Fifty Years After the Nigerian Civil War: Lessons from Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun

Introduction. The Civil War in the United States (1861–1865) has been of considerable interest to historians, lawyers, economists, and political scientists for more than 150 years. The internal political struggle that broke out in the middle of the 19th century between the two regions of the young democratic state seems to be a valuable object of research. However, scientific approaches to the study of the causes of the “inevitable conflict”, their transformation and rebirth depending on the historical period and the political situation are of even greater interest. This article attempts to summarize the main trends in the historiography of the causes of the Civil War in the United States, mainly in foreign historiography. Methods of research and materials. The methodological basis of the study was made up of general scientific and private scientific methods. The historical-legal, comparative method, as well as sociological, concrete-historical and systemic methods are used. The theoretical basis of the study was the work of mainly foreign historians, lawyers, political scientists and state historians. Analysis. Without denying the centrality of slavery among the causes of the Civil War, researchers identify religious, economic, political and social factors as the key determinants of the separatist movement in the South. A special place in American studies is occupied by the consideration of the role of African Americans in inciting conflict, the personality factor of A. Lincoln, as well as the influence of the abolitionist movement and journalists on the growing confrontation between the North and the South. At the same time, all directions, one way or another, boil down to the fact that it was slavery that was the fundamental cause of the Civil War. The peculiarities of the formation of each of the scientific directions were determined by the socio-economic and political conditions that took place in a particular historical period. Results. The periodization of scientific approaches to the study of the causes of the Civil War in the United States in the historical and legal literature can be carried out by dividing the research into three main periods: the “confrontational” (second half of the 19th century); the “socio-economic” (beginning – middle of the 20th century); the “industrial” (middle of the 20th century – the beginning of the 21st century). In the period from the beginning of the 21st century to the present, there is an obvious consensus on the central role of slavery among the determinants of war, but approaches to this problem in recent years have been characterized by interdisciplinarity, complexity, taking into account completely different sides of the conflict. Each of these areas has contributed to the formation of a holistic view of the causes of the Civil War, allowing us to realize the complex, multifaceted nature of the causes of the conflict and to reject two-dimensional approaches to their understanding. Key words: American Civil War, causes of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln, slavery in the United States, the Missouri Compromise, abolitionists, history of the USA.

Author’s IntroductionThe author argues that slavery is the root cause of the Civil War even though historians have often posited other explanations. Some other interpretations have been ideological (i.e., about the morality of slavery), others have been economic, political, or cultural.Focus Questions If you were to make an argument for the causes of the Civil War, what evidence or types of evidence would you want to examine? In what ways can the different types of arguments (ideological, economic, political, and cultural), be combined to explain the causes of the Civil War? Do such arguments exclude or reinforce each other? In what ways? Author Recommends * E. L. Ayres, In the Presence of Mine Enemies: War in the Heart of America, 1859–1863 (New York, NY: Norton, 2003).A study of two counties, one north and one south, during the end of the sectional crisis and the early Civil War. While Potter, Walther, and Wilentz offer sweeping, often political, histories, Ayres offers a microhistory approach to the sectional conflict. Although Ayres writes within the tradition of seeing cultural differences between North and South, he concludes that slavery was the issue that drove the two sections apart. * M. A. Morrison, Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny and the Coming of the Civil War (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).Views the development of the sectional crisis through the lens of Manifest Destiny. Territorial expansion drove hostility between the sections. Morrison concentrates on the political developments of the period connected to the acquisition and organization of the territories to show how the issue of slavery in the territories polarized the sections. * D. M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861 (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1976).The most comprehensive survey of the decade before the war. Potter traces the development of slavery as a political issue that North and South could not resolve. While it is a masterly and nuanced treatment of the political history, it does not incorporate social history and is more detailed than is useful for most undergraduates. E. H. Walther, The Shattering of the Union: America in the 1850s (Wilmington, Scholarly Resources, 2004) has recently supplanted Potter as a survey of the decade. It is an easier read for undergraduates and incorporates the new literature than has emerged since Potter wrote. * S. Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York, NY: Norton, 2005).A sweeping history of the United States from the constitutional era to the outbreak of the Civil War. Wilentz attempts to update Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.’s synthesis The Age of Jackson by returning to a focus on the evolution of democracy while at the same time incorporating the social history that emerged after Schlesinger wrote. Only the last third of this very long book covers the 1850s, but Wilentz argues that democracy had taken differing sectional forms by that period: a free‐labor version in the North and a plantation version in the South.Online Materials 1. The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War (http://valley.vcdh.virginia.edu/)A prize‐winning website that profiles Augusta County, Virginia and Franklin County, Pennsylvania. Material from this website formed the basis of Ayres, In the Presence of Mine Enemies. Although the website primarily concentrates on the Civil War itself, it provides access to newspapers and letters and diaries from the 1850s that show the development of, and reaction to, the sectional crisis in those counties. It also shows students the types of materials (census, tax, and church records as well as newspapers and letters and diaries) with which historians work to build an argument. 2. American Memory from the Library of Congress (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html)Although not specifically devoted to the origins of the Civil War, the American Memory site provides access to the collections of the Library of Congress which contain massive amounts of primary materials for students and scholars. From the website, one can gain access to congressional documents, periodicals from the 1850s, nineteenth‐century books, music, legal documents, memoirs by white and black southerners as well as slave narratives.Sample SyllabusNicole Etcheson’s ‘Origins of the Civil War,’ History Compass, 3/1 (2005), doi:10.1111/j.1478‐0542.2005.00166.x can be used as a reading in any Civil War course.

In Northern Uganda, a rebel group called the Lord's Resistance Army led by Joseph Kony has been fighting the government since the mid-1980s in what has become Africa's longest civil war. It is estimated that more than 100,000 people have died in the civil war while others have had their lips, ears or limbs cut off and thousands of children have been abducted as fighters, laborers, and concubines. This violence, in turn, produced more than 1.8 million Internally Displaced Peoples Camps, throughout Northern Uganda. Many Northerners blame the Ugandan government for forcing them into inhumane camps and for failing to protect them from the marauding LRA.Militaristic attempts by the Government to defeat the rebels has proved futile, as a result, the Government has resorted to peace talks as an alternative solution to the civil war. The Northerners see the peace talks as the only hope and lasting solution to peace in Northern Uganda. The question that remains is; what will be done to the perpetuators of these crimes when the peace talks finally bear fruits? Legal means such as trying the perpetuators in the courts of law has been considered with the Government recently setting up a special division in the high court to try the rebels. Non legal means such as forgiveness has also been considered as a way of dealing with the rebels. The Acholi and other Northern tribes of Uganda do have a longstanding tradition of resolving intra-tribal disputes through apology, negotiation, compensation, and forgiveness. The Acholi people have used mato put - blood atonement - for centuries. They believe that killing a person makes you unstable. By ceremonially cleansing his soul, the former soldier would exorcise the evil spirits.This paper seeks to analyze what is considered to be the cause of the civil war in northern Uganda. It argues that a solution to the civil war cannot be found unless the cause of the civil war is first taken into account.The paper will define and discuss the nature of forgiveness and evaluate the significance of forgiveness as the solution to the long standing civil war in Northern Uganda. The paper argues that the tribal ways of resolving disputes through forgiveness are alive and well, and can serve as a firm foundation for peace. The Acholi tribal chiefs will be able to devise an effective system for mass reconciliation through traditional methods.\The paper also argues that a rule of traditional justice such as the Acholi mato oput, has its weaknesses in that once the case has been addressed through the traditional process, the matter is put to rest and it is forbidden to speak of it again. This is argued that it would significantly hamper any other approach to justice and reconciliation and may inculcate the spirit of revenge in the victims of the civil war against their perpetuators.The paper also discusses the challenges to the option of forgiveness as a means of healing the wounds of the civil war and concludes by making recommendations that can be put in place while applying forgiveness to solve the long standing civil war.

‘These are times for historians to write who seek to avoid all calm narrations as a dead water, to fill their volumes with cruell wars and seditions. I desire not employment at these times’. So wrote Sir Henry Slingsby at the beginning of the Bishops’ Wars. As James Bond put the point in the inimitably different idiom of the late twentieth century, ‘it reads better than it lives’. Interesting times are often more interesting to those who do not suffer the misfortune of living in them. In these days of social history, it is no longer clear that historians, as a profession, deserve Sir Henry Slingsby’s reproaches, but we have certainly spilt enough ink on the causes of the English Civil War. Contemplating the umpteenth assault on this subject, I feel bound to echo Eric Shipton on Mount Everest: ‘for God’s sake let’s climb the bloody thing, and then get back to real mountaineering’. The hunt for the causes of the Civil War has not, on the whole, had a beneficial effect on seventeenth-century historiography: not all the most important developments in the early seventeenth century can be assumed to be causes of the English Civil War. There is a risk that important themes may be either ignored, or strait-jacketed in order to turn them into causes of the Civil War when they are not. To take a couple of examples, the fact that England reached the top of the demographic curve sometime around 1640 is clearly of the highest long-term importance. The coincidence of dates makes it tempting to see whether this can be turned into a cause of the Civil War, but though it is possible to make a connection by way of resistance to taxation, such a connection is highly tangential, and it is hard to make it of the first importance. In the long term, the slow growth of cultural diversity is also of the highest importance. This at first sight looks a little more promising, but in fact it turns out that only those manifestations of diversity which can be directly related to religion, such as maypoles or the sabbath, will fit at all accurately into the jigsaw.

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...

Civil War historiography is usually reserved for the pages of academic journals. But a series of events in 2017, amidst the ongoing debates about the removal of Confederate monuments, thrust the discussion about the Civil War's causation onto the front pages of newspapers and news websites. First, in an April 2017 radio interview, President Donald Trump questioned why politicians could not find a compromise to avert the Civil War. In October of the same year, President Trump’s then-chief of staff John Kelly expressed a similar sentiment, arguing that “the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War….” The front-page news underscored what historian Charles B. Dew acknowledged was “probably the most hotly debated issue in American history.” This paper seeks to summarize the major trends in the historiography of the causes of the Civil War, while also acknowledging that the secondary sources are massive. Only a small sample of the many thousands of histories can be presented here.

A study of wartime literature also serves the function of documenting and preserving the stories and key experiences which the victims have witnessed through their forbearance in such events. While hate crime, caste conflicts, communal violence and ethnic violence are indispensable discourses in the study of criminal justice system, a parallel study of hate crime and ethnic violence through the kaleidoscope of contemporary Nigerian literature would be equally influencing. For any civil war, citing one cataclysmic reason is never justifiable. In the late 1960s the political and social climate in a multi- ethnic country like Nigeria was brimming with religious and tribal differences, the immediate reason that triggered the unfortunate civil war in Nigeria was ‘hate speech’ of the political leaders and military commanders. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a third-generation Nigerian woman writer reminisces this civil war through her novel Half of A Yellow Sun (2006) in which the scarring memoirs of genocide, war time rapes, ransacking of houses and property, mass killings, forced conscription and forced prostitution of young girls are captured with the intent to highlight the menacing minds of war driven humans. It is true that Hate crime is more destructive and dangerous when it finds such secessionist atmosphere as would ignite ethnic violence and deeper still into a full-blown civil war. Through this paper an evaluation and analyses of the hate crime during the Nigeria-Biafra Civil War would come under scrutiny through the literary promontory of Nigerian novel Half of A Yellow Sun.

The Causes of the American Civil WarRecent Interpretations and New Directions (1974 Reprint) Eric Foner In 1960, as Americans prepared to observe the centennial of the Civil War, one of the foremost historians of that conflict published a brief article entitled, “American Historians and the Causes of the Civil War.”1 Most readers probably expected another survey of the changing course of civil war interpretation. Instead the author announced that as a subject of serious historical analysis, Civil War causation was “dead.” Looking back over the decade and a half since David Donald wrote, it would appear that he somewhat exaggerated the death of this field of inquiry. In the 1950’s, historians were concerned with investigating periods of consensus in America’s past. But in the 1960’s, as the issues of race and war came to the forefront of national life, earlier times of civil strife in American history attracted renewed attention. The 1960’s, for example, witnessed a renascence of the study of slavery. It is now no longer possible to view the peculiar institution as some kind of accident or aberration, existing outside the mainstream of national development. Rather, slavery was absolutely central to the American experience, intimately [End Page 41] bound up with the settlement of the western hemisphere, the American Revolution and industrial expansion. It was what defined the Old South and drew southern society along a path of development which set it increasingly apart from the rest of the nation.2 At the same time, a striking reversal of interpretations of the abolitionists took place.3 In fact, there was a paradoxical double reversal. On the one hand the abolitionists, previously castigated as fanatics and agitators, suddenly emerged as the conscience of a sinning nation—much as the Garrisons and Welds had portrayed themselves a century earlier. At the same time, a number of writers argued that not only were the friends of the slave not immune from racism, but, far from being truly “radical,” they seemed to accept the middle-class values of northern society.4 The flood of studies of slavery, abolitionism, and the race issue does not seem, however, to have brought historians much closer to a generally accepted interpretation of the coming of the Civil War than they were fifteen years ago. As the late David Potter pointed out, the irony is that disagreements of interpretation persist in the face of a greatly increased body of historical knowledge.5 This is partially because the Civil War raised so many still unresolved [End Page 42] issues. Perhaps, however, there is another reason. Historians’ methodologies and value judgments have changed considerably over the past fifteen years, but the questions historians have asked of their data have remained relatively static. Like the debate over slavery before the appearance of Stanley Elkins’ study in 1959, discussion of the causes of the Civil War continues to be locked into an antiquated interpretive framework. Historians of the Civil War era seem to be in greater need of new models of interpretation and new questions than of an additional accumulation of data. There have, however, been a number of works in the past fifteen years which have attempted to develop entirely new ways of looking at ante-bellum America and the origins of the Civil War. One of the most striking developments of these years has been the emergence of the “new political historians,” who have attempted to recast our understanding of ante-bellum political alignments. They have de-emphasized “national” issues like slavery and the tariff, and substituted ethno-cultural conflicts between Protestants and Catholics, or between pietistic and ritualistic religious groups, as the major determinants of voting behavior. These works have broadened our understanding of antebellum political culture, and demonstrated the inevitable failure of any “monistic interpretation” of political conflict. And they should force historians to abandon whatever economic determinism still persists in the writing of political history. Perhaps most important, they have demonstrated the virtues of viewing voters not as isolated individuals, but as men and women embedded in a complex network of social and cultural relationships.6 The “new political history” involves both a new methodology—the statistical analysis of quantitative...

The relevance of the research lies in the fact that in linguistics, the study of concepts is an urgent direction that allows us to consider words in their cultural, cognitive and communicative contexts. The purpose of the study is to characterize the evaluation zone of the concept of "Civil War" in A. Fadeev's novel "The Rout". The description of the concept "Civil War" allows us to clarify the peculiarity of the individual experience of cognition of this social concept. The variety of interpretative fields is caused by the peculiarity of the conceptualization of the world in the individual consciousness. In the structure of the concept, the interpretative field of the concept "Civil War" as a periphery, its irreplaceable role in conceptual analysis is determined. The main content of the study is the analysis of the evaluative zone of the interpretative field, in which the characteristics and properties inherent in the concept of "Civil War" are always interpreted in a new way. In this study, the author used the method of conceptual analysis, the method of contextual analysis and logical-semantic analysis. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the fact that the study of the novel "The Rout" by A. A. Fadeev has practically not received enough attention, despite the fact that it is one of the most representative works of the twenties of the last century. There are very few scientific papers devoted to the concept of "Civil War". The analytical algorithm of concept research can be applied to the conceptual analysis of similar works of art. Being a direct witness of the war, A. A. Fadeev evaluates it based on the impressions of eyewitnesses, and the study demonstrates his generalized view and understanding of the struggle between the reds and whites, which is manifested in a number of moments through the main components of the assessment of the war by different classes of the novel's heroes, which in general constitute the essence of the Civil War. The results of the study allow us to conclude that in the interpretative field, assessments are mostly negative, which reflects the brutality of the war and the fact that class struggle was an integral cause of the Civil War.

On the Causes of the Civil War in Nepal and the Role of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist)

The Origins of the Civil War: A New Interpretation Kenneth S. Greenberg (bio) John Ashworth. Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic, volume 1: Commerce and Compromise, 1820–1850. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. xii + 520 pp. Appendix, notes, and index. $64.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper). John Ashworth is a historian with a grand vision. The book under review here is the first volume of a projected two-volume study of the origins of the American Civil War. Commerce and Compromise, 1820–1850, will be followed by Towards a Bourgeois Revolution, which will carry the story from 1850 through the Civil War. Even with only half of this study in print, we can appreciate the main features of an ambitious work of synthesis. Ashworth is a scholar who works within the broad Marxist tradition of historical analysis. The scope of the book he has produced is as vast as any undertaken by a major historian in recent years. In explaining the causes of the Civil War, Ashworth analyzes not only the labor systems and economies of both northern and southern societies, but also their relation to the world of politics and ideas, and to the interactions of all these factors within and between the sections. The book includes extended and detailed discussions of the Jeffersonian political tradition, the Missouri Crisis of 1820, the nature of slave labor as well as of precapitalist and capitalist free labor, antebellum economic development, the abolitionist movement, the proslavery argument, the Second Party System, and the Compromise of 1850—along with scores of related topics. It is the kind of large, complex, and subtle work destined to provoke both sharp praise and sharp criticism from fellow historians. As with any work in the Marxist tradition, Ashworth rests his analysis on an understanding of class and class conflict. Such material factors, he believes, must be at the heart of any explanation of the causes of the Civil War. Explicitly rejecting E. P. Thompson’s emphasis on class consciousness as central to the definition of class, Ashworth understands class “in terms of the relationship between two groups at the point of production, where one group is seeking to appropriate to itself some or all of the labor of the other” (p. 13). Moreover, he believes that behavior which “is the product of a desire to [End Page 607] benefit some or all the members of one group at the expense of some or all the members of the other, can be seen as class conflict, whatever the consciousness of the participants” (p. 13). In other words, for Ashworth, class and class conflict depend on material circumstances that need not be understood by historical subjects. Ashworth also draws on the concept of “hegemony” originally developed by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramschi during the 1920s, and in recent times made famous in impressive books about slavery and antislavery by Eugene Genovese and David Brion Davis. 1 Gramschi’s ideas are not easily compressed into a short summary, but they center on one key concept. Gramschi had been concerned with the problem of why the Bolshevik revolution did not spread to the West after its success in Russia. He believed that the answer was rooted in the “hegemonic” leadership exercised by the ruling class—by the way their intellectual, cultural, and moral beliefs came to be at least partially accepted by the masses as ideal values rather than as values that served class interests. Ashworth applies this concept to a variety of antebellum contexts—with special emphasis on the point that the antebellum leaders who articulated hegemonic ideas had virtually no consciousness that their beliefs served a ruling class. In other words, just as with class and class conflict, Ashworth emphasizes that hegemony operated with no one aware of its nature or existence. The best way to see this theoretical structure in action is to look closely at a few of the topics of concern to Ashworth. He begins this volume by situating slave resistance as a central, necessary factor in the coming of the Civil War. But as with everything else in the world described by Ashworth, slave resistance operated as a cause of the war...

352CIVIL WAR HISTORY for Negroes are at present major problems in the United States but are not so in Cuba. Robert McColley University of Illinois The Death of SUvery: The United States, 1837-1865. By Elbert B. Smith. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967. Pp. viii, 225. $5.00.) This book forms a part of the Chicago History of American Civilization series. It takes its place chronologically between Marcus Cunliffe's volume on the period 1789-1837, and John Hope Franklin's on reconstruction ; it overlaps Charles P. Roland's The Confederacy. One may say at once that the author is less perspicuous than Cunliffe, less successful as a synthesizer of recent scholarship than Franklin, and more superficial than Roland. Surely, if the futile Confederacy deserves a whole book for its brief hour, the preponderant Union deserves as much for its enduring contribution to American civilization. It is perhaps pretentious to describe this work as a volume in a history of civilization. In actuality Smith has written fairly straightforward political history, stressing parties, campaigns, and men, making scant effort to fit his narrative into the context of American civilization. Daniel Boorstin, the editor, asserts that his series "aims to bring to the general reader, in compact and readable form, the insights of scholars who write from different points of view." Whatever this may signify, Smith has written a highly readable narrative, which is probably too compact to encompass his grand theme. His insight is distinguished bv balanced judgment; but his approach is conventional, if not old-fashioned, and his recital, as I must amplify, is gravely marred by factual errors. To tell the history of the United States from 1837 to 1865 in two hundred pages is no mean feat. Mr. Smith offers a smoodi account, enlivened by anecdotes and biographical sketches. He is familiar with recent literature; and he emphasizes racism as a fundamental cause of the Civil War. Slavery, in dying, he observes in a contemporary note, did not take with it the disease of racial prejudice. I believe him quite right in stressing race, but I think he has not sufficiently buttressed his argument . Smith commences with a sparse survey of historians' interpretations of the causes of the Civil War, and of sections, the abolitionists, and Jacksonian democracy. His treatment of the last theme is largely biographical, inadequate on the Democrats and misjudging of the Whigs. He excels himself in explaining the origins of the Mexican War, and censures the United States for starting it; and he underscores the one war as a cause of a second. He underplays the explanation of the partition of Oregon. Consistent widi his biographical method but not with the realities of history, he focuses upon the great Senate debate in presenting the Com- BOOK REVTEWS353 promise of 1850. Rather surprisingly he follows this with an entire, if short, chapter on fugitive slaves, and tiiis witii a chapter on Bleeding Kansas and Bleeding Sumner. So significant a matter as the origins of the Republican party is managed cursorily, leading up to an extended narrative of the Fremont campaign. Throughout tiiis part of the book Senator Thomas Hart Benton, whose biography Smidi has written, looms almost larger than life. From here on the book moves at a hurrying pace. Smith holds compromise to have been impossible in 1861, frees Lincoln from fault in opposing the Crittenden proposal and from starting the Civil War. He disposes of the military history of die Civil War in nine pages. The teacher who might consider putting diis book into the hands of students should be alerted to the questionable assertions and downright errors that a knowledgeable press reader would have eradicated from the text. It is misleading to say diat Seward and Weed adopted "the twin spirits of abolitionism and Free-Soilism" to defeat Van Buren's Albany Regency (p. 17), and to continue to identify Seward as an abolitionist (pp. 97, 164); or to call John Quincy Adams an abolitionist (p. 55). Smith is sadly in error in stating diat "in die election of 1832 Calhoun and his friends gave tiieir unqualified support to Clay" (p. 48); and in having Calhoun resign from die Vice-Presidency...

Reviewed by: Across the Bloody Chasm: The Culture of Commemoration Among Civil War Veteransby M. Keith Harris Michael F. Conlin Across the Bloody Chasm: The Culture of Commemoration Among Civil War Veterans. By M. Keith Harris. Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions of the American Civil War. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014. Pp. [xii], 220. $42.50, ISBN 978-0-8071-5772-5.) In Across the Bloody Chasm: The Culture of Commemoration Among Civil War Veterans, M. Keith Harris explores how Civil War veterans remembered that awful conflict. Harris shows that most Union and Confederate veterans commemorated the Civil War in distinctly sectional ways. He contends that from the perspective of its veterans, the public memory of the Civil War was “a story of competition, negotiation, and contestation” (p. 4). While most white Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries focused on reconciliation between the two sections, extolling the bravery and dedication of soldiers on both sides, veterans continued to fight the Civil War by other means, such as at monument dedications and in textbooks. Indeed, Harris shows that Civil War veterans rarely met with their former opponents to remember the conflict. Instead, they met with their former comrades, reinforcing their common beliefs. Harris shows that Civil War veterans disputed everything from military tactics to the return of battle flags to Confederate units. They contested the treatment of prisoners of war and punitive measures taken against civilians. If Union veterans were outraged by the appalling conditions at Andersonville, then their Confederate counterparts bitterly resented William T. Sherman’s depredations in Georgia and the Carolinas. Union veterans sought to cover their cause in glory by reminding postbellum generations that they had fought for union and emancipation. Despite the fact that most Union army veterans were just as racist as typical white Americans, they gloried in the fact they [End Page 454]had rid the United States of the curse of slavery. Union veterans asserted that slavery was the cause of the conflict and that Confederates had committed treason to defend that odious institution. Union veterans elevated emancipation, claiming that it was just as important to their cause as preservation of the Union. Of course, most white Union veterans could oppose slavery while still supporting racial inequality. Many Confederate veterans downplayed slavery as the cause of the war. Some flatly denied that they had fought to protect slavery, instead emphasizing defense of their homes and communities and vague but oppressive actions taken by the tyrannical North as the reasons for their noble bid for southern independence. Both Confederate and Union veterans claimed the mantle of the Founders and charged their adversaries with undermining the Union those worthies had established. Harris complicates the picture of white supremacist postbellum reconciliation between the North and the South and Union and Confederate veterans offered by David W. Blight in Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory(Cambridge, Mass., 2001). Blight contends that Americans in the early twentieth century conspicuously ignored slavery as a cause of the Civil War and emancipation as a war aim, giving the segregated nation a public memory of the war on southern terms, culminating in the fiftieth anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg in 1913. Harris shows this was not the case for the war’s veterans. However, the strength of Across the Bloody Chasmis also its weakness. Harris’s focus on veterans tells us only how those select Americans remembered the Civil War. While they were respected, these ex-soldiers were far less influential than their children, who established the postwar consensus on sectional reconciliation. Michael F. Conlin Eastern Washington University Copyright © 2016 The Southern Historical Association

Faith, Loyalty, and the Limits of Neutrality in the Crisis of the Union April Holm (bio) Timothy L. Wesley. The Politics of Faith during the Civil War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013. xi + 273 pp. Notes and index. $45.00. Just as Abraham Lincoln famously asserted that slavery was “somehow” the cause of the Civil War, historians of nineteenth-century American religion have reached a consensus that religion, particularly evangelical Protestantism, is somehow essential to a complete understanding of the conflict. The exact mechanism of that “somehow,” however, remains difficult to define. Over the past twenty years, historians have taken on the challenge of formulating a satisfying and complete account of the connection between the pervasive religiosity of the nineteenth-century United States and the great political and military upheaval of the era. Historians agree upon the centrality of evangelical Protestantism to nineteenth-century American culture.1 Americans North and South interpreted the traumas of war and its aftermath through this evangelical Protestant lens. The Civil War era saw a religious people using their faith to make sense of an all-consuming military, political, and interpersonal struggle. As George Rable writes in his recent synthesis, God’s Almost Chosen Peoples, “many people on both sides of the conflict turned to religious faith to help explain the war’s causes, course, and consequences.”2 Both Northerners and Southerners, Rable argues, saw Providence at work in the drama of secession, the ordeals of the battlefield, and the revolution of emancipation. Still, many questions about the war and religion remain unresolved. Historians of religion and the Civil War grapple with two categories of questions. One category seeks to identify the role religion played in the war itself, from secession to emancipation: did religion affect secular events? A second line of inquiry asks how the war affected American religion: did secular events fundamentally alter the American relationship with the divine? A subset of this latter line of inquiry concerns how the war affected the lives of people of faith—specifically clergy, active church members, and the denominations to [End Page 655] which they belonged. Timothy Wesley takes up these problems in his thought-provoking and ambitious volume, The Politics of Faith during the Civil War. Wesley begins with the observation that antebellum clergy could influence millions. Preachers, he writes, were “the most politically determinative force within affiliated American Christianity, the only members of the greater church family who exercised significant yet immediate authority over others” (p. 42). Patriotic civilians, church leadership, and secular authorities recognized this powerful potential influence. Consequently, ministers acquired heightened political significance during the Civil War. Observers from all three groups monitored clergy to ensure loyalty to the Union. They expected and enforced patriotic messages from the pulpit. Wesley argues that the narrative of a monolithically pro-war and pro-Union Northern clergy has obscured the number of ministers in the North who strongly opposed such “political preaching.” Supporting his argument with evidence from church records, religious periodicals, and military documents, Wesley draws three conclusions: that white Northern ministers did not uniformly support the government; that, nevertheless, the boundary between church and state was much more porous in the Civil War era than historians currently assume it was; and finally, that the censure of nonpolitical preachers constitutes an important untold part of the story of civil liberties in the era. The book is a welcome contribution to the growing body of work on religion during the crisis of the union. Wesley draws attention to an overlooked point of conflict between religion, politics, and church and state in American history. His work prompts instructive new ways of thinking about civil liberties, loyalty, and the divide between the moral and the political in the fraught atmosphere of the Civil War North. The Politics of Faith during the Civil War is structured both chronologically and thematically. Wesley begins with a discussion of the familiar political events of the 1850s and concludes with the end of the Civil War. The first two-thirds of the volume primarily concern white Northern clergy and their struggles over religion and politics in the time of war. Wesley admirably includes clergy from outside the evangelical Protestant mainstream...

SPHERES OF INTERVENTION: FOREIGN POLICY AND THE COLLAPSE OF LEBANON, 1967-1976 James R. Stocker Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016 (vii + 296 pages, notes, index, illustrations, maps) $45.00 (cloth)Reviewed by Jeffrey G. KaramIn Spheres of Intervention: Foreign Policy and the Collapse of Lebanon, 1967-1976, James R. Stocker reconsiders the role of the United States in Lebanon's path to the civil war that erupted in 1975. Combining declassified documents from the National Archives and various American presidential libraries, as well as some Arabic and French sources, Stocker advances two main arguments. The first is that US policy toward Lebanon was subordinated to strategies toward the Cold War and the broader Middle East; the second is that the US played a role in the process of Lebanese state collapse (4, 5). Both arguments are meant to convince the reader that rather than focus on one set of factors, a proper study of involvement in Lebanon between 1967 and 1976 should incorporate the different domestic, regional, and international factors that shaped policy at the time. Stocker considers Lebanon's slide into mayhem alongside other regional and international events, such as the October War of 1973, the detente between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the various disengagement agreements and disagreements between a number of Arab states and Israel during the 1970s, making his account of the underlying factors that ignited the Lebanese Civil War among the most comprehensive.Spheres of Intervention consists of an introduction, eight chapters, and an epilogue. In the introduction, Stocker discusses interests in Lebanon and surveys existing literature on the causes of the civil war, which include the fragility of Lebanon's political system, foreign meddling in Lebanon's internal affairs, the effects of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and poor socioeconomic development. The first three chapters deal with important junctures between the Arab-Israeli War of 1967 and the Jordanian Civil War of 1970, known as Black September. Chapters four and five focus on the heightened tension and subsequent skirmishes between Palestinian militants and the Lebanese government leading up to the October War of 1973, as well as the state of sociopolitical affairs in Lebanon before the outbreak of the civil war. The last three chapters examine the first two years of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-76) and the intense negotiations between various Arab states, the United States, and Israel to broker temporary peace between the warring factions. More specifically, chapters six and seven demonstrate that Lebanon became a battleground for regional contestation between Syria and Israel, as well as between Syria and different Arab states. The epilogue fast-forwards through Lebanon's civil war and ends with the United States calling on the Lebanese government to implement UN resolutions, particularly regarding the disarmament of Hizballah's armed forces and other militas on Lebanese soil and, in the wake of the assassination of Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri in 2005, the creation of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon.As the product of serious research drawing on multiple sources, Spheres of Intervention is unique in the way it approaches policy and the beginning of Lebanon's civil war. Parts of the book's analysis, however, prompt concerns about the interpretation of sources and linkages (or lack thereof) between important events in the time period covered. The first concern relates to the author's extreme reluctance to connect the dots between the various archival materials. It is understandable that Stocker refrains from making grandiose assertions that cannot be properly substantiated. Nevertheless, the author's analysis of military and financial support to right-wing Christian militias is very limited and troubling. As a matter of fact, Stocker vacillates between implicating the United States in taking sides, particularly by supporting Christian militias in the build-up to the Lebanese Civil War (18, 63-64, 131-32), and dismissing this partisanship by claiming that the United States refrained from actively fueling civil conflict (63-64, 144, 166, 224). …