American History: A Survey (Brinkley), 13th Edition

Chapter 14: THE CIVIL WAR

America in the World

The Consolidation of Nations

The American Civil War was an event largely rooted in conditions particular to the United States. But it was also a part of a worldwide movement in the nineteenth century to create large, consolidated nations. America's expansion into the western regions of the continent—and its efforts to incorporate those areas into the nation—was one of the principal causes of the controversies over slavery that led to the Civil War. A commitment to preserving the Union—to consolidating, rather than dismantling, the nation— was one of the principal motives for the North's commitment to fighting a war against the seceding states. Similar efforts at expansion, consolidation, and unification were occurring in many other nations around the same time.

The consolidation of nation-states was, of course, not new to the nineteenth century. Spain, Britain, Russia, and other nations had united disparate states and regions into substantial nations in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. But nationalism took on new force in the nineteenth century. That was partly because of growing nationalist sentiment among peoples who shared language, culture, ethnicity, and tradition and who came to believe that a consolidated nation was the best vehicle for strengthening their common bonds. Nationalism was also a product of the centralization of governments in many areas of the world, and the development within them of the ability to administer large territories from above. The revolutions in America and France in the late eighteenth century—and the subsequent strengthening of the French concept of nationhood under Napoleon in the early nineteenth century—inspired new nationalist enthusiasms in other parts of Europe.

In 1848, a wave of nationalist revolutions erupted in Italy, France, and Austria, challenging the imperial powers that many Europeans believed were subjugating national cultures. Those revolutions failed, but they helped lay the groundwork for the two most important national consolidations of nineteenth-century Europe.

One of these consolidations occurred in Germany, which was divided into numerous small, independent states in the early nineteenth century but where popular sentiment for German unification had been growing for decades. It was spurred in part by new histories of the German Volk (people) and by newly constructed images of German traditions, visible in such literature as the Grimms' fairy tales—an effort to record and popularize German folk traditions and make them the basis of a shared sense of a common past. In 1862, King Wilhelm I of Prussia—the leader of one of the most powerful of the scattered German states—appointed an aristocratic landowner, Otto von Bismarck, as his prime minister. Bismarck exploited the growing nationalism throughout the various German states and helped develop a strong popular base for unification. He did so in part by launching Prussian wars against Denmark, Austria, and France—wars Prussia easily won, inspiring pride in German power that extended well beyond Prussia itself. The FrancoPrussian War of 1870 was particularly important, because Prussia fought it to take possession of the French provinces of Alsace and Lorraine—provinces the Prussians claimed were part of the German "national community" because its people, although legally French citizens, were ethnically and linguistically German. In 1871, capitalizing on the widespread nationalist sentiment the war had created throughout the German-speaking states, Bismarck persuaded the German king to proclaim himself emperor (or Kaiser) of a new empire that united all German peoples except those in Austria and Switzerland.

The second great European movement for national unification occurred in Italy, which had long been divided into small kingdoms, city-states, and regions controlled by the Vatican. Some areas of Italy were at one time or another dominated by the French, the Spanish, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Beginning in the early nineteenth century, Italian nationalists formed what became known as the Young Italy movement, under the leadership of Giuseppe Mazzini. The movement demanded an end to foreign control in Italy and the unification of the Italian people into a single nation. It promoted an idea of the nation as a kind of family, and of its territories as a family home. Peoples with common language, culture, and tradition, Mazzini believed, should be free to unite and govern themselves. More important than this growing popular nationalism as a cause of Italian unification were the efforts of powerful and ambitious leaders. The most powerful Italian state in the mid-nineteenth century was the kingdom of the Piedmont and Sardinia, in the northwestern part of the peninsula. Its king, Victor Emmanuel II, appointed his own version of Bismarck—Camillo di Cavour— as prime minister in 1852. Cavour joined forces with nationalists in other areas of Italy to drive the Spanish and the Austrians out of Italian territory. Having first won independence for northern Italy, Cavour joined forces with the southern nationalist leader Giuseppe Garibaldi, who helped win independence in the South and then agreed to a unification of the entire Italian nation under Victor Emmanuel in 1860.

Other nations in these years were also trying to create, preserve, and strengthen nation-states. Some failed to do so—Russia, which despite the reform efforts of several tsars, never managed to create a stable nation-state from among its broad and diverse peoples; Austria, whose empire could never consolidate its claim over a similarly diverse group of national groups; Turkey, whose Ottoman Empire (known as "the sick man of Europe") remained frail despite the efforts of leaders to strengthen it; and China, which likewise tried and failed to produce reforms that would consolidate its vast lands effectively. But others succeeded—Meiji Japan, for example, instituted a series of reforms in the 1880s and 1890s that created a powerful new Japanese nation-state.

In fighting and winning the Civil War, the nationalists of the northern parts of the United States not only preserved the unity of their nation. They also became part of a movement toward the consolidation of national cultures and national territories that extended through many areas of the globe.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giuseppe_Garibaldi - Wikipedia: Giuseppe Garibaldi

http://www.ohio.edu/~Chastain/dh/gari.htm - Garibaldi, Giuseppe

1
Evaluate the role played by Giuseppe Garibaldi in the formation of the Italian national state. How did the problems he faced compare or contrast to those faced by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War? Do you believe the comparison is valid?

http://mars.wnec.edu/~grempel/courses/wc2/lectures/rev1848.html - The Revolution of 1848

2
A crucial year in the history of European nationalism was 1848. Peruse the information at the site above. What happened in 1848? How did it impact on the burgeoning movement of nationalism around the continent? How is the European experience of 1848 similar to the American Civil War, if at all?
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