‘Our Brethren’: A British Version of Southern Separatist Ideology during the American Civil War

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-68
Author(s):  
Michael J. Turner

British responses to the American Civil War were not straightforward, though the relevant historiography has tended to concentrate on a number of now quite familiar explanations. The reasons why British people took sides – if they did (for some did not) – are usually thought to have been shaped by the slavery question and concomitant thinking about race, labour systems, and the nature of work; by direct economic interest – cotton, grain, investments, and the potential for future commerce; by political ideas, relating especially to democracy, national self-determination, federalism, and republics; and by geostrategic concerns about how best to preserve Britain's global role and imperial power. These were all important, but so was a relatively neglected set of influences on British opinion that arose from cultural and social determinants. This article suggests that many British people supported the Confederacy because they saw the American South as fundamentally unlike the North and, what is more, as recognizably ‘English’. The words and deeds of a prominent pro-Southerner, A.J. Beresford Hope, are used to elucidate this motivation for taking sides. Scholars have not previously investigated Hope's activism or the cultural and social case for the Confederacy in much detail.

Author(s):  
William A. Link

William Link introduces key contexts for the book, namely that the origins, onsets, and resolutions of the American Civil War are best understood as a global struggle. Not only was the creation of a new American nation a result of the war, but this creation also occurred in concert with a worldwide emergence of modern nationalism. By 1860, the American South contained the world’s largest and most valuable enslaved population, and the huge wealth in cotton, rice, sugar, and tobacco secured through slave labor is what drove exports, trade, and profit in American and global financial centers. This book suggests new ways to situate US Reconstruction as affecting and being affected by global events, and it argues that Reconstruction cannot be understood unless we extend our analysis beyond national borders.


2020 ◽  
pp. 22-37
Author(s):  
Charles Reagan Wilson

‘Section to nation’ examines how, by 1830, the American South had long had a predominantly agricultural economy. Its people soon idealized the agrarian republic that had taken shape after the American Revolution as the basis for an emerging sectional identity. Slavery was the basis of a productive economic system, in which the South was enmeshed with northern merchants and traders and the whole financial world of England. The American Civil War undermined southern ideology dramatically through the emancipation of slaves. The Reconstruction era would be nearly equal to the Civil War in forging a self-conscious white southern identity.


Author(s):  
Diane Miller Sommerville

Lays out blueprint for the book by outlining methodological approaches, evidence base, and historiographical interventions (including ‘dark turn’ in Civil War scholarship) of a study on suicide and suffering during and after the Civil War in the American South. Identifies evidentiary challenges including poor record keeping, attempts to hide suicides, elusiveness of cause or motivation, and gender bias in lethal suicides. Case studies emphasize experiences of individuals, transcending well-trodden theological and cultural discourse about suicide. Examines impact of war traumas like PTSD on soldiers and veterans, and on their wives and families. Racialized ideas about suicide and depression shaped southerners’ understanding of suffering, held by whites to be a marker of civilized peoples.


2007 ◽  
Vol 61 (4) ◽  
pp. 449-478 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Sun-Joo Lee

This essay offers a new, transnational reading of Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South(1854-55), a novel that has traditionally been read in national terms. As a sailor, Frederick Hale belongs to a profession that connects the cotton-producing American South to the cotton-manufacturing British North. This alternate "North and South" resituates Gaskell's novel in transatlantic terms and offers a new, racialized prism through which to view the novel's central conflict between master and man. By historicizing Frederick's narrative within the nineteenth-century transatlantic antislavery movement, I argue that Frederick's metonymic connection to slavery expresses itself in his narrative's generic proximity to the American slave narrative. I consider the implications of Frederick's cosmopolitanism and suggest that it anticipates Gaskell's agonized feelings about the American Civil War, an internecine conflict that places at its center the problem of slavery.


2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (27) ◽  
pp. 276-299
Author(s):  
JULIANA JARDIM DE OLIVEIRA E OLIVEIRA

Este artigo aborda o tema das relações entre Império e Prová­ncias no Brasil a partir de um olhar internacional e em um contexto de ”crise da década de 1860” e da Guerra Civil nos EUA. Dentro do contexto de uma guerra que tem implicações transnacionais, analisaremos dois focos de debate na Cá¢mara dos Deputados do Brasil que sofreram a influência do conflito nos EUA: as propostas de retomada de produção do algodão e os problemas relativos ao recrutamento de soldados em meio á  guerra. Busca-se demonstrar que a Cá¢mara dos Deputados foi palco importante para que os deputados se posicionassem a partir de diferentes interesses regionais ou provinciais, frente a um contexto internacionalizado. Em suas falas é possá­vel observar que em face ao conflito norte-americano e o contexto internacional, os parlamentares foram capazes de fazer uso de um ”jogo de escalas” para discutirem demandas e interesses regionais, explicitando relações nacionais, regionais e internacionais.Palavras-chave:  Estado Nacional. Guerra Civil. Prová­ncias.  PROVINCIAL INTERESTS IN BRAZIL DURING THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR:  a transnational view of the relationship between the Empire and the ProvincesAbstract:  This paper discusses the relationship between the Empire as a central power and the Provinces in Brazil from an international perspective within the context of the ”crisis of the 1860s” and the American Civil War. In view of this national conflict with transnational implications, we will focus on two debates in the Brazilian Lower House of Congress: the debates over the investments in cotton production and the army recruitment in times of war. The Lower House was an important environment for Brazilian Congressmen to defend different regional or provincial demands, in view of an internationalized context. In their speeches it is possible to assert that, when faced with the North American conflict and the international context, congressmen were able to use a game of ”scales” to expose their regional demands and interests, highlighting national, regional, and international relationships.Keywords:  Civil War. National State. Provinces.  INTERESES PROVINCIALES EN BRASIL EN LOS Aá‘OS DE LA GUERRA CIVIL NORTEAMERICANA:  una mirada transnacional sobre relaciones entre el Imperio y las ProvinciasResumen:  Este articulo trata del tema de las relaciones entre imperio y provincias de Brasil a partir de la mirada internacional en el contexto de la ”crisis de la década de 1860” y de la Guerra Civil de los EEUU. Dentro del contexto de una guerra de carácter internacional, analizaremos dos enfoques de debate en la Cámara de los Diputados de Brasil: las propuestas de retomadas en la producción del algodón y los problemas relacionados al reclutamiento de soldados en el medio de la guerra. Es objetivo probar que la Cámara de los Diputados fue un escenario importante para que los diputados se posicionaran a partir de diferentes intereses regionales o provinciales, frente a un contexto internacionalizado. En sus declaraciones es posible observar que ante el conflicto norteamericano y el contexto internacional, los parlamentarios fueron capaces de hacer uso de un ”juego de escalas” para discutir demandas e intereses regionales, explicitando relaciones nacionales, regionales e internacionales.Palabras clave:  Estado Nacional. Guerra Civil. Provincias.


2011 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 85-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard A. Pollock

James Baxter Bean published a series of articles in the Southern Dental Examiner in 1862 describing his work with “plaster and its manipulations.” This early experience included a new way of managing jaw fractures, with customized splints uniquely based on pretraumatic occlusion. Bean's oral splints and their method of construction, using an articulator, became the standard of care in the Atlanta region during the American Civil War and, by 1864, throughout The Confederacy. In short course, Bean's approach also swept The Union, following in large part the efforts of a colleague in the North, T.B. Gunning. Thus, what began in the early 1860s in a dental laboratory in the southeast swept the continental United States and revolutionized management of jaw-fractures during, and immediately after, the American Civil War.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document