Looming Civil War: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Imagined the Future by Jason Phillips

Abstract

Reviewed by: Looming Civil War: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Imagined the Future by Jason Phillips Jesse George-Nichol Looming Civil War: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Imagined the Future. By Jason Phillips. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Xi, 320 pp. $34.95. ISBN 978-0-1908-6816-1. Years before his infamous raid on Harpers Ferry, John Brown commissioned a blacksmith to make one thousand pikes for fending off “border ruffians” in Kansas (46). The pikes consisted of a blade mounted atop a six-foot pole---the former part modeled after a Bowie knife Brown had seized from one of those border ruffians (a Virginian, as fate would have it) whom the pikes were meant to defend against. When he traveled east to incite a slave rebellion in Virginia in 1859, Brown took the pikes with him, expecting to distribute them among the slaves who joined his cause. They were circulated as relics after his capture and execution; southern nationalist Edmund Ruffin wound up with one, as did abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. For each the pikes embodied a different vision of the future: one saw race war and bloodshed while the other imagined justice and liberation. In Looming Civil War, Jason Phillips uses material objects like these pikes to help explain “how nineteenth-century visions of the future formed, spread, and made history” (3). He also looks at cultural productions like songs and novels, technological innovations like the railroad and telegraph, as well as private writings like letters and diaries from both ordinary and prominent people. The result is 260-page mosaic of how nineteenth-century Americans grappled with the future, encompassing not only a range of ideas about what the future held but also about Americans’ relationship to it. These constitute Phillips’ two principal goals in the book---to paint a more comprehensive picture of what they imagined in the future and how they conceived of the future itself. [End Page 275] He argues that two competing temporalities governed the way that Americans thought about the future. Those who “anticipated” the future saw themselves traveling toward it, believing that people could shape it and their own lives as they went along. For them the future was open, and they felt confident in the forward march of human progress. Meanwhile those who “expected” it saw the future approaching them, believing that its course was predetermined. For them the future was closed and largely outside of their control- in the hands of God or other impersonal forces. When applied to specific people these categories sometimes seem overly simplistic, but in a more general sense they highlight that Americans encountered the world and the future differently. Phillips claims that before the Civil War Americans were more likely to anticipate the future; the ensuing conflict, however, shook their faith in progress and in their (or anyone’s) power to influence the events around them, and fatalism proliferated as a result. In short, the Civil War changed the way many Americans thought about the future. Yet Phillips emphasizes that this shift was neither complete nor universal, for his main historiographical mission in this book is to dispel the idea that Americans foresaw a short, glorious war when the Civil War began. This “short war myth” is widespread in both scholarship and public history, but---drawing on his wide array of sources---Phillips effectively demonstrates that contemporaries envisaged the approaching conflict in various ways. He juxtaposes stories of young men eager to live out their romantic visions on the battlefield with stories of conservatives who warned of approaching cataclysm, women who perceived death and destruction ahead, abolitionists who anticipated the convulsions of revolution, and slaves who saw new opportunities for freedom and emancipation. These different perspectives influenced the behavior of all of these groups and helped to shape the war itself. In the beginning, men rushed to enlist in numbers that the United States and Confederate governments could hardly handle, and slaves running to Union lines forced American soldiers and statesmen to contend with the role of slavery [End Page 276] in the struggle. Phillips also shows that the impulse toward reconciliation after the war helped to quash these diverse viewpoints in historical memory, because...