Civil War History

Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom has been a seminal part of American studies scholarship since its first publication in 1975. Morgan’s core ideas about the American paradox of liberty and early democracy on the one hand (albeit for a white man’s republic) and growing entrenched African slavery and enslaved subjugation on the other, have engrained foundational thinking about the [End Page 61] early American republic. These two paradoxical tensions formed the making of the United States of America—and of American exceptionalism. Andrew F. Lang’s A Contest of Civilizations: Exposing the Crisis of American Exceptionalism updates Morgan’s enduring views by shifting the focus to the antebellum and Civil War eras. Through this rich study, Lang considers another paradox of tensions for the nation to grapple with at mid-century.

For Civil War scholars, A Contest of Civilizations is a familiar story about the context of the conflict’s coming. It is also a broadly familiar story about American exceptionalism debates and definitions. Lang confidently approaches the period from a new angle, presenting a knowable story to generate in-depth understanding around how the war raised contested questions about what the Union was for Americans, and how it created problems for the meaning of American Exceptionalism when slavery’s incompatibility with the country’s founding principles were put under extreme conflict pressure. Prominent African American abolitionists and thinkers articulated this concern alongside white pro- and antislavery and secessionist debaters. By appropriating “the language of American civilization,” Lang notes, “the concept of Union” was used to “contest the unjust racial exclusions hosted by a white democracy” (61). Even when Frederick Douglass challenged the meaning of the Fourth of July in 1852, he paradoxically—and simultaneously—“lambasted white supremacy” and championed the blueprint of American civilization (the Constitution) as “a glorious liberty document” (61).

Being a nation of paradoxes is what marks the United States’ nineteenth-century exceptionalism. The book’s focus around this continual tension is laid out early on in Lang’s declaration that his research “engages [with] the paradoxical questions raised by nineteenth-century exceptionalist conviction, civilizationist discourse, and conservative practice,” which led to debate over “the contest interpretations of American civilization” for those caught up on both sides of the sectional divided (13). By starting in the antebellum period, the study also shows that competing interpretations predated the war and, furthermore, tied to international revolutions through the 1840s–1860s as “diverse concepts of nationhood” reshaped Europe (15). Indeed, Americans’ own understandings of their homeland’s impending conflict were shaped by international concerns, and not always positively. Concerned that failed democratic nationalist experiments before the war would travel across the ocean, Lang includes a brilliant line from an antebellum Philadelphian newspaper that argued how American secessionist disunion would “Europeanize this content” and end peaceful American civilization as it was known (101). Little wonder that Union acceptance of the Confederacy’s “unconditional but merciful surrender” in 1865 was an attempt to illustrate how exceptional “civilized republics” could practice “peaceful restraint” by comparison to European counterparts (295). [End Page 62]

Lang’s book is also presented in an exceptional way—rather than having long chapter titles, the eight central chapters are given single words that reflect where each chapter is in the chronological narrative. Starting with “Union,” Lang subsequently assesses the “Causes,” “Purposes,” and “Conduct” of the war before dealing with “Insurrection.” This fifth chapter adds weight behind interpretations of African American Union military service as a slave uprising in its own right and showed agency in securing emancipation through the bayonet. The final three chapters of the book focus on the Civil War’s “Endings,” “Consequences” and “Peace,” with some discussion looking forward to how American exceptionalism changed again in Reconstruction—a period that Lang argues “reflected an enduring paradox of American exceptionalism...