Book Time #22: Alan Taylor's Civil War book
Hello Book Time friends. I spent two weeks in April on vacation so my reading—and writing—suffered as a result. I did learn to make babka and rye bread, though, and went to the Met for the first time despite living in NYC for more than a decade. So overall a successful vacation despite the lack of reading time.
I’m going to revisit a book I briefly mentioned in my 2024 wrap-up, the latest edition of the Alan Taylor series on continental US history. Here’s a full review.
American Civil Wars: A Continental History, 1850-1873, Alan Taylor
Book Time is a big fan of what I have previously referred to as the Alan Taylor Trilogy, a series on the North American continent from its settling to the mid-19th Century written by University of Virginia historian Alan Taylor. The titles of the respective volumes are American Colonies, American Revolutions, and American Republics.
I credit the trilogy for changing my perspective of American history. Taylor covers the entire North American continent, not just where English settlers happened to reside at any given time. I appreciate the fragility of the people and land that ultimately became the United States, the ambition, cruelty and horrors that shaped the place, and the contradictions that have always been at the heart of this country’s existence.
However, the Taylor Trilogy is now the Taylor Tetralogy. American Civil Wars, which was released last year, is the fourth installment. While the book is worthy enough of a read, it lacks the sharp insights of the previous volumes. I suspect this is due to the time about which Taylor is writing than any shortcomings on his part. By this period, the North American continent was increasingly dominated by the United States (and, for a brief period, the Confederate States). Unlike previous volumes, what happens in Mexico and Canada takes a back seat to the main event, the American Civil War, an event about which there is already a tremendous amount of stellar scholarship. As such, American Civil Wars adds the least of the four volumes to accepted wisdom.
This is not to say it adds nothing. Most accounts of the Civil War speak little of the Union and Confederacy’s efforts to court the various factions and governments in Mexico. They almost never mention Canada, although I found the Canadian sections of the book too disconnected to what was happening elsewhere to belong, undermining the premise of the project to cover the entire continent as one story. By this point, those stories had meaningfully diverged.
Still, Taylor is such a gifted writer and researcher that the book has plenty to offer. As with his previous works, he is not shy to call out venerated figures in American history for being, essentially, idiots. However, his targets in this volume, such as virtually every Civil War general and most Confederate politicians, are frequent, deserved historical punching bags. But it will be quite a while before I forget the story of a Union general leading his division on a charge into a giant crater he created with a dynamite explosion into which the men got stuck and were subsequently annihilated.
If you’ve never read about the Civil War before, I wouldn’t start here. Battle Cry of Freedom is still the flag bearer in that regard. But here you will get a clearer perspective of the Civil War’s inherent contradictions and absurdities. I often hear or see people on social media say something about how we live in the stupidest times or an unprecedented era of hate and division. I am grateful they are wrong. I pray they remain so.