ABSTRACT
The middle decades of the nineteenth century witnessed many separatist struggles over competing and emerging national identities. The chapter will look comparatively at the United States, Ireland, and Schleswig-Holstein and how these three regions dealt with the aftermath of devastating yet unsuccessful civil strife and their continued struggle with reconciliation. While some of these uprisings were more bloody than others, they all shared one thing in common: the losing side had to reconcile to a continuation under what they perceived as oppressive foreign rule. All three tried with either terror campaigns (Ireland and the U.S. South) or with a second war to find liberation. In the United States, Reconstruction failed to overcome deep-seated racial resentment, and the eventual emergence of Jim Crow and Civil Rights continue to illustrate the difficulty some southerners have reconciling to their section’s defeat. By contrast, in the German duchies, the hope for liberation from Danish rule finally materialized in 1864 as part of the Dano-German War. However, independence was not forthcoming, and instead the duchies became part of the Prussian kingdom. In Ireland, the Irish Republican Brotherhood’s terror campaign went nowhere when the British government changed policy, eliminating religious oppression, as did the Easter Rebellion of 1916, when finally Home Rule and eventually independence became possible. All three episodes show the historical background for continued and lingering animosity. Reconciliation is and was a difficult process and many diehard nationalists never could overcome the shame and anger of having lost their struggle for independence. The long duree view illustrates just how devastating losing a civil war can be and how much such a loss influences the perception against reconciliation.
