When the Guns Roared: World Aspects of the American Civil War (review)

302CIVIL WAR HISTORY economic policy. The economic fights of the period were never simple ones between the people on one side and the "interests" on the other, as they are made out to be here. The issues resulted in a much more complex conflict between groups whose membership cut across class and regional lines. Nor does Professor Bradley seem aware of the newer general interpretations of the Reconstruction era to be found in the works of John Hope Franklin, Bernard Weisberger, James McPherson, John and Lawanda Cox, and Eric McKitrick. To him Thad Steven remains "cynical" and "this sinister figure in American history," triumphing with his policy of "thorough" Reconstruction over the "prostrate South." The simplistic pro-southern and anti-Negro attitudes of Claude Bowers and George Fort Milton with respect to Reconstruction have little place in a book published in the 1960's. One is finally left with the sad realization that we probably learn less about the forces and conflicts in the Pennsylvania Republican party in the sixties from Bradley's more than four hundred pages than we can from David Montgomery's brief 1961 article in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography. And this is too bad. We need systematic studies of local and regional politics during the crucial years between Sumter and Redemption. But such studies should be sophisticated analyses of complex political phenomena as well as free from the biases of the era itself and of the myths since created about those years. Joel H. Stlbey University of Maryland When the Guns Roared: World Aspects of the American Civil War. By Philip Van Doren Stern. (Garden City: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1965. Pp. xxii, 385. $6.50.) This talented author of six books on the Civil War, editor of nine more, has now written a volume about what he describes as the world aspects of the war. He has not followed the patterns of his predecessors. Unlike E. D. Adams, he is neither writing mainly on Great Britain and the war nor—like Pratt and Jordan—about Europe. Unlike Monaghan he does not keep the focus on Lincoln. Unlike the Owsleys he goes far beyond economic matters. He has sought to bring together the international ramifications of the conflict, as those ramifications spread out literally around the world—not merely to Britain or France but to Austria and Russia and even Japan. He has sought also to relate stories of Confederate and Union intrigue, the covert as well as overt acts. He considers public opinion. Withal he tries to hold before the reader the progress of arms in America. Stern has looked for materials abroad. He admits that the papers of Thomas H. Dudley, the enterprising Union consul in Liverpool, proved more interesting than what he found in Europe, that he could fight the war easier in the splendor of the Huntington Library in California than to journey about England, from Public Record Office and the British Museum to the National Maritime Museum and other places. But he went to the Eng- BOOK REVIEWS303 Iish sources, and also visited the Archives Nationales in France, the municipal library in Bordeaux; and in Denmark the Royal Naval Museum and the-Society for Naval History. One can quarrel with some things about the book, such as the occasionally kaleidoscopic organization: the author shakes the glass too quickly, Japan to France to England to Austria. It is possible to see here and there a flipping of note cards, material coining off the cards right onto the pages. Once in a while one senses casual writing, a willingness of this Old Civil War Hand to shove the cards aside and let 'er roll, trusting to memory for event and explanation. Stern plays with some of the old bones rattled by a dozen writers since Ephraim Adams dug them out of the British depositories. The book's virtue is to put together its massive material in readable form, and offer the speculations and judgments of a well-read and reliable student of the war. Stern has been into this material for years, has read deeply in the literature. To arrange the pieces of his narrative is for him almost second...

Topic: American Constitutional Law and Politics
Subfield: Political Science and International Relations
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences