Historian Jeremy Black provided an international perspective on the American Civil War. Courtesy | Gianna Lodice
The Civil War was much greater than a national conflict between North and South, said English historian, author, and lecturer Jeremy Black in a March 20 speech sponsored by the Center for Military History and Strategy.
“Napoleon III views the Confederacy in a favorable light because it supports Napoleon’s plans in Mexico, whereas the Union is totally against it,” Black said. “Napoleon III comes to the view that it might well be appropriate to act against the Union, but he doesn’t want to act on his own, and he sets out to persuade the British to cooperate with him, and the British cabinet is divided.”
In Black’s lecture, based on his newest book “The Civil War,” he discussed how the United States played a surprisingly key role in resolving the global matter which he called “the North American question.”
“The North American question is the aspect of American history that often tends to be missed out,” Black said.
He contended that this aspect is the idea that the American Revolution and the founding of the United States were precarious.
“What the Founding Fathers were writing about was how best to protect a revolutionary settlement, which was threatened in their eyes by the possibility of attack from outside, and maybe of corruption from inside,” Black said. “Both of these are key elements for the Jeffersonian Republicans and for the Federalists, and they go on affecting the next generation.”
Black said the feeling of America’s establishment being constantly in question substantially influenced the war, with foreign intervention threatening both the Union and Confederacy. Continued British and French presence in North America in the mid-19th century put pressure on the young American nation, and Black said the Americans realized not only that intervention might occur, but even more so that the country’s vulnerability invited it.
The most important question of the time, Black said, then became what would occur in America if this intervention happened.
“Now, why and what might have happened are not just things for us to talk about as some kind of parlor game,” he said. “They were what people at the time were actually speculating about.”
Of course, foreign intervention did not end up occuring, Black said.
“In the mid-1860s, the European powers disengaged from North America very rapidly, and the North American question is solved on American terms,” Black said.
But he explained that just how these terms played out introduced further wartime insecurity.
In 1862, the success of Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s Antietam campaign badly damaged the prevailing public belief in a quickly-approaching Union victory, according to Black. This Southern resilience, he said, became a growing concern for Abraham Lincoln as his 1864 reelection campaign neared.
“In 1864 Lincoln is very worried, from what we can tell from his correspondence, that he won’t get reelected,” Black said.
Black explained that victories during the Union’s Atlanta campaign in mid-1864 and a failed Confederate counteroffensive helped rally critical Republican support, contributing to Lincoln’s victory.
“One of the difficulties for the South is that it becomes apparent with the 1864 result that the North is going to keep going,” Black said. “It’s not surprising that, therefore, the war comes to an end, but as a result of a really hard, grueling match.”
But Black said his main concern was what would have happened if Lincoln hadn’t won.
“I’m using the term ‘if.’ Bear in mind, that is exactly the terms you see in people’s letters of the period,” Black said. “In other words, it’s not some historian sitting here dreaming up things in the tongue as to what might have happened.”
Ultimately, Black used the international perspective to highlight the fallacy of assuming cut-and-dry patterns when interpreting historical events.
“Those who provide explanations in which the outcome is in some way inevitable, are taking away not just agency from the individuals involved, but are also taking away contingency from the human process,” he said.
Hillsdale’s Director of the Center for Military History and Strategy Mark Moyar said the talk fulfilled his expectations.
“It was a great overview of the Civil War, and it gave an international perspective which we are often missing, as we tend to focus so much on the United States,” Moyar said. “He really helped us understand the international geostrategic factors that influenced the war, and especially this question of whether other countries might have intervened.”
Freshman Nayeon Kim said she agreed with Moyar’s appreciation of this perspective, especially considering her experience with American history as a student from abroad.
“I’m not an American citizen; I’m an international student,” Kim said. “It was really interesting to hear about the international aspect of the Civil War and how there are different aspects to the Civil War that I wasn’t able to learn in other U.S. history classes.”
