The story is probably apocryphal that Helmuth von Moltke, the chief of the Prussian general staff, once characterized the American Civil War as an affair of “two armed mobs chasing each other around the country, from which nothing could be learned.” Such sentiments were nonetheless rife among Prussia's military leaders in the early 1860s; and the performance of the armies that these soldiers thereupon led against Denmark, Austria, and France only encouraged their belief that the wars waged almost simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic were not comparable phenomena. The present volume of essays leaves no doubt that the Prussian soldiers were mistaken and that historians can compare the German Wars of Unification and the American Civil War with insight and profit. Employing the idea of total war to frame this comparison has thrown light on both the differences and similarities in the conflicts. It has also, however, raised difficulties of its own.

As Carl N. Degler's essay (Chapter 3) makes clear, the simultaneity of these conflicts was not fortuitous. The wars on both sides of the Atlantic were instances of momentous civil strife, facets of the great mid-century political convulsions that Robert Binkley has characterized, in a wonderful but long neglected book, as the “crisis of the federated polity.” The wars sealed the consolidation of new forms of rule, which were more unitary and centralized than the German Confederation (Bund) had provided in central Europe or the antebellum constitution, at least as construed by Southern observers, had foreseen in the United States. The tensions that undermined these looser federations reflected in both cases painful adjustments that accompanied the transition to industrial capitalism.