The US Civil War is sometimes regarded as a kind of redemptive bloodletting for original sins, or a necessary and inevitable first step toward a defining consensus around ideas of democracy, freedom, and citizenship (“the American creed”). The chapters in The World the Civil War Made (a collection of conference papers from 2013) take the transformative nature of the Civil War as a question rather than an assumption, and suggest new ways of seeing the post-war period.

The notion of the Civil War as a transformative moment in American national development discounts the continuity across the antebellum and postwar periods. Postwar black politics had roots in antebellum slave communities. War and emancipation did not meaningfully change the longer trajectory of class relations or racial oppression (neither did a black president). Religious culture across the war also displayed remarkable continuity, particularly among southern whites, who produced unifying narratives of righteousness and triumph that have not only endured but strengthened over the course of the last 150 years.

Union schmunion. After the war, across regions, routine violence and enduring local power relations made it impossible for the federal government to enforce its own policies or to persuade people to accept the principles behind them. What defined the postwar era was not just the federal government’s new reach but the way that common people―southern freed peoples and rebels, western settlers and Indians―managed to resist its efforts. In both the South and the West, army interventions sparked intense debates about government’s proper role, size and cost. The Democratic Party regained popular support among northern white voters by raising fears of a standing army, a tyrannical central state, high tax rates, and racial equality.

As Downs and Masur write in the introductory essay, the postwar U.S. was a nation ruled by violence interrupted by flashes of rights, rather than a nation of rights undermined by inevitable flashes of violence. In various chapters we hear of whites rioting against Chinese mine workers in Wyoming and attacking the Nez Perce in Oregon, Latinos in New Mexico obstructing federal officials from freeing their peons, and black settlers displacing Native Americans in Indian Territory. The persistence and ubiquity of violence, lawlessness, and coercive labor practices belie any notion of national unity or commitment to a rationalized, legalistic public order. Chaos, anarchy and illiberal forms of power were more the norm than the exception after the Civil War.

What is valuable and interesting about The World the Civil War Made is the attempt by the various authors to avoid teleology and to contemplate the postwar moment itself rather than look back with the knowledge of what happened later. In deflating the mythology of the Civil War, the book also suggests that violence and ignorant chauvinism are defining parts of the American experience. ( )