A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

Amanda Foreman's " World on Fire" twelve years in the making and over 900 pages long, is not for the faint-hearted. It is not "Gone with the Wind" or "War and Peace" as some reviewers have suggested. There are no page-turning romances and women are very minor characters. But for the hard-core history buff, "World on Fire" is in some ways better than these great classic novels. It's plot zigzags among 200 characters -- including farmers, soldiers, cartoonists, politicians and labor leaders. It is gritty, off-center, more alive and more disturbing than these broad ranging novels. Unsentimental and a take-no-prisoners, bracing writing style, "World on Fire" is a work of great richness and descriptive power, a complex treat for those with strong concentration powers who don't mind an often confusing and abruptly changing plot strewn with dozens and dozens of unknown characters.

Foreman's research is prodigious,forthright and robust. It includes eye-opening accounts of poorly planned advances by both Union and Confederate armies, equipment pieced together like childrens' toys, and as always in war stories, countless vignettes of scared, hard-charging soldiers who are ultimately blown apart because of bad officers and bad equipment.

The British part of this story has been, for the most part, untold and unmined. Britain's political elites make it their business to constantly upbraid Lincoln and his Secretary of State, William Henry Seward. Above all, despite loftier proclamations against slavery, they don't want their lucrative cotton business ruined with the South and its slave labor. Former Tory turned Liberal Party leader, William Gladstone's role is eyebrow-raising throughout, as is the bad public relations gambit of the Union army when a famous journalist is unceremoniously drummed out of covering the war by Northern interests, unhappy at his balanced, often provocative coverage. Foreman has commented that she was struck in the course of her research by the large number of Brits who sympathized with the Southern states.

This wonderful, rich history can't be beat in terms of sheer real-life drama, complex, vulnerable characters and a depressed, tortured Cabinet in Washington, D.C. trying to deal with a President who has just lost a son to typhoid fever and a thousand other heart-searing problems. "World on Fire" is certainly worth the hard work.

Amanda Foreman first demonstrated her ability to bring history to life with her biography Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. Now she has surpassed herself with A World On Fire, a magnificent history of the American Civil War and the highly important part Great Britain played during it. Most Americans who have an interest in the Civil War period will already know that both the North and the South courted British support during the conflict, and that many British subjects were either strongly pro-Federal or vehemently pro-Confederate. But few will have realized the extent to which the war dominated British politics during the 1860s and the amount of British money and the numbers of British people who took an active part in the conflict. Nor will many British or American readers have understood until now the extent to which the Civil War and Britain's response to it shaped the "special relationship" the two nations have enjoyed for over a century.

In the years before the shooting started Britain and the United States had a troubled history. Britain played a major role in the US economy, particularly through the large amount of cotton she purchased each year for her textile mills. Neither fully trusted the other. Boundary disputes over the US Canadian border and other arguments dating back to the Revolution kept Anglo-American relations tense. The election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 brought matters to a head, first because it led the South to secede and start to fight for its independence, and second because of Lincoln's appointment of William H. Seward as Secretary of State. Seward was ambitious to see the US grow and looked longingly north towards Britain's North American possession, Canada. For their part the British had an assertive government of its own dominated by Lord Palmerston, who was just as determined as Seward to see his nation grow ever stronger and more powerful. Complicating matters was the economic problem caused by the US blockade of the Confederacy, which meant Britain's textile industry was deprived of Southern cotton. The Confederacy hoped that this would bring Britain into the war on their side, and indeed many British leaders advocated intervention, but the idea of fighting to preserve slavery and (even more importantly) alienating the North, kept Britain neutral throughout the conflict.

Foreman's well known ability to skillfully detail personality and clearly describe complex historical events make the 800+ pages (not including another 150 pages of notes and index) of A World On Fire flow beautifully. Battles are described succinctly but with great attention to the fine human details, so that the reader feels the terror of Charleston's population as it comes under Federal bombardment, for example. Foreman is at her best when covering the negotiations and interplay between British and American politicians, so its easy to understand the motivations of men like Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis in America or Lord Russell and Lord Palmerston in Britain. Less well known figures like Charles Francis Adams, the US ambassador to Britain and James Mason, the Confederate commissioner, as well as Lord Lyons, the British representative in Washington, are also vividly described. Then there are the multitudes of private individuals who were drawn into the conflict on one side or another, sometimes tearing apart British as well as American families, such as what happened to the Duke of Devonshire when his son and heir joined the Confederate army while a younger son supported the North. Women's roles are not neglected, and the exploits of spies like Rose O'Neal Greenhow and Belle Boyd are well and colorfully described. I also appreciated Foreman's witty descriptions of some of the more eccentric Britons who got involved like Alfred Rubery, "one of life's nincompoops," or Feo Monck, "a force of nature, though a gentle one." Those stories made me laugh aloud even though the general tone of the book is naturally one of conflict and turmoil.

Perhaps the most important point Foreman makes in A World On Fire is that it changed Anglo-American relations forever. Both sides came to understand that the other could potentially be a terrible enemy or a great friend, and after the fighting came to an end both began to work towards a more cordial relationship. Cooperation slowly replaced competition in politics and diplomacy, and the foundations of what Churchill later called The Grand Alliance began to be laid. To me, as a native Southerner with great-great-grandfathers who fought for both the North and the South and who takes great pride in his more distant British ancestry, this was the most important and moving section of A World On Fire: the beginnings of that special relationship which still means so much to both nations.

This is an excellent book. It presents the American Civil War from an "outsider" prespective. Namely the British perspective. Its perspective allows it to distance itself from all the melodrama and moralizing that surrounds modern American narratives of the civil war. It is also very effective in answering how sympathy could exist within an anti-slavery Britain for the slaveholding Confederacy.

The book does well in communicating the ugly side of the Northern cause. From the crude violent raving nationalism of William Seward to the incompetent diplomatic efforts of Lincoln's government, its all here. And there is also the coverage of the war as a "international crisis" not all that different from many modern ones in other places. There is violence, there is bloodshed, there is the question of intervention on humanitarian grounds and the personal involvement of individual europeans in a conflict far away but yet not so far. But there is also the ultimate compentency of American policy in avoiding a worse-case situation. As much of a fool as Seward often acted in public, he was not a total fool in the exercise of policy.

But it also does well in dealing with the ambiguities of the Southern cause in Europe and its supporters. As well as the limits of what support they could obtain from outside and why. The question of how anti-slavery Britains could find sympathy for the slave-holding south is an important one. And one that sheds light on the moral ambiguities of the conflict as a whole. There is also the ultimate weakness of the southern cause morally due to slavery.

The book is full of interesting characters from the American diplomats to the "merchants of death" aiding the Confederates in London to the international trade in Cotton. There is just an incredible amount of story in the book and tells a well-known story from a very different point of view. That is a rare achievement especially in a subject written about as much as the American Civil War.

Some will find opportunity to be critical of the book for its outsider viewpoint. This is not a book from which to gain an understanding of the core narrative of the war in the United States. This is not a book that is going to be faithful to the written-in-stone story of the war that some are attached to either. But thats ultimately its real value. It uses the outsider persepective to break the story of the war out of its usually totally American context and insular American narrative.

This book is an example of how to do good history. It brings new stories to the table and a different perspective without restorting to gimmicks and sensationalism. It adds new perspectives to history in a reasonable way that brings more voices to the table without trying to revise all existing history.

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