Dream and Dread

Surgery is rapidly becoming a part of public health initiatives in developing countries. In collaboration with the Sierra Leone Ministry of Health and Sanitation, a team of local surgeons and surgeons from the organization Surgeons OverSeas (SOS) used the WHO Tool for Situational Analysis to Assess Emergency Surgical Care to quantify surgical capacity in Sierra Leone. These data were then compared to data collected from the Medical and Surgical History of the Civil War, a work documenting surgical care and hospitals during the US Civil War. There are 0.2 government hospital surgeons/100,000 people in Sierra Leone compared to 300 surgeons/100,000 soldiers in the Union Army. In Sierra Leone it is rare to have running water, fuel, anesthesia, and reliable X-rays. In comparison, US Civil War hospitals had reliable running water, fuel, and anesthesia. It is rare to manage open fractures, limb dislocations, amputations, and conditions requiring chest tubes in Sierra Leone, while these procedures were commonly employed in US Civil War hospitals. Government hospitals in present day Sierra Leone lack the infrastructure, personnel, supplies, and equipment to adequately provide emergency and essential surgical care. In a comparison of present day Sierra Leonean and US Civil War hospitals, the US Civil War facilities are equivalent and in many ways superior. It is hoped that such a comparison will aid advocacy efforts so that greater resources are devoted to improving emergency and essential surgical care in low- and middle-income countries.

Racial health inequalities in the USA: The role of social class

The origins of the US Civil War have long been a central topic of debate among historians, both Marxist and non-Marxist. John Ashworth’s Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic is a major Marxian contribution to a social interpretation of the US Civil War. However, Ashworth’s claim that the War was the result of sharpening political and ideological – but not social and economic – contradictions and conflicts between slavery and capitalism rests on problematic claims about the rôle of slave-resistance in the dynamics of plantation-slavery, the attitude of Northern manufacturers, artisans, professionals and farmers toward wage-labour, and economic restructuring in the 1840s and 1850s. An alternative social explanation of the US Civil War, rooted in an analysis of the specific path to capitalist social-property relations in the US, locates the War in the growing contradiction between the social requirements of the expanded reproduction of slavery and capitalism in the two decades before the War.

Infectious diseases killed more Union soldiers than combat (2:1 ratio) during the US Civil War, 1861-1865, but this mortality was unevenly distributed across 2,000 individual regimental units. Historical disease mortality rates by US state were obtained from old administrative records from the US Civil War. When disease casualties were assigned to individual states on the basis of where the regiments were recruited, distinct geographical patterns emerged, varying by a factor of 10. More rural areas experienced higher disease mortality rates, especially in southern and border states. A strong correlation (R2 = 0.58; P <0.01) between Civil War disease mortality and the proportion of farming occupations by state was found by using data from the 1860 Census. Low population density also correlated with higher disease mortality rates, but the area of farmland or wheat production in 1860 did not. Elevated disease mortality among Black and Indian (Native American) soldiers was comparable to that of White Union soldiers recruited from the Confederate states and was much higher than that of soldiers from more urban states in the Northern and Eastern regions. Disease mortality during the US Civil War varied greatly between groups, with epidemiological isolation prior to the war associated with higher mortality and urban living or prior military service associated with lower mortality. This difference is likely due to varied immunity to infectious pathogens.

Introduction: Black Laughs Matter

The Historiography of Victorian Britain and the US Civil War David Brown (bio) The influence of the American Civil War within British historiography, by which I refer to the historiography of the Victorian era and of the British Empire in the mid-nineteenth century, is minimal. Of course, Anglo-American and transatlantic historians taking a comparative approach have written extensively on this topic, but this essay confines its analysis to the work of card-carrying historians of British history in the Victorian era. There has been a long and distinguished tradition of British scholars of the American Civil War—which includes William Brock, J. R. Pole, and Peter J. Parish—and more recently much interest the war’s transnational impact, but what impact has this literature made outside of its subfield? To be frank, it has had very little influence on scholars of Victorian Britain, and I took a couple of weighty books from the library shelf at random to illustrate the point. [End Page 156] How many pages do you think the US Civil War takes up in the work covering 1846–1886 in Oxford University Press’s multivolume New Oxford History of England? The index of The Mid-Victorian Generation has just four subheadings under the United States of America: agriculture; economic competition; relations with; and Civil War. The three separate entries listed under “Civil War” begin on page 13 by suggesting that the supply of wheat to Britain was disrupted “by wars in the Crimea and the United States.” The eagle-eyed might raise an eyebrow at this, because common wisdom suggests that transatlantic wheat exports increased during the early 1860s, partly compensating for the dearth of cotton in calculating the war’s disruption of the British economy.5 On page 197, two sentences discuss the “good deal of interest in British military circles” in battle tactics and weaponry, although with little lasting effect because “British experts dismissed” them “as aberrations arising from unique circumstances.” Coverage of the American Civil War peaks on pages 230 and 231 of this 787-page work. When I say “peak,” I mean ends—and two full pages are not given to the Civil War, because Poland’s 1863 rebellion against Russia takes up half a page, as does Garibaldi’s British visit in 1864. The narrative of the American Civil War’s transatlantic effect is covered in one paragraph that is, it must be said, remarkably cogent. The paragraph emphasizes neutrality threatened by the “rabidly anti-British” William Seward, diplomatic spats over the Trent and the Alabama, and Gladstone’s speech at Newcastle in October 1862, where much alarm was caused by his declaration that Jefferson Davis “has made a nation.” The war’s significance is covered in just three sentences in the next paragraph, contextualizing Gladstone’s faux pas at Newcastle and his subsequent transition to liberal champion of working-class reform.6 The Civil War does not have much traction for domestic historians of the Victorian era, then, but surely it has more purchase within the context of Empire? No. The forty essays of a 756-page 2012 edited collection, The Victorian World, provide more separate index entries for the American Civil War, but in terms of the events between 1861 and 1865, greater detail is found in The Mid-Victorian Generation.7 The citations are, without exception, brief mentions of the war in passing, set within the context of other themes, even in a final essay titled “The Victorian Period of American [End Page 157] History.” This chapter appears most pertinent but does not examine the war’s impact within Victorian Britain. Instead, it contests the standard historiographical practice of using the Civil War as a convenient periodization device that divides US history into ante- and postbellum to argue that the last two thirds of nineteenth-century American history should be treated as one era: the Victorian period.8 In other words, it examines the ways the British Victorian experience informs US history, rather than vice versa. There are just two strands of British historiography in which the Civil War makes an intervention. The first is the domain of military historians who confront the—by now venerable—question...

An Uphill Battle: The American Civil War in German Historiography Mischa Honeck (bio) In twenty-first-century Germany, the US Civil War rarely makes headlines. This changed somewhat in the wake of the Charlottesville riots in August 2017. Stunned by the show of force by white supremacists and neo-Nazis, which resulted in the death of thirty-two-year-old Heather Heyer, the German media scrambled for answers. It was the usual routine: talk shows and op-eds about the sad state of US race relations, the country’s hyper-partisanship, and the lack of moral leadership coming out of the White House. Occasional expert interviews tended to provide thicker descriptions; these often pointed to the emotionally charged memory landscapes that have continued to divide the nation since Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House in April 1865. Many fine and dear colleagues spoke out. They did a tremendous job. What was striking though: most considered themselves Americanists, but only a handful had written on the Civil War. Not one could look back on a career singularly devoted to studying that conflict and its afterlife. There are two main reasons for the relative invisibility of the US Civil War in recent German historiography: the first is systemic, the second one more methodological. Although there is nothing uniquely German about placing higher value on generalization in certain segments of our profession, the historical profession in the Federal Republic neither encourages nor rewards specialization if one focuses on non-European history. The “Civil War historian” is a foreign species in German academia. Usually German Americanists, if they do so at all, author one book on the subject before moving on to another topic or century altogether. This is what I did. People trying to secure a permanent professorship in this system are supposed to be generalists on “America.” Trying to be a James McPherson as a young scholar in German academia is the surest ticket to unemployment of which I am aware. The second reason has to do with recent developments in the field. Since at least the beginning of the new millennium, the historical profession in Germany and elsewhere has experienced seismic shifts, including the tendency to privilege transnational and global approaches. This has involved paying greater, and renewed, attention to the study of race, minorities, immigration, and colonization. My argument is that this widened lens has had ambivalent effects on non-Americans laboring in the field of US history in general and the history of the US Civil War in particular—effects that I will spell out in greater detail over the following pages. [End Page 161] Suffice it to say that new Civil War–related publications from German historians are rare and few. The last five biannual meetings of the Historikerverband—the German equivalent of the American Historical Association—did not feature a single paper on the war. Now that is something to ponder. I am far from suggesting, of course, that there is not a veritable tradition of German-language scholarship on the war that deserves mentioning. Therefore, I will devote the next couple paragraphs to recapitulating major themes and questions in Civil War histories authored by German scholars since the mid-nineteenth century. Although such an attempt can only be cursory, it will hopefully reveal that new interpretations have seldom emerged outside larger ideological shifts and political transformations. In closing, then, I will address whether the global history paradigm that is currently gaining more disciples (not just in German-speaking academia) will further sideline US-centered accounts of the Civil War or whether it might lead to an unlikely renaissance within surprising constellations and novel contexts. The earliest German-language works on the history of the Civil War came from people who saw it—immigrant soldiers, veterans, and commentators. The sheer scale of German American involvement in the conflict justified an intense public interest in the war on both sides of the Atlantic. An estimated two hundred thousand German Americans served in the armies of the North, which made them the largest ethnic minority to fight for the Union. Like their nationalist counterparts back home, these immigrant historians had an unabashedly ethnocentrist agenda. In highlighting...

£24.50 and $40.00, £12.75 and $20.00 softback Paul Robert Magocsi Ukraine: A Historical Atlas 1986 University of Toronto Press Toronto 62

Reviewed by: The Loyal Republic: Traitors, Slaves, and the Remaking of Citizenship in Civil War America by Erik Mathisen Madeleine Forrest The Loyal Republic: Traitors, Slaves, and the Remaking of Citizenship in Civil War America. By Erik Mathisen. Civil War America. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Pp. xvi, 221. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-5459-1; cloth, $34.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-3632-0.) American citizenship lacked clear definition until the mid-nineteenth century. Citizenship in the early republic was plagued by generalizations, questions of obligation, and issues regarding its origins. In The Loyal Republic: Traitors, Slaves, and the Remaking of Citizenship in Civil War America, Erik Mathisen explores how this dynamic evolved as the Civil War era redefined what it meant to be an American citizen. Mathisen illuminates in new and valuable ways how “loyalty . . . became part of a larger attempt to redefine citizenship and reckon with the power of nation-states” (p. 2). Through both rhetoric and politics, he argues, “loyalty . . . clarified . . . for the first time, the obligations of American citizenship” (p. 173). Although it [End Page 928] became a necessary marker of allegiance during the war, loyalty faded from political discourse by the mid-1870s with disastrous consequences for African Americans. Using Mississippi as a case study, Mathisen examines the interplay between loyalty and citizenship through local and national lenses by weaving together events from the Deep South with those occurring at the national level. He ultimately argues that, while antebellum Americans understood the rights guaranteed to them as citizens, they were less clear on their own obligations to the national government. The Civil War clarified the issue, if only briefly, and left a lasting impact on how Americans remember the war and how they still think about national loyalty. Mathisen shows that, despite its best efforts, the Mississippi state government was subsumed by the more powerful Confederate state. Although both Mississippi and the Confederate States of America ultimately failed, white southerners who remained loyal to both gained a new understanding of citizenship obligations. Continuing this theme, Mathisen contends that the Confederate army became the main vehicle by which soldiers were turned into loyal citizens, and the army created a bond between white southerners and the Confederacy that can be traced to the formation of the Lost Cause. But even this connection was not without its struggles, as Mathisen notes, because the Confederate government and the state governments were often at odds as to who should be in charge, especially when it came to the command of local militias. In the second half of the book, Mathisen gets to the strongest part of his argument. Here he examines the role loyalty played in defining citizenship for both the Union and the Confederacy. Loyalty had assumed a new level of importance by mid-war as emancipation enabled freedmen to seize loyalty to the Union as an integral step toward gaining full citizenship rights. The loyalty of enslaved men and women, as well as African American soldiers, served as a sharp contrast to the absence of white southern loyalty. Mathisen makes clear that loyalty was hard to define, however. President Andrew Johnson’s required loyalty oaths, for example, made a mockery of his desire to force former slaveholders to repent for their sins. But after Congress took control of Reconstruction, the Union’s focus and energy shifted toward African American protection. Mathisen shows that in this period action, not rhetoric, meant more when proving allegiance. Ultimately, the march toward unification ensured the separation of loyalty from citizenship obligations—a move that unduly benefited white southerners. While Mathisen admits that loyalty’s prominence as a part of citizenship ebbed, he effectively contends that it remains both in Civil War memory and as an important part of American patriotism. The Loyal Republic is a well-researched and thoughtful study that adds much to our understanding of the complex evolving concepts of American citizenship. Mathisen’s focus on the ways the Civil War altered Americans’ understanding of the obligations of citizenship and the role loyalty played in that understanding makes this book a welcome addition to any Civil War scholar’s library. [End Page 929] Madeleine...

Book Review: James Heartfield, British Workers & the US Civil War: How Karl Marx and the Lancashire Weavers Joined Abraham Lincoln's Fight against Slavery 150 Years Ago. London: Reverspective, Ltd., 2012. ISBN: 978-0956806123 (Paperback). 40 Pages. £5[Article copies available for fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2013 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]You may have caught late night classics-in-the-making such as Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter or Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies. Well, I have one for you that happens to be true according to historian James Heartfield. What do Abraham Lincoln, weavers in Lancashire, Britain, Karl Marx, and the US Republican Party have in common? They all collaborated in the fight against the Confederacy and the regime of slavery that it represented.In his fascinating albeit abbreviated work, Heartfield, British journalist and former member of the Revolutionary Communist Party, weaves story of cross-Atlantic solidarity and social movement building while laying bare uncomfortable truths. He shows us that Britain was in position to determine the balance of the US Civil War for number of years until 1963. However, the British government and elites displayed contradiction that uncovered the dark nature of power in the classical manner that Chomsky lays bare as the nature of American Imperialism. Britain publically disdained slavery, going so far as to search its merchant ships on the high seas under suspicion of slave activity. Logically, then, one would expect that had Britain intervened in the Civil War, it would be on the side of the Union lead by Lincoln. According to the established myth, British workers would side with the Confederacy knowing they would be hurt by the famine through lost jobs and reduced work hours. This is because significant portion of Britain's industrial activity depended on stable supply of raw cotton from the South. When the North blockaded Southern ports it resulted in drop of cotton exports, thus the cotton famine.History proved otherwise, as Heartfield demonstrates in his work. British politicians and elites actively agitated their workers to enter the war on the side of the South for couple of reasons. One, Lincoln represented then radical Republican ideals opposed by British elites. Rather, it was the elite's natural instinct to oppose notions of freedom should those expand into greater demands by white workers. Second, British industrialists needed the South' s raw cotton for their mills and economic activity. The Northern blockade of Southern ports interfered with the free cotton trade. Third, Britain was resentful if not fearful of former colony becoming stronger competitor under consolidated Union.Marx, who was living in Britain at the time, and many other intellectuals, activists, journalists, etc., recognizing the specter of sanctioned slavery across the globe, agitated against support for the Confederacy. Marx himself corresponded with Lincoln, the first Republican President, in genuine show of support and solidarity. More importantly, as Heartfield underscores here, British workers demonstrated instinctive solidarity with the plight of the US slaves even though it was against their own immediate economic self-interest. As important, the North sent shipments of supplies to striking British workers in show of solidarity.Southern elites, in collaboration with most British elites, newspapers, and pseudo-pro-labor, and anti-slavery organizations, engaged in fierce propaganda to persuade British workers to support the Confederacy and accept British military intervention on their behalf. For example, the leader of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS), with official government ties, stated Lincoln's Proclamation was a measure of hostility to the whites, and designed to produce slave insurrection (p. …

Reviewed by: Nations, Markets, and War: Modern History and the American Civil War Marc Egnal Nations, Markets, and War: Modern History and the American Civil War. By Nicholas Onuf and Peter Onuf. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006. Pp. xii, 362. Cloth, $45.00.) The Civil War was not only fought on the battlefield. It was also a clash in the realm of ideas, as leaders, both North and South, sought to convince individuals in their own sections, in the opposing region, and in the world at large of the righteousness of their cause. Coauthors (and brothers) Nicholas and Peter Onuf state, “Our purpose in Nations, Markets, and War is to illuminate the critical conceptual developments in Western liberal thought that enabled Lincoln to see the crisis of the union as an epochal struggle for the new nation’s soul” (4). They want to examine the ideas “that enabled Americans to think themselves out of the old union and into two separate and hostile nations” (181). Despite its worthy goals and the insightful analyses of particular thinkers, the Onufs’ book does not succeed in relating the evolution of Western thought to the American Civil War. The first part of the book, less relevant for Civil War historians, examines European thought from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. In five chapters, this section analyzes writers such as Hugo Grotius, David Hume, Emmerich de Vattel, Thomas Hobbes, and, particularly, Adam Smith. These pages present a great deal of information on views of civilization, concepts of progress, the emergence of “liberalism,” and the idea of a nation. But Nicholas Onuf, who wrote this section, makes little effort to link these chapters to the overall goal of understanding the Civil War. More broadly, these chapters too often lack coherence or a clear argument. Making sense of this section, even on a sentence level, is frequently tough sledding. Readers must wrestle with statements such as, “In Foucault’s account, resemblances come in many forms, but in Renaissance discourse, four forms of ‘similitude’ dominate,” or, “If faculties translate into rights in [End Page 311] the relations of equals they translate into property when considered on their own in relation to everything else in nature” (113, 132). The second part, written chiefly by Peter Onuf, looks at American thought from Thomas Jefferson to the Civil War, although a chapter reflects again on the influence of Adam Smith. Here the lines of influence between writers and those involved in the sectional clash are shorter. Still, the links often remain vague. These chapters present thoughtful essays on Smith as a moral historian and Jefferson’s views of nationhood but do not show how such views influenced exchanges in the 1850s. Discussions of Pennsylvanian Henry C. Carey and South Carolinian William Henry Trescot are valuable and seem more pertinent, because these individuals were also participants in the conflict. But again the impact these writers had on the larger debate is not always clear. Many northerners rejected Carey’s advice, just as southerners often spurned Trescot’s counsels. Part of the difficulty the Onufs face lies in the need to ground intellectual discourse, the focus of their work, in political and social realities. One assertion the authors make repeatedly is that “the American Civil War was the first fully modern war; there would have been no war had the North and South not been modern nations” (18). But this statement is puzzling, particularly since the Onufs describe the North and South as “modern nations that commanded the loyalties and lives of their peoples” (4). If this depiction is questionable for the North, it certainly does not hold for the Confederacy, where large areas were disaffected and at least one in five individuals who took up arms joined the opposing side. More plausible would be the contention that a modern nation (as they define the term) was the result rather than a cause of the Civil War. The task the Onufs have set for themselves is ambitious and potentially of great value. The two authors, both accomplished scholars, have read a vast array of treatises, pamphlets, and other primary sources. But the final product is unsatisfactory. Despite its length and breadth...

IntroductionFormed in Alabama in 1994, the League of the South is a nationalist organization that advocates secession from the United States of America and the establishment of a fifteen-state Confederate States of America (CSA) – four states more than seceded during the US Civil War (1861–1865), the additional states being Okla­homa, Missouri, Kentucky, and Maryland (Southern Patriot). With over ten thou­sand members, the League professes a commitment to constructing this new CSA based on a reading of Christianity and the Bible that can be identified as “Chris­tian nationalist.” This position is centred upon what we identify as the theological war thesis, an assessment that interprets the nineteenth-century CSA to be an orthodox Christian nation and understands the 1861–1865 US Civil War to have been a theological war over the future of American religiosity fought between devout Confederate and heretical Union states. In turn, this reasoning leads to claims that the “stars and bars” battle flag and other Confederate icons are Chris­tian symbols and the assertion that opposition to them equates to a rejection of Christianity.

It has, admittedly, been a long time since I have read Herbert Gutman's Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America. The essays in this volume were foundational to my PhD training at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, an alma mater I share with Gutman, and I remember them as core texts in the labor history seminar that I took there as a second-year graduate student. As time went on, though, my research interests during my dissertation work and as an early career professor seemingly took me far afield from Gutman's emphasis on working-class formation and culture. I primarily identified as a historian of the US West and of the US Civil War and Reconstruction. My research, which dealt with unfree and quasi-free labor systems in California from the 1850s to the 1870s, did focus on work and workers. But as with many other Civil War and Reconstruction historians, my preoccupation has almost always been with the state. I want to know how labor and immigration exclusion policies shaped the lives of workers; how workers engaged with the state by contesting these laws and policies; how the state acted violently against workers; and how the outcomes of these struggles changed the overarching political history of the United States during Reconstruction.Given my research commitments, my first impression on rereading Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America was dissatisfaction at the weak emphasis on the state. There was precious little about the law, politics, and judicial proceedings that were at the heart of my own interpretations of labor history and inherently central to the Civil War and Reconstruction.In fact, one of Gutman's most provocative claims in the title essay of this volume is that the Civil War and Reconstruction may not have mattered all that much in the broader scheme of labor history. Gutman purposely disrupted the familiar periodization of national history that pivoted around the Civil War and Reconstruction as major turning points. Instead, he treated the period from 1843 to 1893 as a single unbroken era characterized by continuity, “common patterns of behavior,” rather than change.1 The “profound tension” between “American preindustrial social structure and the modernizing institutions that accompanied the development of industrial capitalism” remained the constant theme of American life, relatively uninterrupted by the Civil War and its aftermath.2After quieting my initial kneejerk protest—how could Gutman possibly discount the impact of emancipation and the Reconstruction amendments on labor history?—I gave serious thought to his argument about continuity across the pre–and post–Civil War periods. I concluded, to my surprise, that Gutman was ahead of his time in questioning whether the Civil War and Reconstruction were actually moments of tremendous rupture in national history.For decades, historians had emphasized that the United States victory over the Confederacy during the Civil War resulted in the consolidation of the power of the liberal US nation-state. The federal government emerged from the Civil War a powerful, muscular entity capable of crushing challenges to its authority across the nation. It quelled the slaveholder rebellion and installed free labor in the South, subdued and incorporated the Native peoples of the West, and crushed worker dissent in the North and Midwest.In the past ten years, however, Civil War and Reconstruction historians have begun to dismantle this image of the postwar American state. Their focus has instead been on the continuities between the pre–and post–Civil War United States: the uneven and ineffectual power of the federal government, the persistence of unfreedom after the end of slavery, and the hierarchy and violence that still structured social relations in a republic (allegedly) dedicated to liberal individualism and equality before the law. The picture of post–Civil War America that emerges from this new scholarship is much more chaotic and ambiguous, and more eerily similar to the antebellum era, than we have often imagined.3Gutman's delineation of workers’ struggles and working-class formation between 1843 and 1893 anticipated this new interpretation of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras. More importantly, his arguments suggest that a renewed focus on labor history—which many Civil War and Reconstruction historians abandoned after the 1980s—can help us trace the threads of continuity that bound together the antebellum and postbellum eras.First, Gutman's focus on workers’ persistent resistance to the ethos of liberal capitalism, which he highlights in both “Work, Culture, and Industrializing Society” and “Protestantism and the American Labor Movement,” undermines any notion that the US victory in the Civil War was also a victory for the Republican Party's vision of liberal citizenship. Scholars often blame the failure of Republican policy on recalcitrant former slaveholders in the South who refused to adopt free wage labor or acknowledge Black Americans’ equality before the law. Gutman reveals, however, that the nation's working people were themselves often rightly skeptical of a Republican liberalism that emphasized individual acquisitiveness over communal good, as well as Republicans’ vision of citizenship rooted firmly in the defense of private property over the right to economic justice. Workers’ resistance clearly shows that a liberal consensus did not triumph after the Civil War. Instead, the post–Civil War era saw the continuation of a battle over the legitimacy of liberal capitalism's cornerstone concepts that started long before the war and lasted long afterward.Second, and relatedly, the essays in the volume speak to Civil War and Reconstruction historians’ current emphasis on the inefficacy and unevenness of state power in the postwar era. Gutman's two lesser-known early articles at the end of Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America—“Trouble on the Railroads in 1873–1874” (1961) and “Two Lockouts in Pennsylvania, 1873–1874” (1959)—are especially worth revisiting because they show how the strength of workers’ community ties derailed (sometimes literally) industrialists’ efforts to harness the power of the state.4 Gutman's intensely local community studies reveal that the image of a muscular postwar state intervening on the behalf of capital to squash workers’ protests does not always resemble reality. In the smaller railroad towns of the Midwest and the coal towns of Pennsylvania during the early years of the Long Depression, the relationships that working-class people forged with middling shopkeepers, white-collar professionals, and small manufacturers often diluted the coercive power of the state. Middle-class leaders in local and municipal governments, who were often bound to their working-class neighbors through long-standing ties of friendship, common working-class origins, and a shared hatred of corporate autocracy, might side with protesting workers against large industrial operators or refuse to deploy state power against them. Together, working- and middle-class residents could frustrate capitalists who wanted to bring down the heavy hand of the postwar state on workers in the name of defending private property. Gutman's community studies remind scholars always to be attentive to the contested and highly contingent nature of state power over and in workers’ lives in the postwar era.Finally, Gutman's emphasis on the incomplete imposition of capitalist labor discipline on working people across the entire nineteenth century can transform our understanding of emancipation. Civil War and Reconstruction historians, including myself, frequently portray the abolition of slavery as a massive social, economic, and cultural transformation. The federal state tried to remake the lives of formerly enslaved people (and the lives of enslavers) by installing free wage labor, along with all of its coercive features—contracts, at-will employment, and time discipline—in the South. This interpretation of the postwar period rests on the assumption that free wage labor and all its disciplinary trappings were already fully developed in the North and that enslaved people had to be acclimated to ways of life that northern wageworkers had already been living under for at least one generation. Gutman's insight that capitalist labor discipline was still very much contested and in flux across all of the nineteenth century forces scholars to reevaluate both the significance of emancipation and the experience of the formerly enslaved. In particular, former slaves’ postemancipation labor struggles seem less disconnected, and less radically divergent, from those of northern wageworkers when we discover that both groups were actively shaping an incomplete, fluid, and contested capitalist vision of labor discipline still very much in the making. In this context, then, emancipation could be read as a continuation of pre–Civil War struggles over worker autonomy rather than as a complete break with antebellum labor history.On the whole, my rereading of Gutman's Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America in my academic middle age convinced me that I needed to revisit classic works in labor history more often. My work does not fundamentally focus on working-class formation, identity, or culture. Still, Gutman's distinctive periodization of the nineteenth century presents a different way of looking at the questions that concern me the most, including the meaning of freedom in the age of emancipation, the character of the post–Civil War state, and the policies and practices of labor coercion. Returning to labor history generally, and to Gutman specifically, may well be one of the most fruitful paths for revising our understanding of the world that the Civil War made.

Civil War Settlers: Scandinavians, Citizenship, and American Empire, 1848–1870

The History of the Tangier DifficultyThe American Civil War in Morocco Graham H. Cornwell (bio) It was a typically mild February day in 1862 in Tangier, Morocco. James DeLong, US consul to Morocco, kept watch from his perch in the US legation, from which he had a direct view of the Bay of Tangier. On clear days, he could identify every ship that passed through the Strait of Gibraltar and thus entered the Mediterranean Sea. Since his arrival in the fall of 1861, he had been constantly vigilant for signs or reports of Confederate naval operations. On the morning of February 19, word arrived that two Confederate sailors had disembarked in Tangier en route to Cadiz, Spain, aboard a French ship. DeLong leapt into action and summoned a handful of Moroccan guards to assist him. Together they marched through the narrow streets of the Tangier medina, the walled portion of the city, and arrested the rebels on the spot. In the ensuing days, DeLong's extraterritorial arrest caused an uproar in the streets of Tangier, as hundreds of the city's European residents marched through the city streets and gathered in protest outside the American legation building. As the Confederates had been passengers on a French vessel, French officials in [End Page 262] Click for larger view View full resolution James DeLong, circa 1861 (Courtesy of private collection of Philip Abensur) Tangier (and later in Paris and Washington) were the most vehement in their condemnation of DeLong's actions. The uproar over the arrest—and DeLong's insensitive handling of it among the Tangier consular corps—reveals much about Morocco's relationship to European imperial powers and about the strength of Moroccan-US relations during the war. The gradual erosion of Moroccan sovereignty at the hands of European imperial powers both made DeLong's arrest possible and provided the context in which French consular officials (as they had arrived on a French ship) would protest and demand their release. The arrest and subsequent outcry say much, too, about the war's significance in the Middle East and North Africa. The American Civil War had material consequences in the region, most notably affecting the flow of cotton textiles, manufactured in Europe using Southern cotton, into the region's newly liberalized markets. In the western Mediterranean, American consuls worked to minimize and subdue the Confederate sympathies among merchant communities who wished to maintain access to the cheap Southern cotton upon which their business depended. But the possibilities for action by US consuls varied depending on geography: what was possible and legal in Tangier was not in Gibraltar. In turn, the independent states of the Middle East and North Africa could also directly, materially intervene in the Civil War. Western consuls may have considered the Islamic states of region [End Page 263] "semi-barbarous" or "uncivilized," but they were still able to make autonomous decisions regarding their own international relations. Morocco's marginal status in global affairs meant that, unlike France and Britain, it never declared its neutrality during the Civil War. Although Morocco in the 1860s was in the midst of a struggle to preserve its own sovereignty in the face of European imperial ambitions, it maintained the capacity to materially support the Union cause. The "Tangier difficulty" thus points to more expansive commercial and naval theaters of the war that stretched across the Atlantic and into Mediterranean. American-Moroccan Relations Scholars have heretofore treated the history of the United States and Morocco during the 1860s as two discrete narratives. The Tangier difficulty, however, reiterates the international character of the American Civil War as well as how European and African monarchical and imperial processes shaped the global context of the American conflict, and vice versa. In 1861, the year the American Civil War broke out, Morocco was reeling from a decisive military defeat by Spain, a loss that allowed European trading partners to liberalize international trade in a series of treaties that permanently altered the trade balance between Morocco and Europe. The main item of this import-heavy trade was cheap textiles produced in France and Britain from American cotton. In short, the US Civil War mattered in Morocco: to merchants...