday, if necessary. The push
toward revoking Xaibe was an attempt to make time align with planta-
tion production. May was a time of intense activity on sugar plantations
while December was relatively lax.
***
The wide-ranging Immigration Act of 1861 was central to the recruit-
ment of labor intended to transform the economic foundations of the
colony toward one based upon the export of agricultural production. The
Act was variously deployed in efforts to obtain laborers from Cuba, the
United States, Barbados, India, China, West Africa, and elsewhere to do
the work of agricultural cultivation. The most sustained efforts to bring
labor to the colony involved first a project to recruit African American
laborers during the American Civil War. The failure of this project was
followed by a turn toward Chinese indentured labor which arrived in the
colony in 1865.
The recruitment of emancipated African Americans for colonial agri-
cultural production was a significant transnational experiment involving
both the North and South. In 1863, for example, a colony of liberated
African Americans was brought—along with white American plantation
overseers—to Haiti to establish an experimental cotton plantation at Île
à Vache. The effort failed as recently emancipated African Americans
refused to labor on plantations and to work for former overseers just as
they would refuse to work in intensive sugar plantation production in
south Louisiana just a few years later.26 In their important Colonization
after Emancipation, Phillip Magness and Sebastian Page have described
the failed efforts of Abraham Lincoln to colonize African Americans in
British Honduras following the Emancipation Proclamation and before
Abraham Lincoln’s death.27 The two note the interest in colonization in
British Honduras within Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet. This interest was
coordinated with the British government in its broader attempt to secure
labor and transform agriculture in the colony.
However, in British Honduras, colonization after emancipation took a
different form than first explored by either the Lincoln cabinet or British
colonial officials. Rather than for emancipated African Americans, British
Honduras became an important location in the “Confederate diaspora”—
the movement of white Southerners, often planters, from the American
South following the war to locations including Brazil, Mexico, and British
Honduras.28 In British Honduras, the technical, managerial, and settling
 RECONSTRUCTING PLANTATION DOMINANCE IN BRITISH HONDURAS: RACE... 237

techniques of war-hardened planters such as Samuel McCutchon became

seen as integral to the introduction of plantation-based sugar cultivation.
By 1870, after McCutchon began to manage sugar production at the
Regalia Estate for Young, Toledo and Company, it was estimated that the
plantation was cultivating sugarcane on 250 acres of land.29 Such increases
in production and McCutchon’s ability to realize them through the
exploitative organization of labor caused The British Honduras Colonist
to report that sugarcane production in British Honduras would “astonish
planters and agriculturalists of other sugar producing countries.”30
McCutchon was brutal and methodical in organizing and managing
plantations in St. Charles Parish, Louisiana. McCutchon organized the
cooking of meals according to those who could no longer perform field-
work—a practice that followed common plantation managerial wisdom.
Further, McCutchon standardized labor organization and effectively dif-
ferentiated skilled and unskilled occupations to maximize production.31
In his 1861 Ormond plantation journals, McCutchon offered descriptive
details of the types of labor different enslaved people were to perform and
the levels of experience such work positions required. This ordering of
labor practices between unskilled and skilled differentiated enslaved labor
according to age and gender, having women perform different work than
men at different levels of intensity in order to maximize productivity.
In his journal, McCutchon meticulously noted when enslaved laborers
were sick and regularly calculated their value in inventories. At the same
time, McCutchon was attentive to the technological processes of sugar
cultivation and observant of global innovations. Employing advanced
technology, McCutchon’s sugar plantations in south Louisiana came to
resemble a “factory in the field.”32 By 1849, the Ormond plantation had
850 arpents (a little over 700 acres) of sugar plantation land in active
cultivation.
Writing for De Bow’s Review, Charles A.  Pilsbury reflected upon the
importance of white Southern planters in the introduction of new tech-
niques of plantation management in British Honduras, noting that planta-
tions had become “scientific” with the migration of white Southerners.33
Further, the movement of Southern planters like McCutchon was seen
by white colonists in British Honduras as essential for procuring invest-
ments in sugar plantation production: “If the events shall demonstrate
that the Southern planters have neither miscalculated the resources of
British Honduras nor the effect of their own energy, British capitalists will
speedily show the sagacity in recognizing this new channel of profitable
238 Z. SELL

employment.”34 Such forms of agricultural collaboration were meant to

enable the reconstruction of white racial dominance while also increasing
the value of colonial land.
Southern planters like McCutchon were seen as integral to the estab-
lishment of plantation regimes as managers of land and labor with knowl-
edge about sugar cultivation. As an organizer of production, McCutchon
had demonstrated an ability to mobilize violence against a hierarchically
divided labor force in St. Charles Parish. At Regalia Estate, McCutchon
demonstrated an interest in the use of scientific methods of machine
production for the cultivation of sugar, drawing upon techniques used
in other parts of the Caribbean. This increased reliance upon the use of
machines was meant to address labor scarcity in the colony. As one plan-
tation observer noted, technological innovations “greatly reduced the
amount of hand labour required” making it possible to “dispense with the
[N]egro and replace him with European skill.”35
Yet, despite such aspirations for technological innovation to displace
dependence upon black labor, estates such as Regalia instead relied upon
new forms of racialized labor exploitation. In 1865, 474 Chinese inden-
tured laborers arrived in British Honduras aboard the Light of the Age. The
experience of these laborers was defined by plantation exploitation and
violence backed by the colonial state. By March 1869, 109 Chinese labor-
ers had died in the colony.36 Chinese laborers resisted these conditions in
a variety of ways including through mass desertion when more than 100
laborers abandoned plantations to join the Santa Cruz Maya.37
At Regalia Estate, McCutchon employed a system of management that
depended upon both Chinese indenture in addition to labor from the
region. In 1868, Regalia relied upon a labor force of nearly one hundred
which included sixty Chinese indentured laborers. The deaths of Chinese
laborers on Regalia reflected broader patterns of conflict and violence
between indentured laborers, planters, and the colonial state. At Regalia,
So Tsing Whan drowned on 16 April 1868, on 18 March 1868 Si Tsai and
another Chinese laborer died of “sunstroke.”38
The death of So Tsing Whan in April 1868 provides insight into the
extreme forms of violence undergirding everyday relations at the Regalia
Estate. On 16 April 1868, ten Chinese laborers were sent to clear land
on a neighboring estate in return for carpentry services. The laborers’
driver returned to complain about a work stoppage and Regalia’s over-
seer George Hyde was sent for. When Hyde arrived, he demanded to be
shown the leader of the work stoppage. When Whan was pointed out,
 RECONSTRUCTING PLANTATION DOMINANCE IN BRITISH HONDURAS: RACE... 239

Hyde brought him to a nearby estate. According to McCutchon, when

Hyde was visiting the estate’s sugar house, “the Chinaman walked in the
river and was drowned.”39 So Tsing was brought from the river by fellow
laborers and his body was taken to their quarters at Regalia. When planta-
tion managers and police arrived, the men refused to remove So Tsing’s
body. Laborers allegedly also stated their desire to kill Hyde for his respon-
sibility in So Tsing’s death. At the following day’s inquest, the verdict was
“voluntary drowning” and in response Chinese laborers refused to return
to work. To break down the work stoppage, several striking laborers were
taken, imprisoned, and forced to two weeks’ hard labor on public roads.40
***
When W. E. B. Du Bois emphasized the necessity for considering “the
stretch in time and space between the deed and the result,” he was spe-
cifically addressing the complexity of colonial production and metropolitan
consumption. Yet, Du Bois’ emphasis also provides a vantage for considering
the continuing transnational impact of US slavery following the American
Civil War. While McCutchon and other white Southerners extended the cul-
tivation of sugar in British Honduras through brutal violence against labor,
their efforts ultimately failed to transform the economic basis of the colony.
The Light of the Age was the only ship of indentured laborers to arrive in the
colony during the period. Despite this, US planters’ involvement in the failed
project serves as a reminder that the stretch of time and space characterizing
US settler slavery’s impact extended past the US Civil War and beyond the
United States.41 These stretches also went far beyond such failures.

NOTES
1. The author is grateful to acknowledge support from the New
Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University for a
research grant which was indispensable to the completion of this
project. British Honduras Colonist, 29 February 1868.
2. Ibid.
3. On Southerners’ recruitment see: Donald C.  Simmons Jr.
Confederate Settlements in British Honduras (Jefferson, N.C.:
McFarland, 2001), 30–31.
4. On mahogany see: Barbara Bulmer-Thomas and Victor Bulmer-
Thomas, The Economic History of Belize: From the Seventeenth
Century to Post-Independence (Benque Vieo del Carmen: Cubola
Books, 2012), 97.
240 Z. SELL

5. British Honduras Colonist, 11 April 1868.

6. Records of Antebellum Southern Plantations from the Revolution through
the Civil War. University Publications of America. Samuel McCutchon
Papers. Microfilm. Series I, Pt. 1 Selections from Louisiana State
University: Reels 5–6. Hereafter cited as: Samuel McCutchon Papers.
7. O. Nigel Bolland and Assad Shoman, Land in Belize, 1765–1871
(Mona, Jamaica: Institute of Social and Economic Research,
University of the West Indies, 1977), 82.
8. David Roediger, “Pre-Capitalism in One Confederacy: A Note on
Genovese, Politics and the Slave South,” in Towards the Abolition
of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and Working Class History
(New York: Verso, 1994), 49–50. Seth Rockman, “Slavery and
Capitalism,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 2 (2012): 5.
9. Dwijendra Tripathi, “Opportunism of Free Trade: Lancashire
Cotton Famine and Indian Cotton Cultivation,” Indian Economic
& Social History Review 4 (1967): 255–263. William Otto
Henderson, The Lancashire Cotton Famine 1861–1865
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1934), 11. Matthew
A. Schnurr, “Commodity Cropping and the Delineation of
Agricultural Space in Natal, 1850–1863,” South African Historical
Journal 61 (2009): 138. R. Gerard Ward, “Land Use on Mago,
Fiji: 1865–1882,” The Journal of Pacific History 37 (2002): 103.
See further: Gerald Horne, The White Pacific: U.S.  Imperialism
and Black Slavery in the South Seas after the Civil War (Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press, 2007).
10. Sven Beckert, “Emancipation and Empire: Reconstructing the
Worldwide Web of Cotton Production in the Age of the American
Civil War,” The American Historical Review 109 (2004): 1405–1438.
11. A. V. Hill, “The Tobacco Industry in Australia,” Economic Botany
6, 2 (1952): 152.
12. Arthur H. Cole, “The American Rice-Growing Industry: A Study
of Comparative Advantage,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics
41 (1927): 619. Judith Carney, “Landscapes of Technology
Transfer: Rice Cultivation and African Continuities,” Technology
and Culture 37 (1996): 5. James H. Tuten, Lowcountry Time and
Tide: The Fall of the South Carolina Rice Kingdom (Columbia,
S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 2010), 26, 22–27.
13. David B.  Grigg, The Agricultural Systems of the World: An
Evolutionary Approach (New York: Cambridge University Press,
RECONSTRUCTING PLANTATION DOMINANCE IN BRITISH HONDURAS: RACE... 241

1974), 102. Cheng Siok Hwa, “The Development of the Burmese

Rice Industry in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Southeast
Asian History 6 (1965): 74.
14. Robert F. Pace, “‘It Was Bedlam Let Loose’: The Louisiana Sugar
Country and the Civil War,” Louisiana History 39 (1998): 389.
15. Ibid., 390. Mark Schmitz, “The Transformation of the Southern Cane
Sugar Sector: 1860–1930,” Agricultural History 53 (1979): 270–285.
16. L Bouchereau and A Bouchereau, Statement of the Sugar and Rice
Crops Made in Louisiana (New Orleans: Pelican Book and Job
Printing Office, 1869), 69. Not until the 1890s did Louisiana pro-
duction match pre-Civil War levels. Schmitz, “Transformation of
Southern Cane,” 271.
17. United States. Department of the Treasury Bureau of Statistics,
Monthly Summary of Commerce: World’s Sugar Production and
Consumption, 1800–1900, 1902. See also: “The World’s Sugar
Production and Consumption, 1800–1900,” The Louisiana
Planter and Sugar Manufacturer (Jan., 1902): 202.
18. Ralph S.  Kuykendall, Hawaiian Kingdom 1854–1874, Twenty
Critical Years (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1953), 141.
On sugar production in Hawaii see: Rebecca Stefoff and Ronald
T.  Takaki, Raising Cane: The World of Plantation Hawaii (New
York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1994). Takaki, Pau Hana:
Plantation Life and Labor in Hawaii, 1835–1920 (Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press, 1984).
19. Richard A. Hawkins, “The Impact of Sugar Cane Cultivation on
the Economy and Society of Hawaii, 1835–1900,” Illes I Imperis,
9 (Dec. 2006): 61.
20. Lacy K. Ford, Deliver Us from Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old
South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 104.
21. British Honduras Colonist, 11 April 1868. Morrell relocated from
Mississippi to Texas in the 1830s.
22. John Hodge to Lieutenant Governor J.  Gardiner Austin, 3 May
1866. CO 123/121, National Archives of the United Kingdom.
23. On Xaibe see: Rosemarie M. McNairn, “Baiting the British Bull: A
Fiesta, Trials, and a Petition in Belize,” The Americas 55 (1998):
240–274. Albert Muntsch, “Xaibe: A Mayan Enclave in Northern
British Honduras,” Anthropological Quarterly 34 (1961): 121–126.
24. “Rough Notes Taken on a Flying Visit to the Northern District of
British Honduras,” Sugar Cane (1 Jan. 1870): 29–30.
242 Z. SELL

25. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

(Clayton: Prestwick House Press, 2004), 65.
26. Consul Samuel B. Dutton, “Report Forwarded by the Foreign Office
Upon the Cultivation of Cotton in the District of Aux Cayes, Hayti,”
Cotton Supply Reporter 1 November 1866. Willis D. Boyd, “James
Redpath and American Negro Colonization in Haiti, 1860–1862,”
The Americas 12 (1955): 169–182. John R.  McKivigan, Forgotten
Firebrand: James Redpath and the Making of Nineteenth-Century
America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008).
27. Phillip Magness and Sebastian Page, Colonization after
Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011).
28. Matthew Pratt Guterl, American Mediterranean: Southern
Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2008). Gerald Horne, The Deepest South: The
United States, Brazil, and the African Slave Trade (New York:
New York University Press, 2007).
29. Great Britain. Parliament. “British Honduras,” House of Commons
Papers; Accounts and Papers, vol. 49 (1870), p. 28.
30. British Honduras Colonist, 14 March 1868.
31. Richard Follett, The Sugar Masters: Planters and Slaves in
Louisiana’s Cane World, 1820–1860. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 2005), 51, 98, 112.
32. James Oakes, The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders
(New York: Knopf, 1982), 153–91.
33. Charles A.  Pilsbury, “Southern Immigration—Brazil and British
Honduras” DeBow’s Review 4 (1867): 537–545.
34. British Honduras Colonist, 22 February 1868.
35. British Honduras Colonist, 14 March 1868.
36. “Register of Deaths Occurring Amongst the Immigrants of British
Honduras.” 107R307. Belize Archives and Records Services
(BARS).
37. Edwin Adolphus to Thomas Graham, 4 October 1866, 89r494.
BARS.
38. Samuel McCutchon Papers, 315–316.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid.
41. W.E.B. Du Bois, The World and Africa (New York: Viking Press,
1947), 42.
 INDEX

A Allen, Henry Watkins, 190

Abeokuta, 130, 133–6 American Colonization Society (ACS),
abolitionism/abolitionists, 8, 18, 52, 135–9, 210
53, 71, 78, 79, 109–43, 207, American exceptionalism, 212
218, 219 American Revolution, 36, 82, 121,
Abolition Society, 215 128, 153, 190, 192
Abraham Lincoln Association, 64n14 Anderson, Benedict R., 169
Abyssinians, 152 Anthony, Susan B., 120
Achaean League, 216 Appomattox, 15, 205, 214, 215
ACS. See American Colonization Apulia, 175, 178
Society (ACS) Arabs, 159, 163
Adam, I.P., 56 Argentina, 93
Adams Arkansas, 94, 140, 143
Charles Francis, Jr., 15, 19, 42, 100 Asante, 131, 136
Charles Francis, Sr., 20 Ashworth, Henry, 19
Henry, 99 Asia, 7, 25, 72, 190
John Quincy, 19 Aspinwall, William, 91, 96
Adams County, 177 Assing, Ottilie, 113, 114
Adler, Dorothy, 105n10 Australia, 233, 234
Adolphus, Edwin, 242n37 Austria, 2–3, 73, 119, 164, 197
Africa, 7, 8, 17, 20, 70, 74, 127–43,
163, 190, 236
Alabama, 22–4, 26, 84, 101, 130, B
172, 173 Báez, Buenaventura, 208, 216–18
Algeria, 195, 221, 222 Baltimore, 112

© The Author(s) 2016 243

J. Nagler et al. (eds.), The Transnational Significance of the
American Civil War, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40268-0
244 INDEX

Bancroft, George, 37, 41, 43 Bull, John, 75, 93

Banti, Alberto Maria, 164n164, Bull Run (battle of), 212
166n19 Bunch, Charleston Robert, 76
Barbados, 236 Burma, 233, 234
Bari, 178 Burritt, Elihu, 112
Baring
Alexander, 93
Thomas, 100 C
Baring Brothers, 92, 93, 95 Calabar (town of), 133
Bates, Joshua, 92, 95, 100 Calhoun, John C., 71, 199
Battle of Puebla, 196 Cambodia, 195
Beecher, Henry Ward, 114 Camillo Benso (Conte di Cavour),
Belize, 214, 231 160
Belmont, August, 92, 94, 97, 98, 103 Campania, 175, 178
Bend, Davis, 141, 142 Canada, 4, 211, 218
Benjamin, Judah P., 189, 198, 215 capital, 8, 20, 27, 91–6, 100, 101,
Bigelow, John, 207 103, 129, 173, 195, 206, 232–4
Bismarck, Otto von, 3, 4, 41, 190 foreign, 91, 92, 94–6, 101, 103,
Blair, Francis P., 211 206
Blight, David, 133, 161 capitalism, 3, 70, 129, 131, 142, 233
Bluntschli, Johann, 25, 26 global, 70
Boccaccio, 156 industrial, 3, 233
Bodin, Jean, 152 capitalists, 1, 16, 91, 94, 95, 97, 99,
Bonaparte, Charles Louis-Napoléon. 100, 102, 110, 129, 135, 141,
See Napoléon III 232–4, 237
borders, 20, 35, 56, 70, 104, 128, 162, American, 102
164, 195, 198, 199, 213, 215 British, 91, 95, 97, 100, 237
interior, 162 European, 94, 99
national, 35 Capitanata, 178
southern, 195, 199 Carey, Henry C., 78–80, 82–4
Brace, Charles Loring, 119 Caribbean, 9, 24, 73, 95, 104, 192,
Brazil, 18, 236 205–22
Bright, John, 55, 56, 58, 59 Cass
Britain. See Great Britain Lewis, 37
British Honduras, 9, 231–9 William, 20
Brown Central America, 137, 211, 212, 214,
John, 57, 113 221
William Wells, 112 Charmes, Gabriel, 26
Bruce, Wallace, 50 Chicago, 77, 79, 81
Bryan, Edward B., 72, 74 China, 4, 161, 163, 236
Buchanan, James, 37, 74, 80, 82, Chinese, 207, 234, 236, 238, 239
208, 211 Christopher Alan Bayly, 52
 INDEX 245

Church Missionary Society (CMS), American, 22, 138

133, 134, 140 global/international, 70, 74, 78
citizenship, 7, 33–45, 115, 118–20, oceanic, 16
122, 206, 210, 214, 215, 221, Comonfort, Ignacio, 189, 193
222 Confederacy, 8, 9, 20, 25, 27, 33, 38,
American/U.S., 33, 38, 39, 41, 39, 44, 76, 81, 83, 84, 94–100,
115, 222 128, 138, 140, 143, 169–78,
black, 215, 221 180, 189–200, 212, 219, 221
second-class, 206 Confederate
transformation of, 33, 34 agents, 96–8
volitional, 33–45 armies, 190, 199, 213
civilization, 16, 27, 101, 114, 119, leaders, 96, 190, 197
120, 122, 129, 137, 139, 156, officials, 38, 39, 198
158, 159, 163, 164, 197, 216 Confiscation Act (Second), 177
European, 158, 159, 163, 164 Congoes, 137, 138
Claiborne, John C., 73, 74 Congress, 25, 39, 40, 42, 43, 53, 82,
class, 34, 60, 93, 96–8, 101, 103, 110, 112, 154, 177, 208, 209, 212,
114, 117, 120, 129, 138, 154, 213, 217
159, 160, 162, 169, 170, 195, conscription, 33, 38, 39, 43–5, 162
198, 206 Cooke, Jay, 102, 103
conflict, 96 Coolie trade, 25
financial, 101, 103 Corn Laws, 18, 21, 53, 71
planter (see planter elite) Coronado, Carolina, 215
ruling, 138, 154, 159, 160, 170, cotton, 7, 8, 69–84, 94, 97–9, 135,
195, 198 141, 233, 234, 236
working, 34, 129 bonds, 98, 99
Cleveland, 213 cultivation, 233
Coahuila, 194 embargo, 97, 98
Cobb, Thomas R. R., 75 interests, 71, 77
Cobden, Richard, 18, 21, 23, 25, monopoly, 72
26, 58 Parliament, 72
Cochinchina, 195 plantations, 71
Collamer, Jacob, 209 planters, 72, 78, 80, 234
colony/colonies, 74, 100, 133, 134, South, 75–7, 79, 81, 82
153, 158, 206, 207, 210, 212, States, 76, 77, 80, 83
214, 232, 235, 236, 238, 239 trade, 70, 72, 80, 94
American, 153 Whigs, 77, 78
Dutch, 100 Crimea, 57
North African, 74 CSS Alabama, 22, 23
Colwell, Stephen, 80, 82 CSS Florida, 22, 23
commerce, 7, 16–19, 22, 24, 70, Cuba, 18, 24, 25, 72, 205–9, 211,
73–5, 77–9, 138, 198 215, 217–19, 222, 236
246 INDEX

Cubans, 209–11, 218, 221 emancipation, 5, 9, 24, 27, 45, 49, 53,
Czolgosz, Leon, 151 60, 61, 70, 71, 75, 110, 113,
118–20, 122, 129, 134, 139,
142, 169, 176, 177, 180, 205,
D 207, 208, 213, 217, 218, 221,
Dahomey, 130, 131, 136, 193 231–4, 236
Davis, Jefferson, 20, 81, 97, 141, 173 African American, 232
Davis, John, 179 age of, 231–9
Deep South, 70, 72–5, 78, 79, 83, black, 9, 118, 119, 233, 234
135, 209 British, 70, 207
Degler, Carl, 170 Catholic, 53
Delany, Martin R., 135, 136 slave, 171, 180, 232
democracy, 2, 53, 55, 57–61, 77, 119, West Indian, 71, 208
121, 122, 155, 190, 196, 206 Emancipation Proclamation, 100, 110,
Democratic Party, 71, 161 176, 177, 236
democrats, 60, 71, 72, 77–9, 112, England, 17, 21, 23, 24, 53, 56, 59,
113, 208, 210, 211, 214, 222 71, 73–6, 78, 80, 101, 114, 115,
Denmark, 79, 110 153, 155, 164, 189, 233
Deutsch, Karl, 153 European
diplomacy administrators (see European,
British, 24, 94 officials)
Civil War, 96 banks, 96
cotton, 7 capitalists/financiers, 8, 94, 97, 99
financial, 8, 96–8 colonial rule, 131, 132, 190
free trade, 16 colonists/settlers, 110, 137
gunboat, 93, 94 countries/nations/states, 39, 40,
Dominican Republic, 206–8, 212, 43, 158, 212
216, 218, 220 expansion, 70
Donatelli, Carmine “Crocco:,” 174 immigrants (see European,
Doolittle, James, 210 colonists/settlers)
Douglass, Frederick, 113, 117, 118, imperialism, 69
120, 218, 219, 221, 235 investors (see European, capitalists/
Douglas, Stephen, 53, 54 financiers)
Dred Scott decision, 33 merchants, 130, 132
Du Bois, W.E.B., 239 officials, 76, 82, 140
power/powers, 18, 70, 73, 76, 81,
83, 212
E proletariat/workers, 128, 141
Ecuador, 43 radicals/revolutionaries, 111, 114,
Edinburgh, 26, 49, 50, 60 140, 143
Egba Yoruba, 133 Europe/Europeans, 2, 5, 8, 9, 11, 18,
Egypt, 233 19, 21, 34, 35, 37, 39, 40, 43,
 INDEX 247

44, 51, 58, 59, 69, 70, 72–6, Frémont, John C., 95
81–4, 91, 92, 94, 96–102, French (people), 4, 9, 21, 26, 35, 37,
110–16, 119, 120, 122, 128–34, 38, 55, 56, 58, 97, 98, 112, 113,
137, 139, 140, 142, 143, 153–5, 134, 154, 190–8, 207, 215, 221
158, 159, 161, 163, 164, French Revolution, 34, 35, 37, 38,
169–71, 190, 191, 195, 196, 154
199, 200, 210–12, 218, 238 Fugitive Slave Act, 213
Ewe (African tribe), 131, 132
expansion/expansionists
American, 72, 190, 205, 207, 208, G
211, 217, 222 Garibaldi, Guiseppe, 113, 159, 174
British, 51 Garrison, William Lloyd, 59, 112,
cotton cultivation, 233 139, 218
European, 70 Gasparin, Compte Agénor de, 55, 58
territorial, 117, 211 Geffrard, Guillaume Fabre-Nicholas,
Expatriation Act of 1868, 43 193, 213, 216
gender, 34, 120, 156, 237
roles, 156
F Germany, 3, 4, 7, 27, 76, 91, 100,
Farnsworth, John F., 218 114–16, 119, 121, 153, 164,
Fenians, 41 190, 222
Field, David Dudley, 26 Gettysburg, 3
Fiji, 233, 234 Grant, Ulysses S., 142, 200, 221
finance, 7, 91–104 Great Britain, 6, 7, 34, 35, 43, 44,
American, 102–4 116, 194
foreign, 99 Grotius, Hugo, 17, 26
international/transnational, 91–104 Guyana, 214
Follen, Charles, 112
Forey, Élie Frédéric, 197
Forster, William, 3, 43, 170 H
Fort Sumter, 84, 151, 173 Habsburg monarchy, 3
Forty-Eighters, 113, 117, 118 Haiti, 177, 192, 193, 206–9, 212–21,
France, 5, 22, 34, 38, 72–4, 76, 81, 236
91, 104, 110, 114–16, 153, 164, Haitian Revolution, 177, 206, 207,
191, 194, 195, 198, 206, 208, 209
212, 215, 222 Hale, Edward Everett, 110
Franco-Prussian War, 121 Hammond, James Henry, 73, 74, 80,
Franklin, Benjamin, 19 209
Fraser, John, 99 Havana, 216, 220
free soil, 15–17, 75, 78, 83, 128, 129, Haven, Gilbert, 115
142, 233 Hawaii, 234
Freidel, Frank, 56, 57 Hawgood, John, 2
248 INDEX

Hecker, Friedrich, 113 King Cotton, 8, 70, 73, 74, 76, 77,
Heinzen, Karl, 115, 118, 120 80, 97
Holly, James, 157, 213 Know Nothings, 210
Howe, Samuel, 219 Knoxville, 173
Hungary/Hungarians, 2, 3, 119, 152 Kock, Bernard, 214
Ku Klux Klan, 222

I
Icarians, 131 L
Île à Vache, 214, 236 labor, 15–27, 44, 70, 71, 73, 77,
India, 78, 190, 211, 222, 233, 234, 80, 93, 121, 129–6, 140, 142,
236 159, 171, 192, 207–9, 218,
Indians, 71, 117, 192, 196, 205, 206, 232–9
208 black, 141, 238
Ireland, 41, 110, 114 coolie, 71
Isabel (Queen), 212, 215, 216 forced/unfree, 121, 171, 209
Italian government, 23, 171, 175, indentured, 236, 238, 239
178–81 laborers, 134, 192, 235–9. See also
Italians, 9, 23, 79, 112, 113, 152, workers
154–7, 159–63, 169–81 enslaved, 237
Italy/Italian Kingdom/Italian State, indentured, 238, 239
4, 8, 9, 27, 114, 121, 151–64, labor shortages, 73
170–2, 174–6, 178–81, 222 Lagos, 130, 133, 134, 135
Lancashire, 233
Latin America, 6, 9, 40, 43, 93, 94,
J 103, 214, 215
Jackson, Andrew, 2 Liberalism, 7, 49–61, 160
Jamaica, 207, 217, 220 Liberia, 136–9, 210, 213
James, CLR, 140 Lieber, Francis, 6, 17, 18, 22, 25,
Japan, 4, 27, 161 26, 116
Jefferson, Thomas, 36, 52 Lincoln, Abraham, 7, 16, 20, 23, 39,
Jeune Ecole, 26 49–61, 79, 83, 84, 100, 110,
Johnson, Andrew, 40, 61, 215, 217, 121, 137, 138, 172, 176–8, 195,
221, 222 211–16, 220, 221, 236
Jordan, Winthrop, 177 Lincoln administration, 16, 20, 195,
Juárez, Benito, 193–5, 200 214
Liverpool, 22, 72, 94, 98, 99
London, 20, 37, 74, 75, 92–5, 97, 98,
K 101–3, 111, 196, 197
Kansas, 74, 140, 211 London Stock Exchange, 93,
Kapp, Friedrich, 121, 122 94, 101
Kentucky, 50, 84, 209 López, Antonio, 193, 216
 INDEX 249

Lorimer, James, 26 Mississippi, 54, 71, 72, 81, 93, 94, 97,
Louisiana, 9, 81, 93, 130, 172, 189, 130, 140, 141, 172, 173, 176,
209, 210, 231–4, 236, 237 177, 209, 215
Louisiana Purchase, 93 Mississippi River, 54, 81, 140, 141,
Lovejoy, Elijah, 54 215
Lowell, James Russel, 58, 60 Mississippi Valley, 140–2
Lusitania, 15, 16 Missouri, 54, 140, 209, 211
Lyons, Richard, 82 Molyneaux, Edmund, 76
monarchy, 3, 155, 162, 195–9
Habsburg, 3
M Italian, 162
Mahan, Alfred Thayer, 27 plans for in Mexico, 244–46, 249
Manchester, 72, 233 Monroe Doctrine, 191, 195, 199,
Mann, Dudley, 73 212
Marcy, William, 20 Montgomery (Alabama), 76, 81, 83,
Martí, José, 221 172
Marx, Karl, 128, 142 Moore, Frank, 58
Maryland, 84, 209 Morant Bay, 220
Mason-Dixon Line, 94 Morgan, J.P., 93
Mason, James, 198 Morgan, J.S., 92, 94
Massachusetts, 92 Morrell, Z.N., 234
Maximilian, Ferdinand (Archduke), Morrill Tariff, 79, 81, 82
197, 198, 200, 215 Morse, John T., 42
Maya, 234, 235, 238 Motley, John Lothrop, 2, 5, 121
McCutchon, Samuel, 288, 294–97,
232, 236–9
McDuffie, George, 71 N
McKinley, William, 151 Napoléon III, 5, 82, 190, 194–6, 199,
Mexico City, 195, 197 212, 214, 215
Mexico/Mexicans, 4, 9, 43, 71, nationalism, 1, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 79, 102,
93, 104, 190–200, 205, 206, 110, 112, 116, 120, 152, 155–8,
209, 211, 212, 214, 215, 236 163, 164, 169, 170, 189–200,
Mezzogiorno, 169–81 211
migration, 7, 8, 16, 26, 35, 38, American, 155, 158, 160
44, 100, 110, 111, 114, 117, Bourbon and Italian, 171
119, 135, 137, 161, 209, 213, Confederate, 190, 191, 194
237 cosmopolitan, 117, 120
forced, 8 ethnic, 120, 122
Haitian, 209, 213 European revolutionary, 163
mass, 35, 44, 110 liberal, 8, 116, 164
transatlantic, 38 protective, 79
Mill, John Stuart, 52, 56, 58, 59 Southern, 189–200
250 INDEX

nationalists, 4, 18, 23, 79, 83, 111, Pitt, William, 97

112, 117, 118, 120, 154, 189, plantations, 9, 15, 24, 71, 114, 129,
191–3, 200 132, 140–2, 214, 231–9
Nat Turner rebellion, 206 cotton, 71, 236
naturalization, 35–8, 40–5, 156 rice, 233
Navigation acts, 16, 73, 75 sugar, 231, 232, 234, 236, 237
New England, 56, 78, 115 planter elite, 173
New Orleans, 76, 231 planters, 9, 72–4, 78, 80, 121, 128,
New York (state), 56, 58 173, 189, 209, 218, 232, 234–9
New York City, 56, 58, 82 Poinsett, Joel, 191
New York Stock Exchange, 102 Port-au-Prince, 216
New Zealand, 234 Portugal, 78
Nicaragua, 72 Powell, Samuel, 80
Nightingale (slave ship), 138, 139 Prussia/Prussian, 3, 35–8, 40–2, 44,
North Carolina, 173, 176 45, 112, 119
Northern Pacific Railroad, 103 Puebla, 195–7
Northwest Ordinance, 217 Puerto Rico, 205–7, 215, 217
Norton, Charles Eliot, 56, 58–60

Q
O Quintero, José Agustín, 194
O’Gorman, Richard, 189
Oneida, 131, 132
Community in New Zork, 132 R
Owen, Robert, 141 race, 9, 19, 22, 25, 34, 38, 45, 57, 95,
Oyo Empire, 133 103, 112, 116–20, 135,
189–200, 206, 208, 210, 214,
216, 219–22, 231–9
P negro, 135
Padmore, George, 140 relations, 112
palm oil, 130, 132, 135 war, 206, 221
Paris, 16, 19, 20, 23, 25, 98, 100, 111 white, 196
Declaration of, 16, 19, 20, 22, 23, racial
25, 52, 153, 222 differences, 205
Pax Britannica, 16 hierarchies, 192, 198, 209
Peabody, George, 92, 96, 100, 104 (in)justice, 121
Pennsylvania, 77–9 segregation, 162
Philadelphia, 78–80, 84, 114 racism, 136, 139, 140, 159, 161, 200
Phillips, Wendell, 54, 59, 207 radicalism, 8, 116, 142, 143
Pickett, John T., 194 reconstruction, 34, 45, 61, 122, 133,
Piedmontese Kingdom, 174 142, 143, 161, 163, 181, 206,
Pilsbury, Charles A., 237 214, 217, 220, 222, 237
Pittsburgh, 78, 118 reconstruction amendments, 45
 INDEX 251

Redpath, James, 213, 214 voting, 5

republicanism, 75, 76, 157, 212 women’s, 120
anti-slavery, 74 Rome, 156, 162, 164
Free Soil, 75 Rothschilds, 92, 94, 97–9, 101, 103
Republican Party, 20, 56, 61, 78, 95, Russia, 73, 79, 110, 114, 119, 208
121, 137, 161, 172, 211
Republicans, 5, 36, 51, 74, 75, 77–80,
82, 133, 177, 191, 208–15, 218 S
revolution(s), 8, 23, 34, 36–8, 44, 51, Samaná Bay, 208, 217
58, 69, 79, 80, 82, 83, 92, 98, Santana, Pedro, 208, 212, 215
110–17, 119–21, 128, 129, 134, Santo Domingo, 206, 212, 215,
136, 138, 140, 142, 143, 153–5, 219–22
157, 169–81, 189–200, 206, Sardinia, 151, 174
207, 209, 218, 233, 234 Savannah, 76
American, 34, 36, 51, 128, 153, Schurz, Carl, 114, 212, 219–2
154, 192 secession, 3, 8, 41, 69, 70, 72, 74–7,
Atlantic, 8, 110, 111, 143 80–3, 100, 121, 152, 158,
bourgeois/capitalist, 129 172–5, 198, 212, 218
conservative, 190 secession crisis, 72, 173, 175
Cuban, 218 secessionists, 3, 74–6, 80, 82, 121, 173
European, 8, 110, 111, 140, 163, Seward, William, 39–41, 45, 77, 122,
191 137, 209, 211, 212, 214–16
French, 35, 37, 154 Sheridan, Philip, 4
Haitian, 177, 206, 207, 209, 234 Sherman, William T., 221
industrial, 233 Sicily, 73, 174
transportation, 70, 92 Sierra Leone, 130, 134, 140
revolutionaries, 111, 112, 114, 116, slavery, 7–9, 15, 18–20, 25, 33, 51,
120, 121, 140, 190 53–5, 57, 61, 70–6, 78, 79, 94,
European, 111, 120, 140, 190 95, 97, 99, 100, 110–22,
rice, 233 127–43, 155, 158, 159, 161,
Richmond, 20, 39, 91, 99, 173, 171, 172, 177, 190, 192, 195,
196–8 205–11, 213, 215–19, 221, 232,
rights, 5, 16, 18–22, 25, 27, 34–8, 233, 235, 239
40–4, 60, 61, 69, 77, 81, 115, abolition of, 192, 195
116, 118–21, 152, 156, 158, defenders of, 53, 207, 209
160, 162, 192, 214, 216, 220, slave trade, 8, 17, 18, 20–2, 24–6, 72,
222 76, 80, 112, 127, 129, 130, 131,
economic, 34 138, 209
individual, 69, 116 Slidell, John, 98, 197
king’s, 156 Smith
maritime, 21 Gerrit, 211
natural, 35–7, 154 Goldwin, 57
neutral, 16, 19, 21 James McCune, 207
252 INDEX

soldiers transnational
black, 214 alliance against slavery, 120
French, 190 approaches/perspective, 2, 6, 7
German, 140 circuits of capital, 233
immigrant, 7 coalition for human liberation, 118
Italian, 178 dimensions of slavery, 171
Union, 45, 134, 140 effects/dimensions of the Civil
South Carolina, 2, 71, 76, 80, 172, War, 69
174, 191, 209, 233 experiment, 236
Spain, 174, 194, 195, 206–8, 212, finance, 91
215, 217, 218 history, 1–9
Stevens, Thaddeus, 216, 217 impact of U.S. slavery, 239
Sturgis, Russell, 95, 100 liberals, 7
sugar/sugar cane, 9, 189, 206, 220, networks, 6
231–9 process of citizenship, 35
Sumner, Charles, 17, 18, 20–6, 207, revolutionaries, 121
211, 213, 218–22 significance of the Civil War, 2–4,
Sweden, 43 36, 102
structures of economy, 103
turn, 170
T transnationalism, 118
Taranto, 178 Treaty of Washington (1871), 17
Taylor, Miles, 210 Trent Affair, 21
Tennessee, 84, 140, 173, 177, 195 Trento, 162
Texas, 71, 72, 172, 234 Trescot, William Henry, 72, 75
Thirteenth Amendment, 214 Trieste, 162
Thomas, Lorenzo, 141 Tsing Whan, 238
Thompson Turin, 151
Jacob, 72 Turkey, 78
Waddy, 192 Tyler, John, 71
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 9, 52, 205–23
Togo, 131
Toombs, Robert, 194 U
Toussaint Louverture, François- United Kingdom, 18, 55. See also
Dominique, 207 Great Britain
trade, 7, 8, 16–26, 70–5, 78–82, US Navy, 21, 138
93–5, 112, 127, 129–31, 138, USS Saratoga, 138
160, 195, 209
cotton, 70, 72, 80, 94
slave, 8, 17, 18, 20, 21, 24, 25, 26, V
72, 76, 80, 112, 127, 129, Vera Cruz (port of), 195
130, 131, 138, 209 Vicksburg, 141
 INDEX 253

Victor Emmanuel (Italian king), 175 women, 33, 34, 56, 109, 119, 120,
Vidaurri, Santiago, 194 131, 132, 157, 174, 237
Vienna, 154 African, 109, 120
violence, 4, 19, 54, 57, 81, 139, 157, American, 34
221, 238, 239 black, 56, 119, 120
Virginia, 36, 57, 77, 84, 173, 177, white, 56
197, 206, 209, 212, 214 workers, 25, 26, 74, 119, 129, 132,
Vittorio Emanuele II, 151, 162 140, 141, 155, 207. See also
Vizcarrondo, Julio, 215 laborers
Asian contract, 26
black agricultural, 141
W enslaved, 134, 141
Walker, Robert J., 97, 209 European, 141
Wall Street, 100, 102 free, 129, 132, 140
Ward, Thomas Wren, 92 indentured, 25, 238
Washington, D.C., 7, 17, 20, 22, 37, northern, 74
39, 49, 91, 208, 216, 217, 220 Wright, Joseph A., 37, 41
Wendell Holmes, Oliver, 121
West Africa, 16, 127, 129, 130, 132,
133, 136, 138, 140, 236 X
Western Hemisphere, 69 Xaibe, 235, 236
West Indies, 206, 207, 216, 217
British, 207
Danish, 206, 216 Y
French, 207 Yoruba states, 130
Wheaton, Henry, 20, 36
Whigs, 71, 77–9, 210
White House, 60, 217 Z
Willich, August, 118, 119 Zollverein, 73, 79