Our Real Revolution

The New Yorker reviewer of A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War notes that the Civil War was the American war that fundamentally changed American consciousness, and America’s place in the world: “More than our War of Independence, which we grandly styled a Revolution (France, 1789: now, there was a revolution!), the American Civil War provoked awe. When the news from Antietam reached the English papers, almost two weeks after the event, readers were stunned: twenty-five thousand casualties in a single day, nearly five times the total of all the battle deaths Britain had suffered in the previous decade’s Crimean War. The scale of the bloodshed, the size of the armies, the mechanized horror of the combat, the moral and spiritual weight of the underlying issue: this was a serious war, and it made the United States a serious country. It marked the end of America’s childhood and cleared the way for its emergence as a global power. The world’s next great war, five decades later, was the Great War, with Americans fighting on European battlefields. And the next century was the American one.”