The Long Civil War: New Explorations of America's Enduring Conflict

Abstract

The Long Civil War seeks to showcase how recent scholars have widened the Civil War's historical periodization. Inspired by Eric W. Hobsbawm's conception of the “long nineteenth century,” the editors John David Smith and Raymond Arsenault expand the geographic, temporal, and thematic dimensions of Civil War history (p. 1). The volume's ten essays draw on a range of source material, including films, historical fiction, popular magazines, and public history sites. While the collection succeeds in its stated aim of highlighting “periodic fluidity,” it falls short in other capacities (p. 2). Diane Miller Sommerville's examination of the political rhetoric of suicide is a standout essay. Sommerville contends that while “northerners and southerners employed the language of self-destruction” to disapprovingly describe secession, notions of collective self-murder shifted over the course of the war. With defeat on the horizon, many Confederates redefined popular understandings of suicide as honorable, a transformation personified by the “martyrdom” of the fire-eating secessionist Edmund Ruffin (p. 87). This notion of self-destruction as heroic—of secession as destined to fail yet virtuous in motive—became a fixture of the Lost Cause canon.