THE CAUSE OF ALL NATIONS: An International History of the American Civil War
THE CAUSE OF ALL NATIONS: An International History of the American Civil War Don H. Doyle, Basic Books, New York, 2014, 400 pages The Civil War is an unending fascination for most Americans. Don H. Doyle presents the American Civil War in its international context. In The Cause of All Nations, he shows how the meaning of the war evolved in parallel ways for European and American opinion makers the ways they perceived the war reflected their hopes and fears, which revolved around the issues of freedom and liberty. The first issue was expressed in terms of abolishing slavery, the latter in terms of republicanism and democracy. In the broadest sense, the war originated in two competing visions of white man's democracy. The first was based on the concepts of free soil, free men, and free labor. Those concepts posited a relatively fluid social structure founded on individual merit and mass democratic politics, a structure buttressed by national government policies emphasizing the indissoluble nature of a federal union acting for the common good. The other vision was based on a relatively rigid social structure based on the dominance of an agrarian upper class posited on a form of mass politics. The lower orders followed the political lead of their social betters, in a structure buttressed by a minimalist local and national government and emphasizing state autonomy except when federal action would serve to support agrarian upper class interests. Doyle sets this American crisis in a global context, showing how the potential dissolution of the American union gladdened conservatives (who were hostile to democracy and republicanism and believed in a social order based on aristocratic hierarchy) and dismayed liberals (who believed in republicanism or constitutional monarchy and freedom of conscience) For the most part, European aristocratic elites could not openly approve of slavery but were excited about the imminent failure of the Great Republic. For these interests, the federal Union's dissolution would destroy the republican political experiment and open the path to increased imperial European domination of the Caribbean Basin and Mexico, as well as the continued existence and extension of slavery. The more radical hoped for a continued fracturing of the United States into several regional confederations dominated by European powers. Thus, the American Civil War was a conflict shaped by European interests. The end of democracy in North America would allow the Europeans to triumph over their own reformers and revolutionaries.