Reconfiguring the Union: Civil War Transformations

234 Pages·2013·1.624 MB·English

by  Iwan W. Morgan, Philip John Davies (eds.)

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Reconfiguring the Union: Civil War Transformations
Edited by Iwan W. Morgan and Philip John Davies
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Reconfiguring the Union
Civil War Transformations
Edited by
Iwan W. Morgan and
Philip John Davies
RECONFIGURING THE UNION
Copyright © Iwan W. Morgan and Philip John Davies, 2013.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-1-137-33647-7
All rights reserved.
First published in 2013 by
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ISBN 978-1-349-46350-3 ISBN 978-1-137-33648-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137336484
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First edition: August 2013
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Preface i x
Chapter 1
Reconfiguring the Union: A Long History of Civil War
Transformations 1
Iwan W. Morgan
Chapter 2
Lincoln and Emancipation: The Lessons of the Letter to
Horace Greeley 21
Richard Carwardine
Chapter 3
Conservatism, Transformation, and the War for the Union 41
Adam I. P. Smith
Chapter 4
Freedpeople, Politics, and the State in Civil War America 59
Erik Mathisen
Chapter 5
The Military Significance of the 1864 Presidential Election 77
Brian Holden Reid
Chapter 6
“In Union There Is Strength”: City-Building and
Nation-Building in Civil War–Era Philadelphia, 1844–1865 101
Andrew Heath
Chapter 7
“There Will Be Blood”: The Civil War and the Birth
of the Oil Industry 125
Matthew Shaw
viii CONTENTS
Chapter 8
“Faugh a Ballagh!” (Clear the Way): The Irish and
the American Civil War 1 43
David T. Gleeson
Chapter 9
Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: A Propaganda
Tool for the Enemy? 163
Amanda Foreman
Chapter 10
Ordeal of the Union: Allan Nevins, the Civil War
Centennial, and the Civil Rights Struggle of the 1960s 181
Robert Cook
Chapter 11
Glory, Glory: Hollywood’s Consensus Memory of
the American Civil War 201
Jenny Barrett
Notes on Contributors 221
Index 223
Preface
T
his volume considers the reconfiguration in the meaning of the
American Union as a result of the Civil War. The contributors exam-
ine the transformations it wrought, their variable scope, their inter-
national and transnational dimensions, and the role of memory in
determining their meaning. The chapters that follow make no claim
to being a comprehensive account of Civil War–related change in the
Union either singly in their area of focus or in their aggregate. What
they do purport to offer are nuanced insights into the most transfor-
mative episode in America’s history that can help understanding of its
significance for the making of the modern United States.
Iwan Morgan, Reconfiguring the Union: A Long History of Civil
War Transformations offers a long-term evaluation of the Civil War–
induced changes in the meaning and nature of the Union. He consid-
ers their significance for: the right of secession, the supremacy of the
national government over the states, the recalibration of the regional
balance of power within the Union, the ending of slavery and the
extension of citizen rights to emancipated African Americans, and the
emergence of a new American nationalism. After initial examination
of the antebellum understanding of these issues, he shows how the
transformations wrought by the Civil War were variable in their scope
and impact on America’s development thereafter.
Richard Carwardine, Lincoln and Emancipation: The Lessons of
the Letter to Horace Greeley , examines the issue that ultimately trans-
formed the conflict for the North from a war to preserve the Union
into a war to do so on the basis of ending slavery in the United
States. His chapter focuses on Lincoln’s public letter of August 22,
1862, to New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley. In contrast to his-
torians who consider him a pragmatist, Carwardine argues instead
that the president’s concept of Union had always been deeply moral.
His analysis of the Greeley letter therefore finds ample evidence
of Lincoln’s dedication to a new Union based on the old values of