The Violence of the Civil War in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

The US Civil War was the deadliest event in American history, but not the bloodiest civil war or even the worst conflict of the 19th century. Generations of writing about the Civil War from a domestic perspective have generated false impressions about which aspects of the conflict were unique and which more commonplace. The American conflict was one of a number of national struggles in the mid-19th century. Some of these—the wars for Italian and German unification, for instance—are well known but are rarely considered alongside the US experience. Other conflicts—the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the Polish Uprising of 1863, or the Taiping Rebellion—occurred concurrently with the Civil War but because of their imperial context are usually treated separately. Americans, and people around the world, consumed news about all these conflicts. They compared, contrasted, and evaluated behavior based on what they saw, seeking both internal reassurance about their own ways of war-making and external validation in the form of allies and material support. Historians gain a better understanding of which Civil War participants experienced lethal violence and why by contextualizing those actions as the participants themselves did—within a global framework.