ABSTRACT
It is generally accepted that the American Civil War of 1861-65 and its immediate aftermath-the Reconstruction period of 1865-77-represents a watershed in American national development. In practical terms, the war that Henry James referred to as the “great convulsion” certainly provides a definitive turning point in the “timeline” of American history.1 In recognition of this, student textbooks frequently divide American history neatly in two, with a first volume covering the period up to the Civil War and Reconstruction, and a second picking up the history of America from Reconstruction onwards. As the years pass this divide will surely have to change, although it is hard to predict what new turning point the textbook publishers will select once the sheer volume of post-Civil War American history forces an alternative division. More fundamentally, the Civil War is regarded as that event which transformed a “Union” into a “Nation.” The Civil War certainly succeeded in holding America together as one nation at a time when it might have come apart. It resolved the question of whether the Union was a voluntary organization from which the separate states had the right to secede-as the South had argued-or whether it was, as Lincoln described it in 1861, perpetual. The Union’s perpetuity, according to Lincoln, was assured not only by the Constitution and the law (although he interpreted both in such a way as to deny absolutely the South’s right of secession) but by geography.“Physically speaking, we cannot separate,” he pointed out. “A husband and wife may be divorced, and go out of the presence, and beyond the reach of each other; but the different parts of our country cannot do this.”2
