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This lecture presents the text of the speech about masculinity, disability, and race in the American Civil War delivered by the author at the 2007 Sarah Tryphena Phillips Lecture in American History held at the British Academy. It discusses the centrality of the Civil War to America's national history, and also highlights the role of the dead in the construction both of Northern/Union nationalism and the Southern civic religion.

This chapter discusses the relationship between evangelical Protestantism and the American Civil War through the lives of Abraham Lincoln and William T. Sherman. The jeremiad script of evangelical Protestantism played a major role in sustaining both the Union's and the Confederacy's war efforts, even while Abraham Lincoln's own views on Providence evolved in a manner both similar to and distinctive from that of his contemporaries. Sherman, in contrast, represented the war's potential for fomenting godlessness, with the challenge his Deification of the State represented to conventional nineteenth‐century Christianity. While evangelicals proved equal to the task of fending off this heterodoxy in the short term, the military and political forces Sherman represented had lasting effects on some postwar figures like Oliver Wendell Holmes, and in historical terms, they cannot be ignored.

This chapter explains the coverage of this book, which is about the wartime letters sent by James B. Griffin to his family during the American Civil War. Griffin was a wealthy plantation owner in Edgefield, South Carolina when he volunteered for the Confederate Army in 1861. This book examines the war time experiences of Griffin, the loss of his properties after the war and his subsequent rebirth as a businessman.

This chapter examines how the lineaments of U.S. national identity were shaped and consolidated by three wars over a span of eighty years: the American Civil War, World War I, and World War II. It explains how American writers during these years sought to accommodate the heterogeneous nature of national space within an allegorical circumference where the geography of the nation would embody its redemptive spirit. The chapter first considers the establishment of social boundaries in William Dean Howells's novel A Hazard of New Fortunes and its effort to redescribe regionalism as a nationalist phenomenon. It then explores the concerted attempt to restore the “multilingual” dimensions of American literature and the nationalistic approach adopted by some writers that incorporates geography as a mode of allegory. It also analyzes the fiction of Wallace Stevens and Gertrude Stein, the latter of whom used the airplane as an emblem of modernism.

Chapter 9 focuses on the relationship between the evolving grand strategy and military strategy in the American Civil War (1861–5). Williamson Murray emphasizes the symbiotic relationship between Abraham Lincoln's grand strategy—aimed at the preservation of the Union with its form of government—and Ulysses S. Grant's ability to execute the military expression of that strategy through effective generalship, selection of capable subordinates, and decisive combat. Murray argues that two main factors explain why it took the North four years to defeat the Southern states. First, the vast size of the theatre of operations posed great logistical challenges. Second, enormous popular enthusiasm for their respective causes led both sides to insist on holding out to the bitter end, despite huge casualties and suffering. Ultimately, Lincoln's grand strategy succeeded because the verdict that ‘the United States is a country’, singular rather than plural, was never seriously challenged again.

This chapter discusses the formation of political alliances centered on differences over racial politics in antebellum America. Even before there was a Constitution, there were pro-slavery and anti-slavery alliances in the not-so-United States. Indeed, the Declaration of Independence, which embedded the rhetoric of human equality and inalienable rights into American political culture, still sought to justify tribal subjugation (by denouncing “merciless Indian Savages”) and to avoid criticism of chattel slavery (by editing out Jefferson's language attacking the slave trade). Throughout the antebellum era, pro-slavery forces retained great power, particularly in regard to the protection of slavery where it was already established. Moreover, the chapter considers how racial politics continued to shape American life—particularly for the disenfranchised people of color—during the period of transition after the Civil War.

Chapter 1 mines an under-examined archive of American travelogues to Cuba to explore the emergence of Chinese “cooliesm” as a transatlantic racial formation enmeshed in the geopolitics of U.S. Empire and in national debates over labor versus capital. Controversies over U.S. participation in the lucrative “coolie trade,” involving the transport of thousands of Chinese indentured laborers to Cuba and Peru, intensified as sectional tensions over the future of slavery threatened to erupt into Civil War. This chapter explores how popular travel narratives by writers, including Richard Henry Dana and Eliza McHatton Ripley, refracted and reshaped American ideas about slavery, citizenship, and free labor, especially in relation to contract ideology and its associated concepts of self-ownership and free will. These narratives helped disseminate the specter of the Chinese “coolie-slave,” which influenced U.S. debates over slavery and later became a potent symbol for the enduring legacy of slavery in Reconstruction America.

This chapter first sets out the book's purpose, which is to use the period from the Mexican–American War to the Civil War (1846–1865) as a stage to assess the strengths and weaknesses of six American presidents: James K. Polk, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, and Abraham Lincoln. These men merit attention because of the demands placed on the chief executive in this momentous era and because they varied so greatly in the caliber of that leadership. The chapter then provides context by discussing the background against which these six presidents performed their duties, followed by a discussion of the causes of the Civil War.

White southerners experienced a crisis of nationalism during the era of the American Civil War. This introduction raises the problems of national identity and citizenship that southerners confronted; defines the key terms; and discusses the scholarly framework. In contemplating the problems of nationalism, white southerners reached backward (taking into account their long experience as American nationalists), outward (to reflect on their knowledge of nationalism in the transatlantic world), and inward (embedding nationalism in their personal lives and identities).

This introduction traces the origin and evolution of the earlier literature on Jews and the Civil War and considers the possible reasons why a number of factually incorrect but attractive ideas about Jewish involvement in the conflict have endured. The historical literature on the American Jewish experience of the Civil War can be divided into two eras: the period from the 1880s until 1950, when the field was dominated by amateur historians, and the period from 1951, when Bertram Korn published American Jewry and the Civil War. In this introduction, the focus is on the period before American Jewish history became an academic field and on how amateur historians developed a consensual understanding of the meaning and importance of the Civil War for Jews. These Jewish historical writings include Isaac Markens's The Hebrews in America (1888) and Simon Wolf's The American Jew as Patriot, Soldier and Citizen (1895).

The United States played a significant role in unionist political thought and rhetoric throughout the Home Rule era. Ulster unionists used American examples to emphasize the need to maintain unity between Great Britain and Ireland, and to provide historical justification for unionist actions. This chapter examines the ways in which the American Revolutionary War, Civil War, and Constitution were utilized in unionist rhetoric. Unionists drew upon these American historical and constitutional examples to highlight ethnic connections to the United States, underscore the failed obligations of the British government to fight to save the Union, and legitimize Ulster militancy.

This chapter resurrects “The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna.” Charles Wolfe's poem, a reimagining of the hasty interment of a fallen general after one of the land battles in the Napoleonic wars, was repeatedly quoted by soldiers and other individuals during the American Civil War when they found themselves having to organize, or witness, the burials of dead comrades. In recent years, cultural historians of Great Britain have tried to account for the massive shift in burial and memorial practices for the common soldier that occurred between 1815 and 1915. The chapter argues that the presence of Wolfe's poem in the hearts and minds of ordinary people played its part in creating the social expectations that led to the establishment of the National Cemeteries in the United States, and thus, in due course, the mass memorialization of World War I.