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13 - A Tale of Two Cities: The American Civil War

from Part ii - Paradigm Shifts and Turning Points in the Era of Globalization, 1500 to the Present

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 October 2023

By
Susan-Mary Grant
Edited by
Cathie Carmichael ,
Matthew D'Auria  and
Aviel Roshwald
Cathie Carmichael
Affiliation:
University of East Anglia
Matthew D'Auria
Affiliation:
University of East Anglia
Aviel Roshwald
Affiliation:
Georgetown University, Washington DC
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Summary

The short version of the history of nationalism and America’s mid-nineteenth-century civil war (1861–1865) may best be explained as a tale of two cities. Not, as one might suppose, the capitals of the Union and the Confederacy, Washington and Richmond, but two cities each of which was situated some four hundred miles from their warring sides’ respective capitals: Boston and Charleston. Arguably, it was in these cities that the essence of the national sentiments that motivated each side was most concentrated: in the case of the Union, to seek to maintain the federal compact and, in the case of the Confederacy, to destroy it. But this is also a story of alternative nationalist approaches. The Union and the Confederacy, respectively, inhabit what Christopher Wellman juxtaposes as the two camps of political theorizing on the subject of states, nations, and secession: the “statist” and the “nationalist.”

Keywords

American Civil WarUnionConfederacyBostonCharlestondisunionsectionalismAmerican statestates’ rights
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Nationhood and Nationalism , pp. 281 - 300
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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References

Further Reading

Doyle, Don H., The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War (New York: Basic Books, 2015).Google Scholar
Faust, Drew Gilpin, The Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988).Google Scholar
Fleche, Andre M., The Revolution of 1861: The American Civil War in the Age of Nationalist Conflict (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).Google Scholar
Gallagher, Gary W., The Confederate War: How Popular Will, Nationalism and Military Strategy Could Not Stave off Defeat, new edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).Google Scholar
Gallagher, Gary W., The Union War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grant, Susan-Mary, North over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000).Google Scholar
Hutchinson, John, Nationalism and War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kedourie, Elie, Nationalism (1966; repr. Oxford : Blackwell, 1993).Google Scholar
McCardell, John M., The Idea of a Southern Nation: Southern Nationalists and Southern Nationalism, 1830–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979).Google Scholar
Quigley, Paul, Shifting Grounds: Nationalism and the American South, 1848–1865 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).Google Scholar
Rubin, Anne Sarah, A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861–1868 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).Google Scholar

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