Review of America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation by David Goldfield

Causes, conduct, and the aftermath of the defining American crisis

I have some close, much-loved relatives in the South. Way before the advent of Trump, we had strongly divergent points of view. As a child, their father’s mix of radical libertarianism and open racism often shocked me; his religion made him impregnable. He vehemently denied that the Civil War was about slavery. In his view, it was about states’ rights a…