Subtitle for British Edition: An Epic History of Two Nations Divided
Subtitle for American Edition: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War
What
is this Book About?
This
is an epic book that runs close to 1000 pages and touches on many different
aspects of the American Civil War, including some examination of American
domestic politics and blow by blow descriptions of many of the battles. But its primarily purpose is to examine Britain’s role
in the American Civil War.
Perhaps
the tone and scope of the book can best be summed up by a quotation from the
final chapter:
Almost immediately after the [American
Civil] war, the British writer William
Michael Rossetti…tried to explain its impact on English public opinion in an
essay for the American Atlantic Monthly. Rossetti claimed never to have seen his
compatriots so animated “in connection with any other non-English occurrences”:
the entire country had divided over the merits of the Civil War, and whether
abolition, democracy, the Union or the right
to self-determination had been the real principle at stake. Expressions such as “I’m a Northerner,” and “I
am a Southerner,” were “as common on Englishman’s lips as ‘I am a Liberal or ‘a
Conservative.’” It has been the purpose
of this book [A World on Fire] to
restore to view the Anglo-American world that Rossetti described. (from
pages 814-815)
Why
I Read This Book
The
British view of the American Civil War has been popping up from time to time in
some of the books I’ve been reading.
* The historical documentary radio program This Sceptred Isle mentions
briefly the division in English society caused by the American Civil War, and
the tendency of the British upper-classes to support the South, and the British
lower-classes to support the North.
* One of the biographies of Marx that - I’ve -
read (I’ve now forgotten which particular one) credited the
anti-slavery demonstrations of British labor groups that Marx was associated
with as one factor in persuading the British government not to intervene on the
Southern side.
* Karl Marx himself was a keen observer of the
American Civil War, and seems to have modified his revolutionary predictions
based on what he saw as a parallel situation in America. (Marx drew parallels between the European
capitalists and the Southern slave owners.
Neither could ever be expected to peacefully surrender their wealth as a
result of democratic elections. It might
be possible for socialism to win initial victories at the ballot box, but any
newly elected socialist government would have to face a “revolt of the slave
owners” just as Lincoln’s
government had. This language and
terminology is reflected in Marx’s writings on the Paris Commune, particularly The Civil War in France.)
* The biography of Captain Richard Burton that I read recounts Richard Burton’s mysterious trip to the
southern United States right before the outbreak of the war, and suggests that
Richard Burton may have been acting as a secret agent for the British
government.
* The short biography on Queen Victoria mentions Prince
Albert’s work on the Trent Affair (W), and credits Prince Albert with narrowly averting war between the
Northern Union and Great
Britain.
* The Decline and Fall of the British Empire mentions the ambivalence
with which the British viewed the American Civil War, and in particular how the
British Government was worried that after the war a unified United States could
one day become stronger than the British Empire.
All
of these were small little tidbits, but the result of all of these collectively
was to get me curious about Britain’s
role in the American Civil War.
The
American history textbooks I had learned from in my school days always
presented American history as if it were happening in a vacuum, and the rest of
the world didn’t matter. But in fact the
world was very interconnected in the 19th century, and the predominate world
power at the time was not yet America,
but the British Empire. I was curious to see how America’s Civil War played into the larger story
of the British Empire. (And for that matter, how the British Empire played into the story of the American
Civil War.) The British Empire at the
time did not have a non-interventionist policy, and in the 19th century became involved
in several conflicts all around the globe (from the Crimean War in Turkey to the Opium Wars in China.) It was very possible that Britain could have become involved in the
American Civil War and, as Amanda Foreman shows in her book, there were a few
times when Britain
nearly did.
So
when I came across this book while browsing in a bookstore one day, you can
imagine I was interested—a whole book devoted to exactly the topic I had been
curious about.
And
yet, despite the fact that this book seems to have been written for exactly
someone of my interests, I hesitated before buying it. It was a real doorstopper at 988* pages, densely
printed. There was no doubt that
attempting a book like this would require some dedication and time
commitment. I, being a slow reader, and
with the bad habit of getting easily distracted, might not be the ideal reader
for a book like this after all.
However,
despite its intimidating length, this book must be fairly popular because I
kept seeing it pop up at various bookstores.
Each time I saw it, I would browse through it, slightly tempted and yet
slightly intimidated. Eventually I
bought a copy in Thailand
just because I saw it at a discount price in a used bookstore, but it still sat
on my shelves unread for another couple years after that.
And
then, one evening, when I was feeling slightly ambitious, I decided to finally
take the plunge, and give this book a try.
*Although
excluding endnotes and indexes, the actual text is 815 pages.
The Reading Experience
Everyone’s
subjective reading experience is different, and my personal experience reading
this book may be different from someone else’s.
But for whatever it may be worth, here is my personal reading
experience:
After
having been intimidated by this book for so long, I was pleasantly surprised to
find how well-written it was. Yes, it is
long, but it’s story-telling historical narrative at its finest.
The
text interweaves big historical events with more personal biographical narratives,
but ultimately the book is more character driven than event driven. Throughout the narrative, the different
biographies of many different fascinating historical figures are interwoven
with each other, and with the big events of the time.
It’s
an ambitious project, and one that in the hands of a less talented writer could
easily have been a disaster. Amanda
Foreman lays out the scope and ambition on the book in her introduction:
Biography is a subset of history, and yet it
stand independently, too. The most
obvious difference is that biographers delve deeply into individual lives and
the influences that shape them, whereas for historians it is the sum of individual
experiences that is important. In A
World On Fire I have tried to combine
both approaches. I decided from the
beginning to treat each of the significant figures, and many of the lesser
ones, as though he or she was the principal subject of the book, so that I
could understand the antecedents of their motives and decisions during the
Civil War. This not only added several
years to the project, but also created the problem of how to construct a single
narrative out of competing points of view, within a timeframe that encompassed
multiple simultaneous events. The
challenge seemed insurmountable until one day I remembered how years before I
had seen Trevor Nunn’s 1980 production of Nicholas Nickleby, an extraordinary ‘theatre-in-the-round’
which brought together a vast panoply of characters through a combination of
three-dimensional staging, shifting scenes and running narratives that created
an all-enveloping experience for the audience. This memory became my guide and inspiration, and I set about writing a
history-in-the-round in the hopes of being able to immerse the reader inside
the British-American world of the Civil War (Author’s introduction
xxiv-xxv)
I’ve
never seen Nicholas Nickleby, but
despite missing that reference I’m relatively sure Amanda Foreman pulled off
what she intended to. Although she
juggles a cast of hundreds, she succeeds in making each character’s story seem
important to the reader.
In
fact, it was almost incredible to me how fully these characters come to
life. Amanda Foreman has dug up all
sorts of personal correspondence, diaries, and memoirs of her subjects. I was fully expecting the old letters and
diaries to read in antiquated stiff-sounding Victorian English, but I was
surprised how modern all of her characters sounded and acted, and I became
immersed in their stories completely.
For
the first couple weeks I was reading this book, it was fully pleasure
reading. I would open it first thing in
the morning to read a few pages before getting ready for work. And I would read it in the evening to relax.
The
first few chapters of this book were arguably juggling too many characters, but
I didn’t care. And if I was constantly
having to flip back to the index, and re-read sections to remind myself of who
everyone was in the story, I easily forgave it.
The book and the characters were engaging enough to justify it.
But,
having so far praised this book, I confess that I did begin to lose my patience
with it at about the halfway mark. When
I was about 400 pages into the book, and barely keeping track of all the
various characters and storylines already introduced, I became frustrated when
Amanda Foreman still continued to introduce more and more characters. Eventually, I gave up on trying to keep track
of who everyone was. When a name popped
up that I didn’t recognize, I no longer went back to the index to try to remind
myself of who it was. Instead, I just
plowed on with the story.
Talented
writer though she is, I think Amanda Foreman possibly overplays her hand in
this book. The number of characters the
reader has to keep track of should have been reduced by half, and few new
characters should have been introduced after the half-way point.
Also,
although I was very happy to learn about the lives of the major historical
figures, I was less interested in learning about the minor ones. I was interested in the stories of great
politicians like William Seward, Charles Sumner, Charles Francis Adams, and
William Gladstone. I was less interested
in the all stories of the ordinary British volunteers that Amanda Foreman
narrates. However, a major part of this
book is devoted to following the stories of a number of British volunteers who
served as ordinary soldiers on both sides of the American Civil War.
Although,
in her introduction, Amanda Foreman states that the original purpose of this
book was to simply follow the stories of the British volunteers during the
American Civil War, before the book grew in scope to try to include the whole
history of British-American relations during the same period. So I suppose this is the book Amanda Foreman
wanted to write, and if I’m not interested in the stories of these volunteers,
it is my problem and not hers.
A
large part of my criticisms are subjective, and has less to do with the merits
of the book itself than what I personally was interested in reading.
My
exhaustion with some of the long military parts of the book can also be chalked
up to subjectivity. Lots of people
really go in for these military histories.
(In conversations, I’ve discovered that many of my fellow history buffs
are primarily interested in history because of the military aspects to it. But I’m not one of them.)
No
doubt, military history buffs will love all the battle descriptions in this
book, but I was far more interested in the political and diplomatic sections of
the book. At the beginning of the book,
the political and diplomatic intriguing was the main part of the book, but in
the middle of the book, the military part of the story took predominance, and
this also did much to dampen my enthusiasm.
It’s
somewhat unclear exactly what the scope of the book is intended to be. I entered the book thinking it would be about
primarily focused on Britain’s
diplomatic relationship with the United States during the Civil
War. But as the book progressed, the
Amanda Foreman included many descriptions of battles and military engagements
which did not seem directly related to Britain. At some points, it seems like Amanda Foreman
was intending to include a comprehensive history of the whole American Civil in
addition to her other aims. But then,
for reasons I’m not entirely sure of, some battles were described in detail,
and others are just skipped over. Every
chapter of the book is well-written in itself, but it was sometimes a bit
confusing for me to decide what was, and what was not, the intended scope of
the book. And if I was confused on this
point, I’m apparently not the only one.
Some of the Amazon.com reviews for this book express a similar
confusion--see HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE...and many others.
But
lest I harp too much on the negatives, the political and diplomatic story in
this book is fascinating—the story of the struggle of the government of Lord
Palmerston and Lord Russell to steer a neutral course despite all the pressure
from both British Northern sympathizers and British Southern sympathizers in
their own country. Amanda Foreman
includes some great descriptions of British Parliamentary debates on the
American Civil War question. There’s
also the story of the attempted maneuverings of both the Confederate and
American diplomats in London. And the continual headaches of Lord Lyons,
the British ambassador back in Washington, in
dealing with the frequently unreasonable demands of the American government on Britain. And much more.
Despite
my caveats about the length and scope of this book, there’s a lot to recommend
it. If you’re a history nerd, I guarantee
you’ll find it fascinating.
So
What Was the British Attitude Towards The American Civil War
As Amanda
Foreman shows in her book repeatedly, British opinion on the Civil War was very
divided.
The
one thing that did seem to be consistent was the British objection to
slavery. But there was considerable
question in Britain
over whether the American Civil War was about slavery or not. The British supporters of the Confederacy (of
which there were a great number) thought that the Confederacy was fighting for
freedom and independence, and that the war wasn’t connected to the question of
slavery. Many of them also believed that
slavery would die out eventually whether or not the South gained independence.
The
question of slavery in the American Civil War is a complex one. (Historians are still debating these days
whether slavery was the major cause of the Civil War or not.) At the outbreak of the Civil War, both the
Northern and the Southern governments wanted to avoid saying the war was about
slavery. The Southern government knew
that it would lose any hope to international support if it said the war was
about slavery, and Lincoln’s government would lose the support of the boarder
states (the pro-slavery states which had stayed with the Union) if they made
the war about slavery. And it was
because of this ambiguity that many British people felt justified in also not
believing the war was not about slavery.
The
Emancipation Proclamation was intended, in part, to gain British support for
the Northern cause, but it was greeted with a great deal of cynicism by many
British, who noted that Lincoln had delayed too long in issuing it, and even
when he did issue the Proclamation, it only applied to the states of the
Confederacy, and not to the slave-owning states in the Union.
However,
according to the picture Amanda Foreman gives, once the war ended with the
abolition of slavery, then the British realized that the war had been a war to
end slavery after all, and many one-time Confederate supporters in Britain
actually repented of their former-sympathies.
The
tremendous casualty rate of the Civil War was also something that shocked the
British.
I’ve
often heard in history classes before about how bloody the Civil War was, but
sometimes without a basis of comparison it’s easy to forget exactly how bloody it really was. At one point, Amanda Foreman notes that the
Americans suffered more casualties in one battle of the Civil War than Britain
suffered in the whole of the Crimean War.
(I forget the page number and the specific battle, but I think I’m
remembering this right.) The British
public was absolutely shocked and appalled at the huge slaughter going on
across the Atlantic.
As
Amanda Foreman describes, this lead to a peace movement among the British
people that wanted the British government to put a stop to the fighting in America. The British government itself was reluctant
to get involved (it knew that a forced peace settlement would be appreciated by
neither the North nor the South) but because of all the popular pressure it was
at least obliged to debate the matter in Parliament.
If
you’re interested in this kind of thing (and I found the whole story
fascinating) Amanda Foreman goes into a lot of detail about the discussions and
debates in her book.
[Sidenote:
it’s somewhat outside of the scope of this book, but when discussing the
American Civil War Geoffrey Blainey makes an interesting point. There were actually two civil wars going on
in the world during this period—the American Civil War, and the Taiping Rebellion in China.
Nowadays, everyone remembers the horrible bloodshed caused by the
American Civil War, but the Taiping Rebellion has been more or less completely
forgotten by everyone outside of China.
However, many more people were killed in the Taiping Rebellion—an
estimated 20 million people died in the Taiping Rebellion, which in terms of
civil wars is the bloodiest civil war in history, and in terms of wars in
general is second only to World War II. So, perhaps the complete absence of any
mention of the Taiping Rebellion is an interesting omission from this book?]
Other
Notes
Interesting
Stuff I Learned
Because
the American school system is so hyper-focused on American history, I’ve done
my best to avoid American history ever since I graduated from high school. George
Washington? Abraham Lincoln? Paul Revere?
I know all this stuff already. I
want to read about some other areas of the world for once.
It
is therefore slightly humbling whenever I do pick up a book on American
history, and discover I don’t really know it nearly as well as I thought I
did. (As occasionally happens to me—see
for example: Here, Here and Here)
So
it was with this book as well. I was
constantly learning fascinating things about my own American history that
indicated to me I might not know everything as thoroughly as I thought I
did.
For
example, I didn’t know that New Orleans was
captured by the Union early in the Civil War,
and then subsequently for the rest of the War administrated under martial law
in the face of a hostile pro-Confederate population. Amanda Foreman goes into some interesting
details on that whole story.
Also,
I knew Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1866, but I never knew that the
original plan was to assassinate Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, and William
Seward all in the same night. And that,
although Andrew Johnson’s assassin got cold feet, William Seward was stabbed
several times by his would-be assassin in a vicious hand-to-hand struggle, and
almost joined Lincoln in death the same night.
I
also knew about Charles Sumner from the infamous caning incident in the Senate
floor, but I never knew about his career after that as one of the leaders in
the Republican Party during the 1860s, and as one of Seward’s rivals.
All
of these fascinating details, and more, are contained in this book.
Connections
Between the American Civil War and the English Civil War?
This
book also hints at another connection between the English Civil War and
American history. It is implied at a couple
of points that the American North/South division traces back to the English
Puritan/ Cavalier conflict.
The
argument goes that the supporters of Oliver Cromwell’s Puritans mainly settled
in the Northern United States, while the Southern United
States were settled by royalist supporters, and the culture clash
between North and South dates from this time.
A
couple times in the book it is hinted at that the reason the English
aristocracy felt sympathy with the Confederate South is because of this historical
connection. And Jefferson Davis, the
President of the Confederate, made a speech in which he explicitly linked the
North with Oliver Cromwell’s puritans, as Amanda Foreman reports on page
352.
Davis damned Northerners as the blighted offspring
of Cromwell’s fanatical Roundheads. It
was in their blood to oppress others, he declared. Their ancestors ‘persecuted Catholics in England, and they hung Quakers and witches in America’. The liberty-loving South could never live in
harmony with such monsters of intolerance.
(p. 352)
Connections
With Other Books I’ve Read
Many
major figures of the 19th Century pop up in this book, so as a consequence it
overlaps with many other books on the 19th Century I’ve read.
* William Howard Russell was a British
journalist famous for his reporting during the Crimean War. I had previously encountered him in the
Flashman book Flashman at the Charge,
but he appears as a major character in this narrative as well, since it turns
out he was the reporter sent by The Times
to cover the American Civil War.
* Henry Morton Stanley, who is one of the
principle figures in The Scramble for Africa, is one of the British volunteers in the American Civil
War whose story Amanda Foreman follows.
David Livingston, another major figure in The Scramble for Africa, has a son who volunteers in the American
Civil War, and who is also in this book.
* Garnet Wolseley was a major figure in the
British Empire, and pops up in Scramble
for Africa, Three Empires on the Nile, and Flashman and the Dragon. He appears in this book as a
British observer of the American Civil War, and a Southern sympathizer.
* Thomas Hughes, the author of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, is mentioned
briefly in this book as a pro-Northern supporter. (Somewhat curiously, Thomas Hughes’s name
appears in the Dramatis Personae at the
beginning of the book, which made me think he would be a major figure in the
book itself. But he is only just briefly
mentioned in the actual text. I suspect
he might have had a larger part in an earlier draft of this book, and was later edited out for
space reasons, but then someone forgot to remove him from the Dramatis Personae.)
* William Seward, who everyone thought
would be president in 1860, until Lincoln came
out of nowhere, and who was subsequently the Secretary of State under Lincoln, is another major
figure in this book. I first encountered
Seward in the book Flashman and the Angel of the Lord .
Seward
was also a major figure in the movie Lincoln,
although in my review of that movie, I expressed some confusion over his
portrayal. In Lincoln,
David Straithairn plays Seward with a quiet dignity and gravitas as a
well-mannered New England Patrician type.
In Flashman and the Angel of the
Lord, Seward is portrayed as a loud, blunt, cigar-chomping brandy-swilling
wheeling and dealing politician. In my
review of the movie Lincoln, I
questioned which portrayal was more accurate.
After
having read Amanda Foreman’s book, I can now say with confidence that the
portrayal in Flashman seems to be
more accurate.
* Rose Greenhow, the Washington D.C.
hostess, who later turned out to be a Confederate spy, is another character I
first encountered in Flashman and the
Angel of the Lord, and who is featured as a major character in A World on Fire. In Flashman
and the Angel of the Lord, Allan Pinkerton is credited with
discovering and arresting Rose Greenhow.
I expected Allan Pinkerton to become a character in A World on Fire as well (especially since he was originally British,
so he would have perfectly fit the theme of the British involvement in the
American Civil War) but Allen Pinkerton never appears. (I suppose Amanda Foreman was already
juggling way too many characters as it was.)
* The Schleswig-Holstein question, which
was one of the plot points of Royal Flash, also pops up in this book.
In this book, during the 1860s the British Government pledges to back Denmark if Prussia ever went to war over
Schleswig-Holstein. When the Prussians
call the British Government’s bluff, and go to war anyway, the British do not
intervene after all, and lose some of their international credibility as a
result. This then affects their
decisions regarding the American Civil War, and their reluctance to make any
promises to either side.
* The majority of the focus of this book is
on the relationship between America
and Britain during the
American Civil War, but a side story in this book is the relationship with France
during the same period.
As
mentioned briefly in this book, Napoleon III took advantage of the American
Civil War to invade Mexico
and try to set up a Catholic Monarchy there.
(This is something the American government probably would not have
permitted under normal circumstances, but was powerless to do anything about in
the middle of their Civil War.) Alistair Horne cites this incident as one of many reasons why Napoleon III was so
internationally isolated going in to the war with Prussia in 1870.
* Napoleon III’s cousin, Pierre Napoleon
Bonaparte, also shows up in this book.
He was fleeing from France
to avoid a duel, and ended up being hosted by the White House for a brief
period during the Civil War.
Pierre
Napoleon Bonaparte would later gain infamy for killing the anti-government
journalist Victor Noir. The huge
protests that resulted from this are seen as one of many events leading up to
the Paris Commune, and are described in any number of the books I’ve read on
the Paris Commune—for example it is featured in The Insurrectionist.
Connections
with The Education of Henry Adams
So, who out there has ever heard of a book called The Education of Henry Adams? If you’ve taken a few college literature
courses, I suspect you’ve come across it.
The
book is a memoir of the life of Henry Adams, who was descended from Presidents
John Adams, John Quincy Adams, and whose father, Charles Francis Adams, was the
American ambassador to England
during the American Civil War.
The
memoir is famous for being written in a highly literary difficult-to-read
style, and also for being chalked full of references to 19th century people and
events that no one remembers anymore. I
was assigned to read a couple chapters of it back in a college literature
class, and could barely make any of it out.
Anyways,
it turns out that the young Henry Adams himself is one of the characters in A World on Fire. Henry Adams travels to England with his father as an unofficial
secretary-assistant at the American Embassy in London, and Amanda Foreman makes use of Henry
Adam’s letters and memoirs to help bring to life the story of him and his
family.
After
reading this book, and feeling like I got to know Henry Adams and his situation
a lot more, I thought to myself, “If I was ever going to read The Education of Henry Adams, now is the
time.” And I actually went as far as
printing out a copy of the book, and reading through the first few
chapters. And I found that it was
actually (mostly) readable now that I had the proper background to understand
who all these politicians were that Henry Adams keeps referring to.
…and
then, like so many of my reading projects, I ended up giving up on it. (I have the bad habit of trying to read too
many books at the same time, and a few months ago I decided I was going to have
to give up on at least half of them. And
being a somewhat difficult read, The
Education of Henry Adams was the first one to go.)
But, if I ever did decide to read that
book again, or if I knew anyone who ever wanted to attempt it, I would
definitely recommend using A World on
Fire as a companion volume to help the reader understand the events and
circumstances Henry Adams is writing about.
Favorite
Narrative History List
