Reviews for And the war came

The average rating for And the war came based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-10-28 00:00:00 Carnell Perkins So I'm slightly obsessed with the pre-Civil War Republican Party, which is such a fascinating blend of business interests, liberal nationalism, anti-slavery, and a little piece of almost every other political party of the preceding decades. That's part of why I took on this old classic, which I can't believe has so few reads on Goodreads! Come on people! Stampp develops a number of interesting arguments in explaining the North's reaction to secession from late 1860 to early 1861. First, it was interesting that there was little panic in the North when SC seceded after the election. The sense was that this was a sort of bluff that needed to be stood up to firmly, as the federal gov't couldn't accept states using secession as a bargaining chip in politics. As things became more serious, the Northern position (esp that of President Buchanan) was that while the federal government should not coerce the states, it can take actions needed to enforce federal law (collecting tariffs, delivering mail) and protecting federal property (forts, ships, etc). This was a hair-splitting difference, but it was politically useful in the sense that if war was to come it put Southerners in the position of firing the first shot. Of course, if they were going to go through with secession, they kind of had to seize federal property in the South, so this formula put the South in a real bind. Overall, this book mildly rehabilitates Buchanan; while he could have done a lot more to prepare the country for war, the problem is that most Northerners at first thought the best way to avoid war was to avoid provoking the South. His actions became a lot more understandable to me after reading this. The most important part of this book is its exploration of one of the 2 main questions in explaining why the Civil War happened. The first, of course, is why the South seceded. The second, which is this book's focus, is why the North decided it could not let secession go and would fight if the South didn't back down. You need both of these things to have a Civil War. The reason why I don't let my students get away with the lazy argument that "slavery caused the Civil War" is that while the South's main motivation for secession was the defense of slavery, slavery was only one of a host of reasons why the North decided to fight rather than accede to secession. That's why the Civil War essay question I give my students is "In what sense and to what extent did slavery cause the Civil War?" It's a pain in the butt question that makes them think more complexly about the question. I'll be able to teach this much better now having read Stampp. He outlines an array of reasons why the North couldn't let the South go. One was the fear of a massive slave empire expanding into Latin America and into the West. Southerners had made it quite clear they wanted to do this, and it was Northern resistance that largely blocked it. History could be different in a thousand ways if this had happened. Another was the fear of losing a key economic region and of the Western hemisphere being carved into rival trading blocs. Another was the likely destruction of the Monroe Doctrine and the return of European powers to the continent. Of course, all of these factors would have made war between North and South, post-disunion, highly likely, so for Northerners the choice wasn't really war or peaceful disunion but war now or war later. Northerners also held major disdain for southern culture, which they believed slavery had perverted, making it lazy and undemocratic, in contrast to the industrious, entrepreneurial free labor north. For anti-slavery people and abolitionists, the secession of the South would ensure slavery's survival and spread, which they could not accept. Secessions, Northerners believed, would beget more secession, fragmenting the country further. Maybe most importantly, secession negated democracy and constitutional government. If you could just slip the game board over any time you lose and go home (not a perfect metaphor but you know what I mean), then law and majority rule essentially mean nothing. It is worth noting that the Republicans and LIncoln didn't actually do anything; secession was a form of prevention not pre-emption based on the total unacceptability for the south of an anti-slavery party taking power in DC, even though the GOP platform called only for the containment of slavery (they werne't abolitionists). Lincoln always had one eye on the world, and he understood that the tyrants of Europe wanted American democracy to fail, they wanted democracy to be the equivalent of chaos; secession's success would have made this true. In a sense, the Civil War really was a war to save democracy and to ensure national unity by eliminating the cause of disunion, namely slavery. It is a shame that as teachers we rarely make those connections. This is a really important book for a divided country, as it addresses the question of why we should be a country at all, why we should work to resolve differences within a constitutional framework rather than just retreating into our homogeneous corners of the world. That's what I mean when I say this book is great for civic education and a liberal form of nationalism (why national unity is essential for the success of liberal ideas and democracy is the topic of Jill Lepore's brilliant "This America.") This is an old-school history book, the kind where the historian interrupts with little asides about causation or other historical issues. I thought the ending was a bit pessimistic, but overall this book is relatively fast paced and quite fascinating. Recommended for Civil War buffs, not beginners.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-04-23 00:00:00 Alicja Bienkowska There are some people who champion a dialectical view of history, but this book helps us to understand that dialectics are not always a good thing.  As a master's degree student in military history I wrote about the dialectic between North and South in the period up to the Civil War, and though I did not cite this book because I had not read it at the time, I would have cited it as the author makes the same essential point that I did with a lot more detail and for a much narrower period in showing that while the Confederacy brought a great deal to the start of the Civil War, the North brought a certain amount of Nationalistic fervor as well as a disbelief that the South would actually rebel for such light and transient causes as a loss in an election that threatened only the growth of their corrupt and debased slave plantation culture.  By looking at the role of the North the author provides us with a clear understanding that a civil war does not happen unless there are two sides who are willing to fight, and that was certainly the case here. This book is about 300 pages long and is divided into fourteen chapters.  The author discusses the roots of the crisis in a discussion of the different social and economic systems of the South and in different feelings about national loyalties that were based in part on sectional power (1) as well as the search for remedies that would address the concerns of both sides and allow them to coexist in peace (2).  After that the author discusses the search for constitutional logic that would address the perpetuity of the Union and the lack of legitimacy of succession as a constitutional remedy (3) as well as the painful choice that Buchanan made to support the Union (4) despite having lost support from both sides.  The author looks at the reality of disunion after South Carolina's rebellion (5) as well as the first uprisings (6) and the deadlock that lasted or months of rising tensions (7).  There is a discussion of the debacle of the compromise attempts (8), the fraud of the conciliators looking vainly for peace (9), and the view of Lincoln about the crisis expressed in his First Inaugural (10).  The author looks at the way that Northerners prepared for the coming conflict (11), the crusading spirit against secession that built up (12), as well as the decision for war that was made by the South in Charleston Harbor (13).  With that the book ends with a discussion of Northern relief that the war had started (14), after which there is a bibliography and index. Neo-Confederates claim that Abraham Lincoln and other northerners acted in such a way as to deliberately provoke the Civil War and thus deserve blame for it starting even though the South rebelled and fired the first shots in Charleston Harbor.  This book does not support such conclusions, but it does demonstrate that the choices that were being made during the secession winter of 1860-61 were different between Unionists and rebels.  While rebels were seeing if any compromise could be made that met their demands or else they would rebel, Northerners were determining whether the Union with honor could be kept peaceably or they would be willing to undertake force to preserve the Union so as to avoid the division that Europe faced.  It is perhaps inevitable given such choices that the two sides both misunderstood each other.  Yet even before Lincoln took office Northerners had already at least mentally prepared for the reality that war would soon be upon them and had chosen to fight rather than let the South depart in peace after its various acts of thievery.  And so the war came, with a certain willingness on both sides to fight rather than to compromise over essentials.  This book gives us a good picture of why the North was willing to fight, something that is not often considered in reading about this period of history.