Continent in Crisis
The U.S. Civil War in North America
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Written by leading historians of the mid–nineteenth century United States, this book focuses on the continental dimensions of the U.S. Civil War. It joins a growing body of scholarship that seeks to understand the place of America’s mid-nineteenth-century crisis in the broader sweep of world history. However, unlike other studies that have pursued the Civil War’s connections with Europe and the Caribbean, this volume focuses on North America, particularly Mexico, British Canada, and sovereign indigenous states in the West.
As the United States went through its Civil War and Reconstruction, Mexico endured its own civil war and then waged a four-year campaign to expel a French-imposed monarch. Meanwhile, Britain’s North American colonies were in complex and contested negotiations that culminated in confederation in 1867. In the West, indigenous nations faced an onslaught of settlers and soldiers seeking to conquer their lands for the United States. Yet despite this synchronicity, mainstream histories of the Civil War mostly ignore its connections to the political upheaval occurring elsewhere in North America.
By reading North America into the history of the Civil War, this volume shows how battles over sovereignty in neighboring states became enmeshed with the fratricidal conflict in the United States. Its contributors explore these entangled histories in studies ranging from African Americans fleeing U.S. slavery by emigrating to Mexico to Confederate privateers finding allies in Halifax, Nova Scotia. This continental perspective highlights the uncertainty of the period when the fate of old nations and possibilities for new ones were truly up for grabs.
Much has been written about the US Civil War and its aftermath. Continent in Crisis tells a different story. By expanding its geographic and chronological scope, the book traces the transnational conflicts, reverberations and fractures that shaped historical processes in a large, complex, densely connected region during a critical period. It brings together the fascinating stories of diverse actors: fugitive slaves, empire builders, filibusters and privateers, soldiers and politicians, indigenous leaders and British officeholders. It explores their ideas of what the nation was and what it should become, and reveals how their alternative visions shaped the history of North America.---Erika Pani, El Colegio de México
Through eight essays, prominent historians of the mid-19th-century US examine the North American impact on the Civil War. The uniqueness of this volume lies in the authors’ focus on the interrelationship and linkage of events in Mexico, British Canada, and the US during this tumultuous era and how these events impacted the sovereignty and politics of each of these states. . . Each essay is well documented and includes helpful endnotes for further research and reading.---Choice Reviews
Brian Schoen is the James Richard Hamilton/Baker and Hostetler Professor of Humanities and chair of the Department of History at Ohio University. He is author of The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics, and the Global Origins of the Civil War (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009) and several recent book chapters, articles, and edited anthologies on the early American Republic and Civil War Era.
Jewel L. Spangler (Edited By)
Jewel L. Spangler is an associate professor and head of the Department of History at the University of Calgary. She is the author of Virginians Reborn (University of Virginia Press, 2008) and co-editor of Remaking North American Sovereignty: State Transformation in the 1860s (Fordham University Press, 2020). Her current project is a microhistory titled “The Richmond Theatre Fire of 1811 in History and Memory.”
Frank Towers (Edited By)
Frank Towers is a professor of history at the University of Calgary. He is the author of The Urban South and the Coming of the Civil War (University of Virginia Press, 2004) and the co- editor of The Old South's Modern Worlds (Oxford University Press, 2011), Confederate Cities (University of Chicago Press, 2015), and Remaking North American Sovereignty (Fordham University Press, 2020).
Introduction: The United States Civil War Era and
Sovereignty on the North American Continent
Brian Schoen and Frank Towers | 1
1 Fugitive Slaves, Free Soil, and the Contest over Sovereignty
in the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands, 1821–1867
Alice L. Baumgartner | 19
2 Inveterate Imperialists: Contested Imperialisms, North American
History, and the Coming of the U.S. Civil War
John Craig Hammond | 36
3 Walker to Riel: State Consolidation on the Margins of Empire
Amy S. Greenberg | 65
4 Reform Wars, Royal Visits, and U.S. Views of Popular Sovereignty in 1860
Brian Schoen | 85
5 “The Pirates and Their Abettors in This Province”:
Sovereignty, Violence, and Confederate Operations in Britain’s Atlantic Colonies, 1863–1865
Beau Cleland | 119
6 “A Long-Cherished Plan”: Detroit and the U.S. Annexation of Canada
during the Nineteenth Century
John W. Quist | 152
7 From Memphis to Mexico: The U.S. Army’s Assertion of Sovereignty during Reconstruction
Andrew L. Slap | 174
8 “Hold the Fort”: Securing the Soldiers’ State in Nineteenth-Century America
Susan-Mary Grant | 189
Conclusion: Law and Order in Nineteenth-Century North America
Brian Schoen and Frank Towers | 221
Acknowledgments | 229
List of Contributors | 231
Index | 233
