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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
  • Edited by Cathie Carmichael, University of East Anglia, Matthew D'Auria, University of East Anglia, Aviel Roshwald, Georgetown University, Washington DC
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Nationhood and Nationalism
    Published online:
    27 October 2023
    Print publication:
    09 November 2023, pp 281-300

  • 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.”