WARFARE IN NORTH AMERICA AND EUROPE, 1861-71

With these words, the conservative Prussian Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke and the left-wing military analyst Friedrich Engels, clearly two very different characters, summed up their impressions of the German Wars of Unification and of the American Civil War, respectively. They were both talking of wars that had taken place in the same decade (1861 to 1871) but on two different continents, for very different reasons, and apparently under very different circumstances. Yet, both men used the same term - people's war - to characterize these military conflicts. We may therefore ask to what extent were there structural similarities between the German Wars of Unification and the American Civil War. Never mind the large differences between these wars; there should have been similarities if such otherwise opposing personalities such as Moltke and Engels looked at them in the same way.

It is certainly true that the war in North America was a civil war caused by the break-up of a nation, whereas the Franco-Prussian War was fought between two more or less clearly distinct nations. To compare these two conflicts is therefore a problematic task.