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A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War, by Amanda Foreman

It's called the American Civil War, but it was much more British than most people think.

A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War, by Amanda Foreman, Random House, 1008 pp.

When Amanda Foreman鈥檚 first book, 鈥淕eorgiana, Duchess of Devonshire,鈥 was published in 1998, the biography became an international bestseller and was adapted into a movie starring Keira Knightley and Ralph Fiennes.

Now, more than a decade later, comes A World on Fire, weighing in at a few pounds and nearly a thousand pages. It鈥檚 sprawling, but never boring. Once again, Foreman displays her exceptional gift for storytelling and for making history both fascinating and relevant.

Never mind how many other books have been written on the Civil War. Foreman offers her own enlightening perspective as an author born in London to an English mother and an American father. (She now lives in New York, but holds dual US and UK citizenship.) Her focus is the significant role that the British played in the war, and although it鈥檚 hardly a secret, it remains a neglected element in history books.

The Civil War is a quintessentially American event, a bloody, four-year battle that tore apart the nation and resulted in the deaths of more than 600,000 soldiers. But Foreman calls attention to the tens of thousands of Britons who served as soldiers, doctors, nurses, reporters, and more. 鈥淭hough united by language and a shared heritage, the Britons in America were nevertheless strangers who happened to find themselves, for a variety of reasons, in the midst of great events,鈥 she writes.

The impact on the British public was considerable 鈥 and deeply polarizing. The whole country 鈥渉ad divided over the merits of the Civil War and whether abolition, democracy, the Union, or the right to self-determination had been the real principle at stake,鈥 she writes, quoting a notable essayist who once explained that expressions such as 鈥淚 am a Northerner,鈥 and 鈥淚 am a Southerner,鈥 were 鈥渁s common on Englishmen鈥檚 lips as `I am a Liberal鈥 or `a Conservative.鈥 鈥

Interestingly, Foreman writes that one of the 鈥渄riving obsessions鈥 behind her book was puzzling out the unlikely allegiances that were stirred in Britain. For complicated reasons, many who deemed themselves 鈥渓iberal鈥 or 鈥減rogressive鈥 believed that the Confederacy held a moral advantage in demanding independence and felt aligned with them, rather than with the anti-slavery North. Some were unsure which side to take, or why secession was even an issue.

鈥淚 don鈥檛 mind your thinking me dense or ignorant,鈥 wrote the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell in a letter to Charles Eliot Norton, a future president of Harvard. 鈥淏ut I should have thought 鈥 that separating yourselves from the South was like getting rid of a diseased member.鈥

鈥淎 World on Fire鈥 brilliantly examines Anglo-American relations of the era, and the politics behind the Civil War, yet it also depicts devastating scenes of battle. The book is filled with first-person accounts, many of them from previously unpublished journals and letters.

鈥淚 was lying on my back,鈥 one solider at Antietam wrote, 鈥渨atching the shells explode and speculating as to how long I could hold up my finger before it would be shot off, for the very air seemed full of bullets.鈥 Another reported that 鈥渢he whole landscape for an instant turned slightly red.鈥

As Foreman writes, some British residents in the South were forced into 鈥渧olunteering鈥 for the war by being kidnapped, chained to wagons and dragged through towns, and hung upside down and repeatedly dunked in water.

The United States was viewed as hypocritical, having not supported Britain in any war, and ignoring 鈥渢he contradiction in demanding British aid once the situation was reversed.鈥 But 20 years after the war ended, in 1885, Anglo-American turmoil had subsided. Ulysses S. Grant wrote in his memoirs that 鈥England and the United States are natural allies, and should be the best of friends.鈥 (It鈥檚 a sentiment still held today, of course, though one that鈥檚 been sorely tested since September 11th and the war in Iraq.)

鈥淎 World on Fire鈥 is so expansive in its scope, and so well written, that to call it a masterpiece somehow doesn鈥檛 seem to do it justice. Foreman has boldly tackled one of the most familiar and important chapters in American history, yet she has brought the Civil War alive as if this story were being told for the first time.

Carmela Ciuraru is a Monitor contributor.

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