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The World the Civil War makes clear that the period broadly understood as Reconstruction was even more complicated than widely recognized. Rather than simply the Republican-led attempt to remake the South, a historical view that is tinted with the notion of “American exceptionalism,” the authors contained herein show that the post-Civil War period can only be really understood by looking at the United States across regions, ethnicities and borders. (Downs 5) It is easy to view Reconstruction through the filter of the behemoth the US became in the twentieth-century, but these essays reveal that US centralized power, for all its growth in support of the war effort, may not live up to its ‘Yankee Leviathan’ reputation. In spite of the intentions of the state to liberalize all within its reach, the West, South, Native Americans and others were not always willing participants. Divergent opinions within Republican party itself, eventually causing Reconstruction efforts to gradually dissipate, was just one example of a force that was fragile to begin with. Yet it was a moment of where great internal improvement measures were realized, heralded evidenced by those like Henry Carey, also featured in Slavery’s Capitalism. Economic solutions would be the best way to solve societal problems, with an American system to create a “harmony of interests” among classes that class-conflict socialism never could (312)
There is even an transnational perspective on the evolution of the American economic system, where “the Civil War and Marxism developed in tandem” according to. (304) As I am writing my paper on economics in the Civil War, I was especially grateful for related discussions. While some see economic elites with an expansionist vision getting a stranglehold on national power through the Civil War, Karl Marx saw the Civil War as a revolution in line with his understanding of class overthrow, and his opinions were directly at odds with Carey’s (312). Andrew Zimmerman’s essay states that the Civil War, to many contemporaries proved that revolution could be accomplished through social rather than governmental or economic change. This understanding rendered the South as essentially the bourgeois power on the run. The Civil War was also more of a “redefinition” of American ideals as opposed to a “repetition” of revolution, according to Zimmerman (304).
The Civil War also asked how much government should power versus the states, as well as what did true freedom and equality really mean. I agree with sbremer that K. Stephen’s Prince’s “The Burnt District” was a fantastic chapter for revealing “how the North viewed these ruined cities as their opportunity to rebuild the south in its image.” Furthermore, the collection shows that liberalism in thought or rhetoric does not always equate with reality on the ground. The sense that very different cultures would voluntarily surrender a way of life and be remade was a common mistake in Western expansionist mindset. The talk about liberalism reminded me of Liberalism and Empire by Uday Singh Mehta that I have read for Dr. McLain’s exam, revealing how high-minded notions of bringing civility to those that need is often blinded to its own biases, not to mention violent means by which they can be accomplished. For instance, while blacks were to be incorporated into the free-labor system, they were not necessarily desired in the expansion westward, and Indian Americans received a mixture containment and forced integration policies. We also cannot take rhetoric or even the of law for granted, as Gregory P. Downs and Kate Masur note that post-war America was “perhaps a nation ruled by violence interrupted by flashes of rights.” (13) This collection effectively moves us toward a more all-encompassing “Greater Reconstruction,” as Elliott West phrased it. (4)
Bibliography
Downs, Gregory P. Downs and Kate Masur, eds. The World the Civil War Made Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 2015.