‘The Charter of its Birthright’: The Civil War and American Nationalism

. This article examines the role of warfare in the development of American nationalism, focusing in particular on the American Civil War (1861–5). The American response to warfare, and especially to the two major conflicts that created and consolidated the American nation ‐the Revolution and the Civil War ‐ is revealing in terms of how Americans went about the process of defining themselves as a nation. Evidence is offered here of how nineteenthcentury Americans used the American Revolution for both national and sectional definition; and how it in turn came to be supplanted by the Civil War as the positive act of American national construction. This article argues that the American response to the Civil War provides an opportunity for scholars to trace the development of the myths that are central to the construction of nationalism but that have, to date, only been examined in any depth in a European context. Specifically, it addresses the question of how and why a destructive, internecine Civil War is still regarded today as the ‘salvation drama’ of the American nation.