Pre-History

Vicksburg, 1971.
When we lived in Houston, my parents and I would take road trips throughout the South. We visited all the major cities of the Gulf states, saw a number of magnificent old homes, and, of course, toured many battlefields. One of my very first memories is of visiting Vicksburg National Military Park on a cold, wet day when I was three years old. Something must have stuck, because when I was about six and I wrote my first book, it was a complete history of the American Civil War (in about twelve pages or so). My parents must have assisted with the text, but I did all of the illustrations. As time passed, my interest did not wane. I remember reading most of the old Century Magazine Battles and Leaders series on the Civil War while I was in junior high. Some adolescents liked the Lord of the Rings trilogy, others threw themselves into sports, and still others were into Rush or Journey. While I liked sports a great deal and worshipped both Rush and Journey, I also read about the Civil War.

The problem was that I did not find the rest of American history particularly interesting. Europe, on the other hand, was fascinating. Both of my parents had grown up in France during World War II, and they had many stories to relate about that terrible period. As a kid, it seemed to me that in Europe, history mattered. Wars, revolutions, massive social struggles, and great cultural achievements seemed to characterize the European experience. And that experience was reflected in my own family history—ancestors who had fought in innumerable wars, suffered during massive upheavals, and participated in great events. When I went to college, I wanted to read about Europe. I had AP credit in American history, so I did not take a single class in the subject. I wrote a senior thesis in British history and took a comprehensive examination in European history (these were considered two separate fields in those days).

After my paralegal experience most definitely decided me against the law, I applied to graduate school in British history. "Why British history?" you might ask. I can't quite explain it. If I attributed this decision to my father, he would probably be flabbergasted, but I have a theory. Almost every Frenchman has a secret envy of Britain (and it's not because of the food). In his eyes, the British, through no fault of their own, have been blessed. They have enjoyed social and political stability, avoided occupation, undergone decolonization without too much suffering, and forged a close relationship with the world's great hyperpower. Not only that, but they produced the English gentleman who showed the rest of the world how to live (see Ian Buruma's Anglomania). When my father left France never to return (and he could have written his own version of Good-bye to All That), he was fed up with his native country, but he still carried that envy of Britain in his heart. The longer he has spent in the United States (he quickly became a naturalized citizen), however, the more he has nurtured this envy into a full-blown Anglomania. As I write, he finds Britain far more intelligible than the land of his birth. Inadvertently, he passed that Anglomania to me. So British history it was.

Graduate School

British officers accompanying McClellan's army in the field pose for a picture during the siege of Yorktown in May 1862. Seated at far right is Lieutenant Colonel Henry Charles Fletcher who is mimicking a pose made famous by William Howard Russell, The Times' famous war correspondent. Fletcher traveled throughout both the North and the South during the war and produced a Report on the Military Academy at West Point, U.S. for the War Office as well as several articles. Between 1865 and 1866, he wrote a three-volume History of the American War. The dark-looking gentlman in the center is Lieutenant Colonel Edward Neville, Fletcher's traveling companion and a cousin of William Gladstone, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, later Prime Minister of Britain four times.

When I first went to graduate school, I was particularly interested in Britain's experience during World War I, largely because this conflict truly launched the 20th century. As I studied the conduct of the war itself, I became interested in that hoary old question about why the British did not learn the "lessons" of the American Civil War. The question in some ways, however, is a false one. The Civil War did not teach a single set of obvious lessons; lessons were "constructed" (to use a current phrase among historians) by people influenced by a wide variety of circumstances. In any event, I found that I could combine by two great interests: Britain and the American Civil War.

I read Jay Luvaas' Military Legacy of the Civil War: The European Inheritance and felt somewhat dissatisfied. The book is intelligently written, and in The Face of Battle, John Keegan cites it as an archetypal work. Yet The Military Legacy of the Civil War is too narrowly focused on purely military matters and the findings of official military observers. I have outlined my criticisms in more detail in elsewhere, but perhaps the most important problem is that Luvaas studies military affairs in isolation from important political, social, and cultural influences. One has only to read the British press of the period to see the extent to which a wide variety of assumptions about American life influenced even the purely military lessons learned from the war. As time went on, I became increasingly interested in the way the American conflict influenced British thinking about not just military affairs, but politics and society as well.

I soon found myself investigating a series of related debates associated with the historiography of the topic. These debates revolved around the following questions.

I have to admit that my dissertation did not answer these questions in a particularly nuanced way. Having enjoyed some time to think about these problems, however, I am now prepared to provide more sophisticated responses.

The Present

I am now working on a manuscript that will address the lessons the British extracted from the Civil War and the factors that influenced the way they went about this task. This work will consist of an introduction, a conclusion, and five chapters that will investigate the following issues:

I. The Antebellum American Image in the British Mind: Most historians interested in British reactions to the Civil War have not bothered to study in any great depth how the British imagined antebellum America. Instead, they either pick up the story in 1861 or provide a perfunctory sketch of Anglo-American relations before the war. This is a shame, because there are certainly great continuities in the way the British saw America before and during the war. This is a particularly interesting topic, because British perceptions of the United States were complex and ambivalent. This chapter will rely mainly on British travel literature about America as well as reviews of that literature. These sources seem to indicate that on the eve of the secession crisis, the British had reached no definitive conclusions about Americans. This fact probably explains why British opinion about the war fluctuated so wildly in 1861. At the same time, however, antebellum travel literature created a number of stereotyped images that could be manipulated—depending on the context—in a variety of ways. In other words, travel literature determined the limits of what could be imagined or written about America.

Frank Vizetelly served as the Illustrated London News' correspondent in America from 1861 to 1865. Initially a Federal sympathizer, he experienced a change of heart after visiting occupied Memphis in 1862. He had himself smuggled across Federal lines and with the exception of a brief visit to Britain, he spent the rest of the war in the Confederacy. For a full inventory of the illustrations he produced during the war, visit the Beck Center Collections at the University of Emory Library.

II. Public Opinion and the Press in Britain during the War: In Britain, antebellum images of America did not remain static during the Civil War. These images changed in response to events, and during the war, newspapers were the most important means of obtaining news about these events. Indeed, with the repeal of the newspaper stamp in 1855 and the abolition of the paper duty in 1861, the metropolitan press was able to expand its circulation greatly. These developments and the time-sensitive nature of news from America meant that dailies began to supplant travel literature as the primary means of imagining America. This chapter will investigate the operation of the press, particularly how it produced, manipulated, and disseminated information about the American conflict. It will also examine what the press sought to accomplish and to what extent it actually influenced the public. This chapter will make an important distinction between public opinion and press opinion. Although scholars often look at the latter and unproblematicallly identify it as the former, the two are different, if only because readers generally produced a wide variety of readings from the same text.

William Howard Russell, The Times' representative in America, poses for Matthew Brady. Russell, who earned fame as The Times' war correspondent in the Crimea, visited America from 1861 to 1862. His account of the Federal retreat from the First Battle of Bull Run made him persona non grata in the North. He had intended to accompany McClellan's army during the Peninsular campaign (in the company of Fletcher), but Edwin Stanton revoked his pass. Tired of death threats and believing that his usefulness in America had come to an end, Russell returned to Britain.
III. Political and Social Lessons: There was not a single set of political and social lessons extracted from the war; different groups saw the conflict in very different ways. It does seem clear, though, that Britons often, but not always, saw what they wished to see in America. In other words, they did not necessarily learn anything new; they merely accumulated evidence to support their positions. In that respect, the war exerted a limited influence in Britain. Aside from surveying social and political lessons learned from the war, this chapter will also explore the legacy of the war in Britain, particularly the relationship between the conflict and reform. Some scholars have asserted that the war helped forge an alliance between trade unionists and parliamentary Radicals that helped found the modern Liberal Party and pushed through the Reform Act of 1867. While it seems clear that the American conflict did indeed help create this alliance, trade unionists and Radicals did not push through reform. If we wish to locate the war's clearest and most significant influences, one ought to search elsewhere. One of the best places to look is in the realm of political theory. Walter Bagehot's classic English Constitution constitutes an excellent example of how the war influenced British thinking. Convinced that the Civil War revealed a number of deficiencies in the American constitution, Bagehot relentlessly compared American political arrangements to those of Britain (which he found superior).

IV. Nationalism and the Nation: Europe was increasingly confronted by a series of "national questions" during this period—in Germany, Italy, Poland, Eastern Europe, and the Balkans (although, interestingly enough, many living in the United Kingdom did not see Ireland as presenting a "national question"). For that reason, Britons had devoted some thought to the question of what constituted a nation, and several intellectuals had provided competing theories on that topic (e.g., John Stuart, Lord Acton, and others). The "American question" was, at heart, a national question like others, but it involved so many substantial British interests that it demanded more attention than any other. The war elicited a number of different theories about what constituted a nation (e.g., race, culture, history, politics, etc.), revealing that this area of thought was still in flux. However, the British discussion about whether the Confederacy or the Union constituted a nation does shed some light on questions that interest contemporary Civil War scholars—namely whether or not the South or the Union were nations. Even if many Britons used the terms imprecisely, they were familiar with the modern distinction between nationalism and patriotism. In fact, it seems that when some claimed the Confederacy was a nation (e.g., William Gladstone's infamous declaration at Newcastle in October 1862), what they meant was not a nation bound by a single culture, but a nation bound by loyalty to a common republic (i.e., patriotism). That the South constituted a nation was an important fact—perhaps the most important fact of the war—for many British observers. As a true nation, the Confederacy would never suffer subjugation, and even if it did, the North would never succeed in restoring the South to a free and democratic Union. At the same time, other British commentators appeared to understand that a similar patriotism lay behind Unionism. What is striking, however, is the number of British commentators who had a difficult time understanding this patriotism and discerning what kept the North's heterogeneous population together.

V. Military Lessons: I have discussed the military lessons of the war in an article elsewhere ("A Military Legacy of the Civil War: The British Inheritance," Civil War History, 49 [June 2003], 153–80.), and this chapter will elaborate on these points.

The Future

At some point in the future I will post a link on this page to a prospectus of my project. And I will finish the manuscript.

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