Book Review: American Civil Wars: A Continental History, 1850-1873

American Civil Wars: A Continental History, 1850-1873. By Alan Taylor. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2024. Hardcover, 560 pp. $39.99.

Reviewed by Aaron Stoyack

Alan Taylor’s American Civil Wars: A Continental History, 1850-1873 is the fourth of a series of his books reframing United States history into a continental context. Its three predecessors, American Colonies, American Revolutions, and American Republics, bring this narrative from colonization to 1850. His studies span not only through time but also across borders, analyzing Mexican, Canadian, Caribbean, and Native American histories.

These works offer outstanding introductions, being readable by near-beginners. Even veteran students of North American history will find these titles useful as fresh narratives containing some of the most current scholarship. Taylor, a Pulitzer Prize winning colonial and early republic historian masterfully chronicles these important and formative periods. Still, it is impressive that he is able to synthesize many different eras into such well-regarded publications.

Given the breadth of his subject matter, Taylor relies primarily on secondary sources. This is no discredit to his research, as his notes and bibliography fill ninety-four pages. Taylor may not have discovered new earth-shattering revelations, but investigating and telling the history of the era via a continental framework is a novel and appreciated perspective.

American Civil Wars explains the triumphs and causalities of the conflicts across North America from 1850-1873, alongside biographical summaries for influential individuals. Events in the United States comprise roughly two-thirds of the text. The long chapters are subdivided by frequent headings that cycle through various nations and non-state actors.

Taylor touches on some underreported flashpoints of the Civil War, and synthesizes wartime experiences of seemingly every region in North America. Mercifully, for the Civil War scholar, he greatly abridges the well-known events in the Eastern Theater. Notably, he engages with the Civil War in the Southwest, Indian Territory, Utah, and on the Pacific coast. Apart from these, a student of the Civil War may find passages on battles and campaigns understandably slim.

Works of this scope sometimes run the risk of over-simplifying events to the point of offering incomplete or inaccurate factual information. For example, when discussing the Appomattox Campaign, Taylor writes, “Winning the race to Danville, Sheridan’s troops compelled Lee’s army to slog on farther westward toward Lynchburg, another railroad junction and base for supplies. On April 6 Sheridan attacked the Confederates at Sailor’s Creek, inflicting 1,700 casualties and taking 6,000 prisoners, among them eight generals.” (343) Sheridan’s troopers actually won the race to Burkeville Junction, a key railroad location that would allow Lee to follow the railroad to Danville, but they were far from the city itself. Sheridan attacked at Sailor’s Creek, but so did two infantry corps at roughly the same time, to whom much of the casualty figures, especially prisoners, are owed. This particular passage stood out as the only noticeable instance of imprecise information. Reviews from historians with different areas of expertise do not suggest any further inaccuracies.

Like the other works in the series, Taylor intended American Civil Wars to be a wide-ranging summary. As long as readers keep that in mind and do not view it as exhaustively authoritative on any single topic, a small shortcoming such as that mentioned above does not detract from its value as a new evaluation of the period’s North American conflicts through a continental lens.