Abstract
The Civil War is the greatest crisis ever faced by the United States. Had the Union not been victorious, the consequences would have been immense—both for America and for the wider world. Even had an independent Confederacy eventually embraced emancipation of its own volition, slavery would still have continued therein for years and what might have replaced it is unclear. It is unlikely that the truncated United States of America or the newly formed Confederate States of America would have become major economic powers by the end of the nineteenth century. It is equally unlikely that either would have become the major actor in global politics in the twentieth century and beyond. At the very least, the balance of power between the Union and the Confederacy on the North American continent would have limited their freedom of maneuver to intervene in Europe and Asia. In essence, therefore, the Union that the Civil War preserved became the foundation for modern America’s power, prosperity, and national identity of exceptionalism.
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Notes
Quoted in Adam Smith, The American Civil War (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 98.
William R. Brock, Conflict and Transformation: The United States 1844–1877 (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1973), 276. For Emancipation policy, see
Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010)
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James G. Randall and David Donald, The Civil War and Reconstruction , 2nd ed (Lexington MA: D.C. Heath, 1969), 384 [Donald’s authorship of this comment is inferred from its absence in the original edition authored solely by Randall].
Gary Gallagher, The Union War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012) [quotation p. 1].
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Philip S. Paludan, A People’s Contest: The Union and the Civil War , rev. ed. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996), xxxi.
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© 2013 Iwan W. Morgan and Philip John Davies
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Morgan, I.W. (2013). Reconfiguring the Unions: A Long History of Civil War Transformations. In: Morgan, I.W., Davies, P.J. (eds) Reconfiguring the Union. Studies of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137336484_1
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