Book Review – A World On Fire

A World On Fire by Amanda Foreman (2012) – We all learned about the American Civil War.  Lincoln, the Confederacy, Gettysburg, slavery and Appomattox.  When we got a little older we may have learned a little more, that it wasn’t quite so cut and dried and that the war was an enormous bloodbath that forever changed who we are as a nation.  With this book, your education on the Civil War will take the next leap forward. (a Visiting Research Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London, and educated as an undergraduate at Sarah Lawrence College and with master’s and doctorate degrees in history from Oxford University) tells the stunning story of the importance of England and English politics in the final outcome of the war.  If England had chosen to recognize the

Confederacy as a nation we would live in a very different world today.  The interplay between the two nations, the United States and the United Kingdom, was intense enough that an additional war between them almost happened twice during the years of the Civil War. Foreman tells the story through the lives of a wide variety of people ranging from the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston to the British minister in the United States (we didn’t warrant a full ambassador at that point in history) Lord Lyons to a variety of common Englishman and itinerant soldiers who would volunteer on both sides of the conflict.  (In fact, Henry Morton Stanley, of “Dr. Livingstone, I presume” fame, served on BOTH sides of the war and eventually in the U.S. Navy as well!)

In the long run there was no chance that the Confederacy could win the win outright.  Lacking the manpower and the industrial base of the North, the Confederacy believed that superior culture and fighting spirit could carry the day.  It was a vain belief.  They had only two hopes.  To drag the war on until the political will of the North was destroyed, or for some major power (England or France most likely) to recognize the Confederacy as a nation.  The first very nearly came true.  In the end Lincoln’s generals (most of whom were awful) won just enough, and at just the right time, to keep the war limping along.  The South still believed that “King Cotton” would bring England in on their side.

England was divided on the subject (the French chose to play a delaying game, waiting for England to move first) and the fight for English popular support sounds very much at home in the 21st Century.  On the one hand there is a strong resonance in the English spirit toward those who fight for liberty.  When the South could keep the discourse focused there they did very well with English politics.  At the same time England had relatively recently turned its back on slavery in all forms.  They were rabidly opposed to any group that continued the slave culture.  Confederate agents implied that if left to its own devices the “peculiar institution” would slowly fade away in an independent South.  This was a political lie of monstrous proportion.  The economy of the Confederacy could not function without slaves and the ruling classes saw no reason to try.  In the end the English politicians would realize this and finally close the door on the Confederacy.

Quite simply, this is the best book I’ve read this year.  I have always been interested in the Civil War and having moved to the heart of the conflict recently (just outside Richmond, VA) my interest has fired up even more.  I was vaguely familiar with the role that England had played in the Civil War.  My understanding of the political side of the war is now far deeper and more detailed than ever before.  The terrible toll of the war has been brought back to me in great detail as well.  Foreman is masterful in her storytelling.  Each of the characters (and there are a boatload of them!) come alive for the reader.  The vain, the long suffering, the bombastic, the idealistic, the devious and the outright deranged move smoothly across through the tale of this terrible conflict.  Characters you think you know well, like Lincoln, get finer detailing and depth.  Others you have never heard of before will capture your attention as they struggle through their own terrifying histories.  Men’s careers and lives will grow, blossom or be destroyed as they attempt to make a passage through the politics of two nations with common heritages and completely separate views of the world.

For the Civil War buff this is a must read.  I strongly recommend it to anyone with an interest in American or English history.  And if you enjoy a story well told, you can’t go far wrong with this one.

Rating – ***** Highly Recommended