Kevin Phillips, The Cousins' Wars: Religion, Politics, and the Triumph of Anglo-America (New York: Basic Books, 1999).

SYNOPSIS:

Phillips takes a broad perspective on ethnicity, politics, and culture in the American Revolution, War of 1812, and American Civil War. He calls these the "cousins' wars" because he sees them as three related events in the English-Atlantic world, all of them related by lineage to England's own Civil War and the religious strife that accompanied it. Phillips' analysis of the Civil War's causes focuses on geography and agriculture. He argues that the divisions between North and South were primarily religious--Puritan Yankee New England and Episcopalian, Methodist South. The great border region was divided by history and settlement, a region of mixed loyalties where in 1860-61 the decisive loyalities were worked out. Phillips' account of the war's origins is explicitly cultural, and his account of political expression follows in this vein.

EXCERPT:

"Pennsylvania was the northern 'parent'--and Virginia the southern one--that together nurtured much of the Border." (446)

"In looking at the Upper South and Border and what the war meant for these regions, it is hard to avoid the sweeping assessment: that the U.S. Civil War was another great watershed in which the victory went to a zealous, skilled, and destiny-minded minority--the principal cadre of which just happened to be descended from the intense and grasping Puritan and Yankee minority that had also been the largest single force in the two previous cousins' wars. The defeat of southern culture, agriculture, and politics did not end at the borders of the former Confederacy." (456)

"Religious denominationalism, as much as economics or ideology, drove the great transatlantic political currents that ultimately ended slavery, maintained the United States as one nation, and inhibited the British government, despite its huge textile industry, from aiding the embattled cotton states. . . Those great currents, the two nations' Protestant belief systems, were surprisingly similar. In the United States, especially in Greater New England, the Second Great Awakening bred an evangelical politics of social and moral intervention that coalesced into the Republican Party and underpinned the election of Abraham Lincoln, for all that he wisely softened the neo-Puritan message. . . . In both nations, nineteenth-century electoral politics still strongly reflected religion and denominationalism." (390)

RELATIONSHIP:

We find Phillips' vigorously argued book to be useful in its depiction of the border as a crucial area in the sectional crisis. On the other hand, we do not follow his emphasis on cultural continuities from Britain as a crucial part of the American Civil War. The differences we see along the border were not cultural but material and political.

"Although Franklin's wealth was concentrated in its rural agricultural commodities, the county was a commercial hub with numerous businesses and shops more densely concentrated than its Southern counterpart."