Like politics, all history is local, at least at first. It seldom remains that way. Key events in one geography almost always send fierce if perhaps unacknowledged echoes elsewhere. Chroniclers preoccupied with the action 
The central cause of the Civil War was human chattel slavery, which powered the economies of the southern slave states. Studies have established that the slave system of agriculture was highly destructive of environments, and thus required aggressive expansion to new lands in order to thrive. To this end, and with the full (if often tacit) support of plantation and political elites, adventurers known as “filibusters” looked to occupy and annex locales in the West Indies and Central America. But the mother lode of wide open spaces turned out to be the vast territories in the west and southwest obtained by conquest in the Mexican War, jealously lusted after by both the southern slaveocracy and northern Free-Soilers. Neither had concerns for dispossessed Mexicans nor the indigenous. Or African Americans, for that matter: southerners would have them only as enslaved laborers, while northerners would ban them absolutely. Lincoln’s election foreclosed the spread of slavery to the territories, and seven states seceded, then four more after shots were fired at Sumter.
Typically, what then follows is the familiar story of Bull Run to Appomattox baked into most Civil War accounts, but Taylor, a distinguished Pulitzer Prize-winning scholar whose body of work has dwelled predominately on the Early Republic, stands apart from most historians in approach and perspective with a thought-provoking fresh analysis of ground otherwise exhaustively covered before. Moreover, Taylor ever compels the reader to not simply look back to what was as we now know it, but rather to consider what might have been, in a time when there were many possibilities, and nothing had yet been decided.
It is this notion that brilliantly shapes his earlier book, American Colonies, which skillfully underscores that boundaries later stenciled in on maps of North America and the West Indies were hardly preordained, that what came to form those thirteen colonies that turned into the United States could very well have encompassed a larger—or, for that matter, smaller—area consisting of other regions then controlled by the French, British, Spanish, and Amerindians. Taylor later has American Colonies serve as the first volume in a series that to date includes American Revolutions, American Republics, and the latest, American Civil Wars. The plural in “Civil Wars” is deliberate, because there is indeed more than one going on in various corners of the continent, including a shooting war in Mexico, a political one in Canada, and something that is a bit of both in the rapidly shrinking lands once exclusively occupied by Native Americans. And all of it is informed by the twin principles that guided nineteenth century America: the Monroe Doctrine, that proscribed interference in the Americas by foreign powers, and Manifest Destiny, that promised the whole of the continent to the United States.
Some of the best content in American Civil Wars leaves the war between Washington and Richmond behind, and takes a deep dive much further south. Like many former colonies, Mexico was plagued by political instability after winning its independence from Spain in 1808, which was exacerbated by tensions in a highly stratified society marked by a gulf between a tiny slice of wealthy landowners and the masses of desperately impoverished landless peasants. In the twenty-five years that preceded the American Civil War, nation-building was further crippled by a series of land grabs by the United States that stripped Mexico of more than a third of its territory. The first was the loss of Texas, a region settled by invitation to Americans who established a slave society. Mexico’s abolition of slavery and other factors led to an armed conflict supported by the US that resulted first in Texas independence and then annexation. The greater blow, of course, came as a result of the Mexican War, a blatant act of armed aggression by the Polk Administration that obtained present-day California, New Mexico, and Arizona, as well as parts of Nevada, Utah, and Colorado. The so-called Mexican Cession amounted to an enormous steal of an astonishing 529,000 square miles. Later, Mexico was strong-armed into ceding even more territory in the Gadsden Purchase.
Beset by its own series of civil wars, and deeply in debt to European powers, the Liberal Republic of Benito Juárez—which had routed reactionary forces on the battlefield—was no match for French adventurism encouraged, indeed invited in, by defeated Mexican conservatives. The French crushed resistance and placed a hapless Hapsburg archduke on the throne as Emperor Maximilian I. The Monroe Doctrine proved to be no deterrent. Republicans in Congress sympathetic to Mexican democracy bristled, but Lincoln was not only fully preoccupied with saving the Union, but worried that a strong rebuke might provoke France to recognize the Confederacy. Meanwhile, Richmond imagined an alliance with Maximilian that would entice France to do just that. In a masterful treatment of the many moving parts here of war, diplomacy, socioeconomic factors, and much more, Taylor succeeds in shifting the focus so that the reader’s perspective is dramatically redirected to view the fractured United States from the Mexican side of the border, a significant accomplishment.
Taylor just as adeptly goes north to explore the dynamic in a then still divided British Canada, anxious at what a restored union to her south by a powerful neighbor further emboldened by victory could mean for her territorial integrity. This tension had a very long history. In American Colonies, Taylor reminds us that in slightly altered circumstances parts of Canada could very well have been incorporated into the United States. In American Revolutions, he chronicles how colonists were angered that the treaty that concluded the French & Indian War also protected much-coveted French Quebec (later dubbed “Lower Canada”), adding to the catalog of grievances that would subsequently foment rebellion and lead to independence. Those hostilities were marked by a failed invasion, and the Battle of Quebec. After the war, loyalists fled to Canada’s west, present-day Ontario, then termed “Upper Canada.” Communities on both sides of the border formed strong trade and cultural relationships, intertwined with the region’s native tribes, which were ruptured by the War of 1812 and another series of failed invasions by the Americans, a story superbly rendered in Taylor’s The Civil War of 1812. When the British, exhausted by the Napoleonic Wars, made peace from an existing stalemate that likely would have gone badly for the United States in the longer term, the result was a mutual respect for US-Canadian borders that endured for decades.
American Civil Wars describes how that respect grew more tenuous in the Antebellum as stress cracks widened. As enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act grew more vigorous, for the enslaved seeking liberty the most secure terminus of the Underground Railroad became Canadian soil, which infuriated slaveowners seeking to have their “property” restored. Blacks were treated favorably at first, but as their numbers grew so did racism and resentment towards immigrants competing for jobs and resources. During the Civil War, diplomatic tensions with the British extended to Canada, as well, which although officially neutral was openly sympathetic to the Confederate cause. Richmond attempted to open a second front in Montréal and Toronto, leading most famously to the raid on St. Albans, Vermont. But as the fortunes of the south faded, and rumblings could be detected in the United States of a reenergized Manifest Destiny that had seized lands to the west and south and was now looking north once more, self-preservation fueled a sense of urgency for unity among the various provinces. The result was the landmark 1867 Canadian Confederation that set forces in motion that within a few years brought all of Canada east and west together as a single entity, better capable of resisting appetites for expansion from Washington.
A consistent theme in Taylor’s works are the marginalized peoples frequently neglected in other histories, especially Native Americans. This time the author focuses on competing attempts by the Union and the Confederacy to recruit the indigenous as allies, such that the Civil War saw the phenomenon of various tribes fighting for the Blue or the Gray. Of course, before, during, and especially after the war, Federal forces employed brutal tactics to put down native peoples, seizing their lands on false pretexts, driving them to starvation by hunting the bison to near extinction, forcing them into reservations known for appalling conditions, and occasionally massacring entire villages. Whatever side they chose, Native Americans always lost.
Those who turned to Taylor’s latest book chiefly for yet another history of the American Civil War may come away disappointed, because that is hardly the main event in this volume. Still, that can be deceiving, because he does devote much print to a fast-paced summary. Indeed, sometimes fast-paced seems to turn into a veritable sprint, and along with that comes some unfortunate missteps. Taylor recycles the long-disproven canard that the term “hooker” was derived from prostitutes accompanying the army of Major General Joseph Hooker, when in fact that moniker dates back to the 1840s. There are also some issues with interpretation, as when he unfairly castigates Meade for failing to pursue Lee with appropriate alacrity after Gettysburg, which aligns with Lincoln’s view at the time but now has largely been discarded by scholars of the campaign.
Still, none of this is fatal, and if I winced here and there it is only because I have spent decades chasing down the Civil War. Moreover, such quibbles are more than offset by the triumph of the final product, which not only enriches the historiography but does so in an engaging style accessible to audiences both popular and academic. The beauty in nearly every work by Alan Taylor is that each leaves the reader treating what was once familiar territory as uncertain terrain demanding reevaluation. So too American Civil Wars. But the real triumph this time is that those turning its final pages will no longer again be capable of thinking about the war without considering its ramifications elsewhere—no small achievement indeed!
NOTE: This review is dedicated to Dr. Peter Carmichael, Director of the Civil War Institute (CWI) at Gettysburg College, a remarkable scholar, educator, and friend whose recent untimely death is an incalculable loss to the historical community. Pete was a huge supporter of my work, introducing me to others in the field with praise I hardly felt I deserved, but which left me deeply flattered because of my admiration for him. He will be much missed by all who knew him.
NOTE: I reviewed other works by Alan Taylor here:
Review of: American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804, by Alan Taylor
Review of: Thomas Jefferson’s Education, by Alan Taylor
Review of: The Internal Enemy: Slavery and the War in Virginia 1772-1832, by Alan Taylor
Review of: American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850, by Alan Taylor
NOTE: I reviewed the Beckert book here:
Review of: Empire of Cotton: A Global History, by Sven Beckert
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