Internationalizing the Civil War
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Presentation at the Gettysburg conference on the future of Civil War studies (March 2013)
![My intention in placing my
sword in the service of the
[Union] cause ... was to
rebuild democratically what
Lafayette had once built in a
completely different
manner.
Gen. Gustave Paul Cluseret to Sen.
Charles Sumner, March 1, 1864](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)
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Internationalizing the Civil War
- 2. My intention in placing my sword in the service of the [Union] cause ... was to rebuild democratically what Lafayette had once built in a completely different manner. Gen. Gustave Paul Cluseret to Sen. Charles Sumner, March 1, 1864
- 3. “America, in collaboration with Europe’s revolutionaries, might undermine the very basis of the traditional social order of Europe,”wrote a Belgian diplomat in Mexico to an Austrian duke (and future head of a French puppet state in Mexico) The Civil War exhibit at the Bermuda National Trust Museum (photo from TripAdvisor)
- 5. The Iron Chancellor Twenty-fifth U.S. Infantry at Fort Snelling, Minn., ~1880s
- 6. Marx, ~1861
- 7. Marx, ~1861
Editor's Notes
- Presented at a conference on the future of Civil War studies, co-sponsored by Gettysburg College, the National Park Service, and the Gettysburg Foundation. Part of a panel on internationalizing the Civil War. I’m drawn to six transnational perspectives that can, potentially, change how we think about nearly any event in the Civil War era. These are both theoretical perspectives, and useful as such, but also a challenge for us to identify actual people who stood (or stand, in the case of recent historians) at each of these vantage points. I find it very useful to peer through their eyes, which can make familiar events look distorted or perhaps bring them back into sharper focus. Does standing in the shoes of these “characters” and looking through their eyeballs help us – historians, site interpreters, casual visitors – make (new) sense of the Civil War and Reconstruction?
- General Gustave Paul Cluseret (1823-1901) was one of the thousands of foreign immigrants, mercenaries, and politically-motivated volunteers who served in the Union and Confederate armies. Notably, he served as both a Union officer and military commander of the Paris Commune in 1871.
- For example, what do we make of this observation from a Belgian diplomatic agent posted to Mexico in 1863 to help place a French-backed Austrian Duke on the imperial throne of Mexico? And how different does the War look from the vantage point of St. George’s, Bermuda — a favorite way-station for Confederate blocakde-runners?
- I don’t read Swedish, but I do want to know how this account of the battle of Gettysburg made its way to Vänersborg (a small city north of Gothenburg), what the local readers thought about it, and how the clip-ping relates to the ground-level experience of the small group of native Swedes who served in the war on both sides. American readers also had newspapers with international news jostling against domestic coverage.
- One of my favorite comparisons is the highly flexible comparison of American Unionism and German Unification – often reduced to the simplistic equation Lincoln equals Bismarck – which inspired some ’48-ers to support the Union cause, was later used in the 1870s to laud Bismarck, and was much later used by Confederate protectors (c. 1917) to defend Woodrow Wilson’s declaration of war against Germany and by modern libertarians (c. 2002) to condemn the welfare state! Here, Buffalo Soldiers wear Prussian helmets in the wake of Reconstruction.
- I draw a distinction between the “historian without borders,” unconvinced that tight boundaries make the best historical narratives, and the comparative historian, who approaches historical events in search of structural similarities and underlying patterns. Karl Marx was a bit of both, and the members of this panel walk in his footsteps (at least to some extent!).