Books: America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation, by David Goldfield

America Aflame

by Stephen M. Klugewicz

Whether or not the American Civil War might have been avoided has long been a subject of debate among historians. Some, like Allan Nevins and Charles and Mary Beard, saw the war as “an irrepressible conflict,” in the words of Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of State, William H. Seward, between two separate civilizations; others, like Avery Craven and James G. Randall, viewed the conflict as eminently avoidable but for, in Randall’s famous phrase, a “blundering generation” of politicians who simply failed to solve what was essentially a political problem.

David Goldfield, who describes himself as “anti-war, particularly the Civil War” , believes that the contest of arms between North and South could have been avoided but that the injection of evangelical Christianity—a “toxic factor”—into the political debate made compromise especially difficult. Goldfield is certainly not the first historian to see religion as a factor in the coming of the Civil War. He is one of the few, however, to argue that it exercised a greater influence on North than on the South.

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