ABSTRACT

Historians of the American Civil War are often tempted to exaggerate the weakness of the Union before 1860. If the ties holding the various states together were fragile, it is easier to explain why the Union broke apart in the secession winter of 1860-61. Accordingly, historians often argue that state loyalties had always been stronger than national loyalties, that longestablished differences between the states made a powerful central authority inappropriate and impossible, and that therefore the federal government had always been weak and inactive in the antebellum years. The story can then emphasize how the success of federal forces in the Civil War finally established the principle that the Union was sacrosanct and perpetual, while the undoubted expansion of federal power during the conflict created central institutions such as the Union had never previously possessed. Thus an American nation, based on a true American nationalism, developed only after 1860, largely as a consequence of four years of bloody internecine strife between North and South. In this respect, at least, many modern Civil War historians would agree with the epic film maker D. W. Griffith: for them too, the events of the 1860s marked “The Birth of a Nation.”1