The Railroad and the State: War, Politics, and Technology in Nineteenth-Century America , and: Nations, Markets, and War: Modern History and the American Civil War , and: The Business of Civil War: Military Mobilization and the State, 1861–1865 (review)

Abstract

The Railroad and State: War, Politics, and Technology in Nineteenth-Century America. By Robert G. Angevine. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. Pp. xvii, 351. Cloth, $70.00.)Nations, Markets, and War: Modern History and American Civil War. By Nicholas Onuf and Peter Onuf. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2006. Pp. xii, 362. Cloth, $45.00.)The Business of Civil War: Military Mobilization and State, 1861-1865. By Mark R. Wilson. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Pp. xii, 306. Cloth, $47.00.)Reviewed by Samuel WatsonDid nineteenth-century nationalism serve liberalism, or vice versa? Each of these works implicitly addresses that question; each does so from different angle and arrives at different answer, from intermittent but ultimately mutually beneficial collaboration between railroads and state (Angevine) to tradition of nation-state authority, unknown to most historians, that became decisive during nation's greatest crisis but faded afterward (Wilson), to contest between sectional economic nationalisms that ultimately posited individualist liberalism against compromises essential to national union (Onuf and Onuf).Nations, Markets, and War is difficult book, tremendously broadranging and sophisticated, but sometimes maddeningly abstract because it operates on many levels, employing protean thinkers like Thomas Jefferson and Adam Smith to examine development of nationalism and coming of Civil War through debates over commercial policy. This second collaborative book by brothers Nicholas and Peter Onuf begins with a conjectural of conjectural history (19), half philosophical and half an exploration of modernity as a mode of historical thinking that . . . authorized nation-states making up modern (6). In second half of their book, Onufs examine transformation of federal union, initially seen as model for liberal world order, into national union, even nation-state, through over the proper extent of market (6), nationalism fashioned in anticipation of discipline of nations - war. Was this process reversion to European balance of power and terrible evils of necessity that Jefferson and other founders had sought to transcend, or was it part and parcel of nineteenth-century liberalism, product of tragic declension as nationalism submerged impulses of age of revolutions?For United States, this path was embodied in conflict rooted in slavery. Here questions of cause and effect, causal priority, and levels of analysis appear most acute. The Onufs observe that conflicts of interest over commercial policy - like divisions over slavery - drove Americans apart (6) and that divisions over slavery often operated through definitions . . . predicated on assumptions about future of American foreign trade relations (259). But these of interest - the tension between nation-as-market and world-as-market (181) - were rooted in specific markets for specific products, some produced by slave labor and some by free. I am not persuaded that absent slavery debate between traders - essentially slaveholding planters - and protectionists would have been so potent, or that it would have been argued by slaveholders in uncompromising political languages of republicanism and minority rights, rather than negotiable, potentially utilitarian economic ones of cost-benefit calculations. Indeed, reader is left wondering how to account for protectionist demands of sugar and hemp producers, southerners and slaveholders, often Whigs and Constitutional Unionists, who did not espouse sectionalism of cotton kings. As Onufs observe, during 1830s or 40s southern nationalists abandoned liberal cosmopolitanism of an earlier generation of free traders (324). One might ask, however, how cosmopolitan Old Republicans and Quids (the earlier free traders) really were, and whether we can or should characterize them principally through their exchange relationships as free traders, rather than through their labor relationships as lords of lash? …