1 - Introduction: The Cambridge History of the American Civil War

Summary

The Civil War was America’s great national trauma. Like the Napoleonic Wars in nineteenth-century Europe and World War II in the twentieth, the Civil War birthed a new civic order. Politics, economic and social life, and cultural expression all assumed a new cast for the war’s participants and their children. Even a century and a half later, after industrialization, urbanization, the dramatic expansion of America’s military and political power in the world, and generations of cultural change, the war’s impact is plain to see. The structure of the national government and the nature of American federalism took their modern shape as a result of the war. Americans’ sense of sectional identity emerged more clearly defined after the conflict and continues to shape politics and cultural life. The only genuine American philosophical tradition, pragmatism, emerged among postwar thinkers as a response to the horrors of the conflict. The war ended the long-standing system of racial bondage even as white Americans met the efforts of black Americans to achieve full and meaningful freedom with apathy, intransigence, and, in some cases, violent resistance.