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The World the Civil War Made (edited by Gregory P. Downs and Kate Masur), is a collection of essays that analyze the “historical distinctiveness” of the postwar period through themes such as “personalized power,” individual rights, and rampant violence (14-15). As higbeejonathan explained, the book’s argument is based on how the Civil War changed the nation (3). The authors examine “new possibilities for imagining government, claims-making, and narrative” (17). These historians were not confined by traditional approaches to slavery or regions; rather, they perspectives of the United States spanned regions, ethnicity, and even territories that had not yet joined the Union. Although the South directly experienced most of the physical destruction and emancipation, the Civil War impacted the west and the north as well as politics at the federal, state, and local levels. The authors demonstrated these developments through the use of monographs, journal articles, treaties, newspapers, photographs, novels, and letters.
The essays in Downs and Masur described several historical events or movements that were considered failures. It reminded me of David Sim’s A Union Forever and the failed attempts of Irish nationhood in the same time period. This method was not simply about labeling failures but also understanding the complexities and consequences of postbellum developments that contributed to those failures. For example, the federal government, or the “Stockade State,” became more powerful during the war but it was not always able to enforce laws and treaties effectively in the Western territories (ch. 2, 3, 7, 9, p. 6, 223). History is not often remembered from the perspective of failure, but historians can consider previously downplayed elements of history with this approach.
This book explained several aspects of the “Reconstruction” era that I had not yet considered. Before reading this, I did not realize that Indian tribes tried to gain citizenship and land based on the Homestead Act. Stephen Kantrowitz’s description of this movement in relation to the postwar period and Western expansion proved that the war affected all parts of the United States, not just the South. Indian relations and other Western developments make much more sense in light of the changes occurring in the rest of the U.S. after the 1860s. This idea of studying regions together instead of separately is visible in Slavery’s Capitalism where historians argue that the North and the South both benefited from slavery. I was also fascinated with the discussion of ruins in chapter four. K. Stephen Prince explained how northerners initially viewed the postbellum South as an idea to be “recreated” (108). He explained that journalists and their readers adopted a mindset of viewing southern destruction as a northern opportunity to renew the south. Postwar Americans had to reconsider the intellectual meaning of destruction and death, which is explained in This Republic of Suffering as Sbremer also pointed out.
Overall, I think this book successfully reimagined the “Reconstruction” period after the Civil War. It was a complicated era that involved continuity and change as Americans tried to reunify their nation going into the twentieth century.