Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... McMinnville Public Library | 973.711 Goldfield | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Dallas Public Library | 973.711 Goldfield | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Salem Main Library | 973.711 Goldfield 2011 | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
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.
Author Notes
David Goldfield is the Robert Lee Bailey Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. He is the author of many works and textbooks on Southern history, including Still Fighting the Civil War , Southern Histories , Black, White and Southern, and Promised Land .
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly 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.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
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.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
WRITING about what might have been is something historians tend to avoid. You may find the occasional counterfactual sentence in a serious history book - What if Lee had accepted command of the Union army? What if Lincoln had lived? - but that sort of speculation is usually left to novelists, as when Philip Roth, in "The Plot Against America," imagines a United States gone fascist under President Charles Lindbergh. "America Aflame," David Goldfield's account of the coming, conduct and consequences of the Civil War, is not a book about things that never happened. It is a riveting, often heartbreaking, narrative of things that did. Yet it also compels us to ponder choices not made, roads not taken - always with the implicit question in mind of whether the nation might somehow have spared itself the carnage of the war and, if so, what kind of nation it would have become. At the outset of his masterly synthesis of political, social, economic and religious history, Goldfield tells us that he "is antiwar, particularly the Civil War." Then he shows, in painfully vivid prose, young men marching into fields "fat with corn and deep green clover" only to be burned alive or torn by shrapnel, survivors left to breathe "in spurts, a frothy saliva dripping creamily from their mouths down to their ears, strings of matter from their brains swaying in the breeze," or to die in their own blood and excrement or, if sufficiently alive to be carried off the field, to be treated by surgeons who, without knowledge of anesthesia or antisepsis, slice off mangled limbs with knives sharpened on "the soles of their boots." Many other books (one thinks of Charles Royster's "Destructive War" and, more recently, of Drew Gilpin Faust's "This Republic of Suffering") have sought to convey, without glorifying or glossing it over, the battlefield truth of America's four-year descent into organized savagery. What is distinctive about Goldfield's book is that he believes the 600,000 deaths and countless mutilations could have been avoided. A war fought over the future of slavery did not have to happen because "the political system established by the founders would have been resilient and resourceful enough to accommodate our great diversity sooner without the tragedy of a civil war." In advancing this thesis, Goldfield is returning to a view once held by eminent historians, including his teacher Avery Craven, that the war was an avertable catastrophe rather than, as Senator William Henry Seward of New York called it in advance, an "irrepressible conflict." In Goldfield's telling, the force that drove the nation toward apocalypse was evangelical fervor of one form or another - in the North, faith in the righteousness of the abolitionist cause, in the South, faith in slavery as a guarantor of a threatened way of life. "Faith reinforced the romance of war" until "war had become a magic elixir to speed America's millennial march" toward Armageddon. But Goldfield's belief that the "political system" could have solved the problem of slavery is a leap of faith of his own. Secessionists, after all, left the Union precisely because they rejected a constitutionally valid election that placed slavery, as Lincoln put it, "in the path of ultimate extinction." In his first Inaugural Address, which Goldfield aptly calls "a walking-on-eggshells speech," Lincoln tried to reassure slaveowners that he would not interfere with their peculiar institution where it already existed, but would only limit its expansion into territories over which the federal government held authority. But slaveowners did not concede the constitutional legitimacy of that authority - and the United States Supreme Court, in its notorious Dred Scott decision, had agreed with them. Goldfield's heroes are those who, in the face of this impasse, sought a solution short of secession - men like Alexander Stephens, a congressman from Georgia, later a reluctant vice president of the Confederacy, who was, in his words, "utterly opposed to mingling religion with politics," and Stephen Douglas, a figure "of selfless patriotism and personal courage" who, recognizing his impending defeat in the election of 1860, campaigned through the South in an effort to save the Union and, after the attack on Fort Sumter, threw his support to Lincoln. In the end, the war did put an end to legal human bondage in America. But emancipation came slowly - first as a military measure to deny the Confederacy the coerced manpower of its slaves, only later as a war against the institution itself once the valiant service of black soldiers had made the thought of restoring slavery after the fighting was over unthinkable. According to Goldfield, the war reduced the North to a sort of postorgiastic exhaustion, leaving former slaves at the mercy of terrorist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan in a South determined to return them to subjugation. After a failed experiment in reconstruction on the basis of racial equality, some of the hottest antebellum abolitionists became apostates to their once-professed faith. Harriet Beecher Stowe's "passion for the plight of the slave" gave way to a preoccupation with decorating houses. Horace Greeley, who had once goaded Lincoln to act more decisively against slavery, wondered if his own enmity to slavery "might have been a mistake." Lamenting the horrors of the war, Goldfield computes its total monetary cost at around $6.7 billion in 1860s currency, and 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." But this computation proceeds from some dubious assumptions. Such a transaction can be made only if there is a willing seller as well as a willing buyer - and, as Goldfield himself notes, all attempts at compensated emancipation, even in the small border state of Delaware, where slaves were a minor part of the local economy, failed because slaveowners had no interest in such a deal. And even if they had, just where would the 40-acre farms be located? In the South? Or in the western territories, where abolitionist sentiment was often mixed with racist animus - a sentiment, that is, in favor of excluding black people, whether slave or free? Throughout Goldfield's book, one sees the present peeping through the past. In his allergy to the infusion of religion into politics, and his regret over the failure of government to achieve compromise, he sometimes seems to be writing as much about our own time as about time past. Yet even looking through his eyes, one finds it hard to imagine that the post-Civil War constitutional amendments by which black citizenship rights were advanced could ever have been ratified if the slave states had remained in the Union. The "secession war," as Walt Whitman called it, would seem to have been a necessary prelude to the process of securing black equality - a process still unfinished today. Despite its implausibilities, Goldfield's thought experiment in alternative history is provocative in the best sense. Most history books try to explain the past. The exceptional ones, of which "America Aflame" is a distinguished example, remind us that the past is ultimately as inscrutable as the future. Andrew Delbanco, the editor of "The Portable Abraham Lincoln," is the Levi professor in the humanities and the director of American studies at Columbia.
Choice Review
For the most part, studies of the Civil War depict the positive motivations and purposes of those who waged the conflict. Many books depict Northerners as the crusaders of abolitionism and preservers of the Union, while Southerners emerge as the defenders of states rights. Goldfield, however, depicts the motivations of the Civil War in negative terms. Describing the Civil War as a failure of reason and moderation, the author (Univ. of North Carolina, Charlotte) blames the war on an evangelical fervor on both sides that reduced practical economic and political issues to debates of good versus evil. Placing his discussion of the war into these parameters, Goldfield examines how the conflict unfolded, as well as how the US changed because of the war. One of the important consequences, according to Goldfield, was the redefining of evangelical beliefs into a secular belief in Progressivism that, for better or for worse, dominated the postwar Gilded Age. Replete with interesting accounts of the war's impact on key individuals, the author's thesis will likely not resonate with all historians, but it is undoubtedly a unique alternative look at the Civil War. Summing Up: Recommended. All levels/libraries. S. J. Ramold Eastern Michigan University
Library Journal Review
Where historian James M. McPherson (Battle Cry of Freedom) and other Civil War scholars have viewed the Civil War as a struggle and triumph for freedom, Goldfield (Still Fighting the Civil War: The American South and Southern History) regards it as America's preeminent failure, a sectional breakdown with volatile evangelical religion at its core. Northern evangelicals condemned slavery as a sin; their counterparts in the South continued to picture it as providentially ordained. With the prewar passing of congressional giants Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and John C. Calhoun, political issues of a substantive nature blurred into a sectional morality play between good and evil. The war did make the United States one nation again and ended "the peculiar institution," but Goldfield argues that the North's postwar advances in business and science and the South's protracted poverty and resentment transformed the cultural force of religion into a complacent rationalization of the status quo in both sections. VERDICT A provocatively written, scrupulously researched, and well-framed consideration of evangelical religion's questionable role in the antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction periods of our history. An important book as the war's sesquicentennial approaches; a must for all libraries.-John Carver Edwards, Univ. of Georgia Libs., Cleveland (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Introduction: A Nation Reborn | p. 1 |
| 1 Crusades | p. 17 |
| 2 Empire | p. 42 |
| 3 Revolutions | p. 59 |
| 4 Railroaded | p. 86 |
| 5 Blood on the Plains | p. 105 |
| 6 Revival | p. 128 |
| 7 The Boatman | p. 158 |
| 8 The Tug Comes | p. 180 |
| 9 Just Causes | p. 205 |
| 10 Shiloh Awakening | p. 224 |
| 11 Born in a Day | p. 245 |
| 12 Blood and Transcendence | p. 268 |
| 13 A New Nation | p. 296 |
| 14 War Is Cruelty | p. 318 |
| 15 One Nation, Indivisible | p. 344 |
| 16 The Age of Reason | p. 370 |
| 17 Aspirations | p. 397 |
| 18 A Golden Moment | p. 417 |
| 19 The Golden Spike | p. 439 |
| 20 Political Science | p. 456 |
| 21 Let It Be | p. 483 |
| 22 Centennial | p. 506 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 535 |
| Notes | p. 539 |
| Bibliography | p. 591 |
| Index | p. 617 |