American Civil Wars
A Continental History, 1850-1873
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2024
A masterful history of the Civil War and its reverberations across the continent by a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner.
In a fast-paced narrative of soaring ideals and sordid politics, of civil war and foreign invasion, the award-winning historian Alan Taylor presents a pivotal twenty-year period in which North America’s three largest countries—the United States, Mexico, and Canada—all transformed themselves into nations. The American Civil War stands at the center of the story, its military history and the drama of emancipation the highlights. Taylor relies on vivid characters to carry the story, from Joseph Hooker, whose timidity in crisis was exploited by Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson in the Union defeat at Chancellorsville, to Martin Delany and Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Black abolitionists whose critical work in Canada and the United States advanced emancipation and the enrollment of Black soldiers in Union armies.
The outbreak of the Civil War created a continental power vacuum that allowed French forces to invade Mexico in 1862 and set up an empire ruled by a Habsburg archduke. This inflamed the ongoing power struggle between Mexico’s Conservatives—landowners, the military, the Church—and Liberal supporters of social democracy, led ably by Benito Juarez. Along the southwestern border Mexico’s Conservative forces made common cause with the Confederacy, while General James Carleton violently suppressed Apaches and Navajos in New Mexico and Arizona. When the Union triumph restored the continental balance of power, French forces withdrew, and Liberals consolidated a republic in Mexico.
Canada was meantime fending off a potential rupture between French-speaking Catholics in Quebec and English-speakers in Ontario. When Union victory raised the threat of American invasion, Canadian leaders pressed for a continent-wide confederation joined by a transcontinental railroad. The rollicking story of liberal ideals, political venality, and corporate corruption marked the dawn of the Gilded Age in North America.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This sweeping account from Pulitzer winner Taylor (American Republics) examines the Civil War in a wider North American context. America's conflict forms the backbone of Taylor's narrative—he moves through the war's epochal events with striking conciseness—while his explorations of developments in Canada and Mexico reveal how the fates of all three nations were intertwined. After Mexico's defeat in the 1846–1848 Mexican-American War, the country was "bitterly divided" between conservative and liberal factions and defenseless against regular incursions by American raiders. Meanwhile, Canadian leaders worked to bridge divisions between Francophone and Anglophone states in hopes of forming a confederation—eventually established in 1867—that would be "better prepared to resist American invasion," a perceived likelihood at the time. Strife on the continent heightened further with the French invasion of Mexico in 1862 and the 1864 elections, which were riven with tension in all three countries, especially in Mexico, where the French held votes structured to prove that Mexicans welcomed French rule. Taylor trenchantly observes that the situation in Mexico further spurred America's Unionists, who feared similar European incursion into their own divided country. He also provides fresh analysis of Mexican and Canadian leaders Benito Juárez and John A. Macdonald, liberals whom he credits with holding their countries together in the face of out of control conservative revanchism. This penetrating study is a must for Civil War history buffs.
