America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation [Hardcover]

David Goldfield (Author)

Book Description

Release date: March 15, 2011

In this spellbinding new history, David Goldfield offers the first major new interpretation of the Civil War era since James M. McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom. Where past scholars have limned the war as a triumph of freedom, Goldfield sees it as America's greatest failure: the result of a breakdown caused by the infusion of evangelical religion into the public sphere. As the Second GreatAwakening surged through America, political questions became matters of good and evil to be fought to the death.

The price of that failure was horrific, but the carnage accomplished what statesmen could not: It made the United States one nation and eliminated slavery as a divisive force in the Union. The victorious North became synonymous with America as a land of innovation and industrialization, whose teeming cities offered squalor and opportunity in equal measure. Religion was supplanted by science and a gospel of progress, and the South was left behind.

Goldfield's panoramic narrative, sweeping from the 1840s to the end of Reconstruction, is studded with memorable details and luminaries such as HarrietBeecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, and Walt Whitman. There are lesser known yet equally compelling characters, too, including Carl Schurz-a German immigrant, warhero, and postwar reformer-and Alexander Stephens, the urbane and intellectual vice president of the Confederacy. America Aflame is a vivid portrait of the "fiery trial"that transformed the country we live in.

David Goldfield is the Robert Lee Bailey Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. He is the author of many works on Southern history, including Still Fighting the Civil War; Black, White, and Southern; and Promised Land.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. This sweeping, provocative history of America from the 1830s through Reconstruction has two grand themes. One is the importance of evangelical Protestantism, particularly in the North and within the Republican Party, in changing slavery from a political problem to an intractable moral issue that could only be settled by bloodshed. The second is the Civil War's transformation of America into a modern industrial nation with a powerful government and a commercial, scientific outlook, even as the postwar South stagnated in racism and backward-looking religiosity. UNC-Charlotte historian Goldfield (Still Fighting the Civil War) courts controversy by shifting more responsibility for the conflict to an activist North and away from intransigent slaveholders, whom he likens to Indians, Mexicans, and other targets viewed by white evangelical Northerners as "polluting" the spreading western frontier. Still, he presents a superb, stylishly written historical synthesis that insightfully foregrounds ideology, faith, and public mood The book is, the author writes, "neither pro-southern nor pro-northern," but rather "antiwar." Goldfield's narrative of the war proper is especially good, evoking the horror of the fighting and its impact on soldiers and civilians. The result is an ambitious, engrossing interpretation with new things to say about a much-studied conflagration. Color and b&w illus. (Mar.)
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From Booklist

A specialist in southern history, Goldfield assesses Civil War causes and consequences chronologically from 1834 to the termination of Reconstruction. Why begin in 1834? That year a Boston mob destroyed a Catholic convent; for Goldfield, that event is symbolic of a toxic factor in the period’s politics, evangelical Protestantism. Arguing that it promoted eschatological mentalities on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line, Goldfield, as his narrative navigates the 1850s, personifies evangelicals’ influence in Uncle Tom’s Cabin author Harriet Beecher Stowe and in southern preachers who sermonized on God’s sanction for southern rights, slavery included. The overtly religious aren’t the sole culprits in Goldfield’s interpretation. He critiques the increasing inflexibility of such politicians as former Whigs Abraham Lincoln and Alexander Stephens. Frederick Douglass and Walt Whitman stroll through Goldfield’s pages as eyewitnesses while he considers that the South’s fear for slavery’s future and for its exclusion from industrialization and westward expansion underlay variously argued causes of the war. But it is his emphasis on the religious angle that readers may find distinctive among Civil War overviews. --Gilbert Taylor

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 640 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Press; First Edition edition (March 15, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1596917024
• ISBN-13: 978-1596917026
• Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 2 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (34 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #287,039 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

David Goldfield was born in Memphis and grew up in Brooklyn, a combination that has left him with a cracker edginess that an education at the University of Maryland did not soften. He did learn how to write, though -- sixteen books on Southern and American (they're different) history. He is the Robert Lee Bailey Professor at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. Goldfield also consults for museums and historic sites, gives programs on American culture for the U.S. State Department in various countries, and serves as an expert witness in voting rights and death penalty cases. He likes to talk. His most recent book is America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation, published in 2011, and he is currently working on a book, "The Gifted Generation," about life in post-World War II America. In the interstices of teaching, talking, writing, and researching, he enjoys the music of Buddy Holly and Gustav Mahler (though not at the same time), reading Southern novels, jogging (though he still calls it running), and baseball.

Email: [e-mail]
Web site: www.davidgoldfield.us

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

110 of 121 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The end point of the American Revolution and the start of modern America April 7, 2011

By W. V. Buckley

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

Civil War history used to be so simple. As grade schoolers we were taught that the war started in 1861 when the Confederates bombarded Ft. Sumter, was fought over the issue of slavery, and ended when Robert E. Lee surrendered at the Appomattox Courthouse in 1865. But it seems the Civil War has become a moving target for historians. Some say it began with John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry. Others cite the violence of "Bleeding Kansas." Or maybe it was the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin and the rise of the abolitionist movement. Even the ending of the conflict has become hard to define. Did it end with Reconstruction? Did it end with the granting of Civil Rights to blacks. Are we still, in some ways, fighting the Civil War.

David Goldfield, an historian at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte, plunges headlong into the fray with America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation. Be forewarned: this is not one of those dry recitations of battles and generals and numbers of casualties. Goldfield makes history come alive when he goes beyond the usual "this is what happened" version of history. By delving into the social history of the United States, he also builds a compelling case for "this is why it happened." And, in what will no doubt draw ire from traditional historians, he ponders "what might have happened." While not quite entering the territory of alternative history, Goldfield proposes that the death and destruction of the Civil War might have been avoided while the result would have been the same: the end of slavery.

Goldfield sees the ominous roots of the Civil War in the Second Great Awakening in the decades before the conflict broke out. Here, for the first time in the fledgling nation's history, evangelical religion became entwined with politics. (Anyone see a connection with another American era? Hmmmm ... like maybe the 1980s when evangelical Christians and the GOP formed an alliance under Ronald Reagan?) Northern evangelicals were concerned about the spread of immigrants, espcially the Irish and the Catholic religion they brought with them. They also encouraged the nation to push Native Americans off land they saw as America's "manifest destiny" to fill from coast to coast. This influence by evangelicals resulted (shades of modern America again!) in a political system in which the reasonable middle ground fell away, leaving only the extreme voices of the pro- and anti-slavery politicians.

America Aflame is one of those rare Civil War histories that isn't content to limit itself of discussions of slavery and states' rights or descriptions of battles and military strategy. But in reading it I felt I was given a much bigger canvass on which to view the war, it causes and the aftermath. Yet, for its scope, the book is immensely readable. Usually it would take me two weeks to wade through a book such as this. I made it through Goldfield's book in four days. I found the book so compelling that I did not want to put it down and read far longer into the night than I intended. As Goldfield tells it, the Civil War was indeed the point at which the American Revolution ended and a modern American truly began.

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars "America Aflame" - The failure of political compromise and its consequences December 28, 2011

By Red on Black TOP 500 REVIEWER

Format:Hardcover

Many historians including the late great Shelby Foote have observed that the fundamental genius of the American political system of government is to seek compromise. And yet the decision of the framers of the Constitution to "park" the issue of slavery in 1797 left a cancer in the American body politic which turned malignant in the mid part of the 19th century. This excellent new general history by Southern historian David Goldfield concentrates on that failure of compromise and firmly lays the blame for this at the door of the infusion of evangelical religious fervour into politics in making conciliation virtually impossible as the 1850s progressed. This issue is brilliantly studied by Goldfield and whereas most books on the civil war will start with the examination of the Mexican War or Bleeding Kansas, he commences in 1834 by dissecting the burning of the Ursuline convent in Charlestown Massachusetts which had become became an object of vicious scorn for anti-Catholic sentiment in the 1830s. Why is this important? Goldfield shows that religious discord and sectarian conflict which materialised in different forms such as Anti-Catholic, Anti-Jewish and Anti-Black Evangelical Christian ideologues effectively destroyed the search for consensus which underpins the constitution. No where was this polarisation more bellicose or visceral than on the question of slavery. The debate was understandably dominated by concepts of an absolute "right" and "wrong" exemplified by a small band of Evangelical Protestants who led Northern abolitionism and in the South by a deeply embedded racist faith in slavery as a guarantor of a threatened way of life. Certainly some politicians like Alexander Stephens and Stephen Douglas cautiously searched for a compromise solutions but the gulf of political polarization was seismic and epitomised by the great abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison's symbolic burning of the constitution and its slavery compromise as a "covenant with death, an agreement with hell,". Equally in 1856 when Preston Smith Brooks a Senator from South Carolina beat Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner unconscious with a cane on the house floor because of one his abolitionist speeches The Richmond Enquirer crowed: "We consider the act good in conception, better in execution, and best of all in consequences. These vulgar abolitionists in the Senate must be lashed into submission."

Goldfield's thesis is controversial and revisionist. It is also on occasions far too neat and precise. It was Abraham Lincoln after all who tried to navigate a way through this and his first inauguration speech in 1861 was a delicate attempt to address the "apprehension of the Southern states" where Lincoln assured his intention not to interfere in slavery "in the states where it exists". Yet a moral issue like slavery could not be negotiated away or be subject to shady political deals. Was a compromise possible? In truth the answer was certainly not. The tragedy of this of course was that the number of American dead in the Civil War exceeded in combination all those who died from the Revolutionary War, War of 1812, Mexican War, Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, and Korea combined. Provocatively Goldfield calculates that the Civil War cost around $6.7 billion in 1860s currency. He then asserts that if "the government had purchased the freedom of four million slaves and granted a 40-acre farm to each slave family, the total cost would have been $3.1 billion, leaving $3.6 billion for reparations to make up for a century of lost wages. And not a single life would have been lost."

The "Ifs" and "buts" of this book make for an absorbing tour de force of scholarship when equally combined with a very solid narrative about the course of the civil war. In particular Goldfield's scrutiny of the inherent weaknesses of the Reconstruction or as some southerners saw it "the redemption" with the restoration of white supremacy is brilliantly done. More than anything else Goldfield's book is a warning about the toxic mix of religion and politics which the framers of the constitution sought to avoid but which consistently rears it ugly head in US politics often with the worse of consequences (there are some chilling similarities with the present). If you are a civil war "buff" seek out "America Aflame" for a refreshing, controversial and panoramic study of the defining event of American History.

33 of 39 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Civil War 150 Years Later. So What's to Celebrate? May 2, 2011

By David R. Anderson

Format:Hardcover

This book, for one thing. David Goldfield looks under the cushions and into the corners of our history to put the Civil War and its bitter aftermath into perspective. In the process, Goldfield challenges a number of perceptions about the war: first, that it couldn't be avoided; second that religion played a major role in bringing us together after the war; and, third; that we emerged from Reconstruction as a unified nation.

The leaders of the Confederacy took slavery as the region's inalienable right both on religious grounds and on economic grounds. But it turns out that the Union could have compensated southern slaveholders in full for their slaves for half of what the war cost. That would have spared our young country the enormous loss of life, the widespread destruction of huge areas of the south and its cities, and provided a less hostile environment for the integration of the country's blacks into the mainstream of American life. After citing examples of countries which successfully took this approach to emancipation, Goldfield deals with the reasons it didn't work here.

Organized religion fanned the flames of war on both sides. Southern clergy proclaimed biblical authority for slavery and for subjugation of the south's blacks after the war. In the north, many churches opposed slavery before and during the war, then turned their backs on the south's blacks at a time when they most needed their help.

The Union victory in the Civil War did not lead to a nation united in any except the most technical sense. As the book makes clear, after Appomattox the victorious north turned its attention to westward expansion, industrial and scientific achievements, the subjugation of the Native Americans, and quickly abandoned as divisive and ill-conceived the plan for reconstruction. The south was left to its own devices to establish de facto slavery more out of hubris than self-interest. Goldfield addresses but can not answer how things might have turned out if President Lincoln had lived to guide the reunification. He does make clear that Andrew Johnson and later U.S. Grant failed to make good on Lincoln's vision for the postwar nation. Pursuit of the almighty dollar too quickly became the be all and end all of northern attention. The blacks the Union had had fought and died to emancipate were left to sink or swim in the hostile waters of the Jim Crow south.

We are still not fully out from under the racial prejudice that fueled the Civil War and its aftermath. But, as Goldfield makes clear, we are much closer to being a fully realized democracy today than at any time covered in this remarkable history. As we mark the 150th anniversary of the fall of Fort Sumter, it is appropriate to take stock of where we've been since and what remains undone. This book makes an ideal starting place for that inquiry.