How did Americans imagine the Civil War before it happened? The
most anticipated event of the nineteenth century appeared in
novels, prophecies, dreams, diaries, speeches, and newspapers
decades before the first shots at Fort Sumter. People forecasted a
frontier filibuster, an economic clash between free and slave
labor, a race war, a revolution, a war for liberation, and
Armageddon. Reading their premonitions reveals how several factors,
including race, religion, age, gender, region, and class shaped
what people thought about the future and how they imagined it. Some
Americans pictured the future as an open, contested era that they
progressed toward and molded with their thoughts and actions.
Others saw the future as a closed, predetermined world that
approached them and sealed their fate. When the war began, these
opposing temporalities informed how Americans grasped and waged the
conflict. In this creative history, Jason Phillips explains how the
expectations of a host of characters-generals, politicians,
radicals, citizens, and slaves-affected how people understood the
unfolding drama and acted when the future became present. He
reconsiders the war's origins without looking at sources using
hindsight, that is, without considering what caused the cataclysm
and whether it was inevitable. As a result, Phillips dispels a
popular myth that all Americans thought the Civil War would be
short and glorious at the outset, a ninety-day affair full of fun
and adventure. Much more than rational power games played by
elites, the war was shaped by uncertainties and emotions and
darkened horizons that changed over time. Instead Looming Civil War
highlights how individuals approached an ominous future with
feelings, thoughts, and perspectives different from our
sensibilities and unconnected to our view of their world. Civil War
Americans had their own prospects to ponder and forge as they
discovered who they were and where life would lead them. The Civil
War changed more than America's future; it transformed how
Americans imagined the future-and how Americans have thought about
the future ever since.
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