( Interesting to read synopsis of panoramic view of American civil War which encroached Mexico and Canada. This Civil War has not ended and is still raging in political arena. f.sheikh).
“Some excerpts; A mountain of historical studies testifies to enduring interest in the American Civil War, a conflict still politically relevant in a nation riven over how to remember it. Those doubting that there is anything fresh to say about the bloodiest event in the republic’s history should read Pulitzer Prize winner Alan Taylor’s brilliant, panoramic account of the conflict. Applying a wide continental lens, he explores this crux of United States history and how it shook neighbouring Mexico and Canada. In all three settings, liberals and social and political conservatives were involved in parallel struggles to build a modern nation. After a French invasion, the creation of a short-lived monarchy and a devastating civil war, the Liberal Party leader Benito Juárez returned to power in Mexico. Fearing the growing power and rapacity of the United States, meanwhile, Canadians navigated internal divisions to create a continental confederation. And in the United States, the pulsing heart and geographical centre of events, Abraham Lincoln’s Union forces subdued the reactionary and rebel slave power to achieve emancipation and the constitutional basis for a more liberal and democratic nation.”
“Panoramic in scope, Taylor’s book regularly shocks the reader with its descriptions of the brutality of warfare (‘arms shot off – legs shot off. Eyes shot out – brains shot out … everything shot to pieces and totally maimed for all after life,’ a Union surgeon grieved in the early stages of the war). Taylor concedes that Union and Confederate generals abided by a code of conduct that precluded total war against white civilians. But it did not extend to non-white peoples. To the horrors of battlefield carnage must be added Americans’ indiscriminate slaying of Indians and Mexicans, as well as Confederates’ murder of black troops in slaughter pens and rampaging whites’ violence against black civilians in the Union’s draft riots. The self-proclaimed ‘fiends from hell’, William Quantrill’s Raiders, threw victims, including a black baby, into burning buildings. In Mexico, frustrated and vengeful French troops played football with the heads of decapitated guerrilla prisoners. The victory of American liberals was scarcely cost-free. “