“The Cousins’ Wars: Religion, Politics, & the Triumph of Anglo-America”, by Kevin P. Philips

 

736 pages, Basic Books, ISBN-13: 978-0465013692

The Cousins’ Wars: Religion, Politics, & the Triumph of Anglo-America by Kevin P. Philips is…interesting, as he argues that the English Civil War (1642–1651), the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783) and the American Civil War (1861–1865) were all part of the same overarching (and very long) war. Roundheads vs Cavaliers, Merchants vs Nobles, Whigs vs Tories, North vs South…the designations may change but the opponents essentially remained the same. According to Phillips, the origins of these struggles lay in the geographic, religious and socioeconomic divisions in England – divisions that were transferred to the New World, where they continued to fester until not one, but two, further wars broke out and more blood was shed. Philips’ thesis, then, is that these cousins’ wars of Anglo-America (his term for the cultural, political and kinship axis between the United States and the United Kingdom), while seemingly very different from one another in terms of motivations and consequences, were in fact very similar in that the winners were all the same: namely, those who supported emerging republican (notice the small “r”) majorities across both the lands.

And just who were these winners? Why, low-church Protestants as opposed to High-Church Anglicans; republicans as opposed to monarchists; middle-class merchants and small industrialists as opposed to aristocrats and monopolists; economic market revolutionaries who favored the development of banks, tariffs and a strong central currency as opposed to economic traditionalists who favored manorial agriculture and its tools; and western expansionists as opposed to eastern landowners (Phillips’ definitions are flexible enough to include even Tidewater planters, like Thomas Jefferson, during the American Revolution). In this way, Phillips’ theme is a continuation of such early 20^th Century scholars like Woodrow Wilson (the worst American President ever, by the way) who saw American triumphs as a logical extension of worldwide British ascension, almost as if the newly-independent colonies of Britain had taken it upon themselves to continue turning yet more of the globe British pink.

As for me, however, I don’t know: it’s an interesting argument – cute, even – but rather too clever by half. The idea that the motivations of Roundheads and Cavaliers in the 17^th Century were the same as Abolitionists and Slaveholders in the 19^th is a stretch, to say the least. The motivations of differing classes in differing countries in differing centuries must, and did, change. But perhaps there is one motivation that unites all these wars, just not the one Philips thought of: best expressed by Sam Watkins, a Corporal in Company H of the 1^st Tennessee Infantry of the Confederate States of America, he said that the American Civil War was “a rich man’s war, but a poor man’s fight”. Aren’t they all.