Review: A World on Fire Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War

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A WORLD ON FIRE Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War Amanda Foreman New York: Random House, 2011, 958 pp. US$35.00 cloth. ISBN 9780375504945A World on Fireis a big book on a big subject. This need not be an advantage. Its sheer size puts it in the league of doze-inducing presidential memoirs and qualifies it for a future as a door-stopper. That would be an unjust fete: sparklingly written, with a strong narrative line, perceptive and (very) comprehensive, World on Fire is a wonderful read. Foreman takes us into the world of mid- Victorian politics, of Trollope and the Pallisers, of sylvan country houses on the one hand, and dark satanic mills on the other, and she makes that world interact with its transatlantic cousin, the dividing United States of the 1850s and 1860s, two nations divided by a single language (a thought variously attributed to Wilde, Shaw, or Churchill, or perhaps all three). Foreman brings the characters of the time vividly to life - lords Russell and Palmerston, foreign secretary and prime minister respectively, William Henry Seward, the American secretary of state, Lord Lyons, the overworked minister in Washington, and Charles Francis Adams, his dyspeptic American counterpart in London. Behind and beyond them are a host of Anglo-American figures - doctors, nurses, soldiers, sailors, spies. The result is a more complete, and more satisfactory, picture than ever before of the substance of Anglo-American relations from the late 1850S to the early 1870s - with one exception.The exception is instructive. Adjacent to the warring dis-United States sat the several provinces of North America. Foreman has trouble with their names, and, after a brief nod at British North America, she labels the great white north simply - a label that Nova Scotians and New Brunswickers might at the time have found rather trying. Ontario and Quebec do appear - several years before they were actually created. The province of Canada (the future Ontario and Quebec) does not appear, though it has a kind of virtual existence as the place that the governor general, Lord Monck, who is mentioned, governed. How he governed, Foreman does not say, but that he governed, she assumes.Foreman's book thus serves as a reminder that Canada was a colony and that its foreign affairs and defence were a responsibility. The crucial decisions about Anglo-American relations were not referred to Fredericton or Halifax or Quebec City, but taken on the spot and on the moment in London. …