American Civil Wars

A Continental History, 1850-1873

By: Alan Taylor

Narrated by: Graham Winton

A MASTERFUL HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR AND ITS REVERBERATIONS ACROSS THE CONTINENT BY A TWO-TIME PULITZER PRIZE WINNER.

In a fast-paced narrative of soaring ideals and sordid politics, of civil war and foreign invasion, the award-winning historian Alan Taylor presents a pivotal twenty-year period in which North America’s three largest countries—the United States, Mexico, and Canada—all transformed themselves into nations.

The American Civil War stands at the center of the story, its military history and the drama of emancipation the highlights. Taylor relies on vivid characters to carry the story, from Joseph Hooker, whose timidity in crisis was exploited by Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson in the Union defeat at Chancellorsville, to Martin Delany and Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Black abolitionists whose critical work in Canada and the United States advanced emancipation and the enrollment of Black soldiers in Union armies.

The outbreak of the Civil War created a continental power vacuum that allowed French forces to invade Mexico in 1862 and set up an empire ruled by a Habsburg archduke. This inflamed the ongoing power struggle between Mexico’s Conservatives—landowners, the military, the Catholic Church—and Liberal supporters of social democracy, led ably by Benito Juarez. Along the southwestern border, Mexico’s Conservative forces made common cause with the Confederacy, while General James Carleton violently suppressed Apaches and Navajos in New Mexico and Arizona. When the Union triumph restored the continental balance of power, French forces withdrew, and Liberals consolidated a republic in Mexico.

Canada was meantime fending off a potential rupture between French-speaking Catholics in Quebec and English-speakers in Ontario. When Union victory raised the threat of American invasion, Canadian leaders pressed for a continent-wide confederation joined by a transcontinental railroad. The rollicking story of liberal ideals, political venality, and corporate corruption marked the dawn of the Gilded Age in North America.

“American Civil Wars demonstrates, as no previous work has, the great political transformations sweeping all of North America during the middle of the nineteenth century. With a geographical frame embracing Canada and Mexico as well as the United States, Alan Taylor once again challenges and deepens our historical perspective.”—Steven Hahn, author of Illiberal America: A History

©2024 Alan Taylor (P)2024 Recorded Books

Truly Continental in Scope

This is your chance to find out what you don’t know about the history of Canada and Mexico, as well as the U.S., during this period.

Provides a fascinating complex understanding of the time period

Alan Taylor is a writer who excels at contextualizing the complexity of history by creating a sort of ancestral snapshot of each person and event and placing them on a family tree, showing both their relationships to one another and to their time. This approach increases readers’ abilities to build those understandings on their own in other readings, about other times. That’s cool. In this book, he upends a more static understanding of North and South and provides a kaleidoscope of complexity with regards to individuals and social groups from regions both within and outside of our borders.

In this book, Alan Taylor displays his unique brilliance at making legible the complex interplay of extremely diverse international, national, and factional agendas, political aspirations, people’s attachment to their political and social worldviews, economic aspirations, their bluster, their denial, and their honest – if not always successful – efforts. Quoting from a mind-bogglingly large reading list of academic sources, newspapers, diaries, and other historical documents, he brings people back to life in such a way that you could mentally animate what role these historical figures would play today on the world stage or even in a more intimate setting of your own office politics. He makes the complexity and uncertainty decipherable so that we can think about it, argue about it, and explore it just as we would events with which we are familiar today.

A true love of history and our understanding of humanity at present are not served by infatuation with imagined, polished heroes but by complex accounts and considerations of character, influences, dreams, successes, and failures that reveal how these elements are the common denominators in all lives and across all times. Taylor does this superbly for figures North, South, enslaved, free, freed Blacks, embittered whites, Mexican, Spanish, Canadian, British, French, and Indigenous. He juxtaposes Maximilian’s wife, Carlota, sister of Leopold II, who placed faith in herself and in her husband to transform Mexico through better monarchy, with the far more egalitarian Benito Juárez, who ultimately subordinated the lives of the indigenous people in capitulating to a rising oligarchy of American investors who could rebuild Mexico. Both Carlota and Juarez are driven to varying degrees of madness by the results of their efforts.

We see members of the former Confederacy who rue their violent support for the perverse and cruel institution of slavery once the war is over, alongside others who will stop at nothing to bring back the old order. And we see Northerners, who in wartime decried slavery with a furious ardor, eventually languishing in their duty to their fellows after the war was over. There are warriors for justice, warriors for oppression, realists, capitulators, power brokers, and pawns. Even the best, who are not depleted of passionate intensity for doing right, must contend with an ecosystem of others’ dreams and aspirations, which all too often run afoul of the righteous. In the end, we may be judged by others and by ourselves for what we’ve wished for: either peace and fairness or war and acquisition at any price.

The book serves as a reminder to plant the right seeds and dream the right dreams…for everybody’s children. Because when the harshest frost melts away, something new will grow.

fascinating!

I'm a huge history nerd but whenever I've read books on the US Civil War it's always been focused entirely on the US without any discussion kd how the war affected other countries and how other countries affected the US. This is one of the most interesting books I've read in a long time.

This is the wrong narrator

Winton does fine with his narration... except for how he pronounces anything that starts with a W. You know that Family Guy sketch about Cool Whip? That's half this book. He should not be narrating a book that has the words "whites, whipped or Whigs" in it as much as this book.

As for Taylor, the book doesn't have a solid structure. He tells the story in order, and mentions a bunch of people for about 2 paragraphs each, only to never mention them again. It makes what should be an interesting story rather dull at times.