Written by leading historians of the mid–nineteenth century United States, this book focuses on the continental dimensions of the U.S. Civil War. It joins a growing body of scholarship that seeks to understand the place of America’s mid-nineteenth-century crisis in the broader sweep of world history. However, unlike other studies that have pursued the Civil War’s connections with Europe and the Caribbean, this volume focuses on North America, particularly Mexico, British Canada, and sovereign indigenous states in the West.

As the United States went through its Civil War and Reconstruction, Mexico endured its own civil war and then waged a four-year campaign to expel a French-imposed monarch. Meanwhile, Britain’s North American colonies were in complex and contested negotiations that culminated in confederation in 1867. In the West, indigenous nations faced an onslaught of settlers and soldiers seeking to conquer their lands for the United States. Yet despite this synchronicity, mainstream histories of the Civil War mostly ignore its connections to the political upheaval occurring elsewhere in North America.

By reading North America into the history of the Civil War, this volume shows how battles over sovereignty in neighboring states became enmeshed with the fratricidal conflict in the United States. Its contributors explore these entangled histories in studies ranging from African Americans fleeing U.S. slavery by emigrating to Mexico to Confederate privateers finding allies in Halifax, Nova Scotia. This continental perspective highlights the uncertainty of the period when the fate of old nations and possibilities for new ones were truly up for grabs.

Introduction: The United States Civil War Era and
Sovereignty on the North American Continent
Brian Schoen and Frank Towers | 1

1 Fugitive Slaves, Free Soil, and the Contest over Sovereignty
in the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands, 1821–1867
Alice L. Baumgartner | 19

2 Inveterate Imperialists: Contested Imperialisms, North American
History, and the Coming of the U.S. Civil War
John Craig Hammond | 36

3 Walker to Riel: State Consolidation on the Margins of Empire
Amy S. Greenberg | 65

4 Reform Wars, Royal Visits, and U.S. Views of Popular Sovereignty in 1860
Brian Schoen | 85

5 “The Pirates and Their Abettors in This Province”:
Sovereignty, Violence, and Confederate Operations in Britain’s Atlantic Colonies, 1863–1865
Beau Cleland | 119

6 “A Long-Cherished Plan”: Detroit and the U.S. Annexation of Canada
during the Nineteenth Century
John W. Quist | 152

7 From Memphis to Mexico: The U.S. Army’s Assertion of Sovereignty during Reconstruction
Andrew L. Slap | 174

8 “Hold the Fort”: Securing the Soldiers’ State in Nineteenth-Century America
Susan-Mary Grant | 189

Conclusion: Law and Order in Nineteenth-Century North America
Brian Schoen and Frank Towers | 221

Acknowledgments | 229

List of Contributors | 231

Index | 233