During the Civil War, European newspapers and journals regularly debated what the conflict meant for America’s political future. Many of those hostile to the Union initially believed that the destruction of America’s republican “experiment” was only a matter of time. Attacking what they saw as a government fighting an immoral war under the sway of popular prejudices, European writers often pictured the Union army as a mercenary force made up largely of recent immigrants and ignorant laborers. According to these foreign detractors, the conflict revealed the bankruptcy of the North’s political system. Some European commentators would later come to look upon the Union with more favor. But this hardly mollified Northerners. As they shaped their interpretations of the war, they did so not in isolation but in response to what they perceived to be an ongoing hostility toward their war effort and the political ff system it safeguarded. Although historians have explored European attitudes toward the war and the Union and Confederate governments’ foreign policies, little attention has been paid to the way a transatlantic discourse shaped domestic representations of the conflict, much less how such representations might have affected the conduct of the war or shaped postwar policies. One ff reason is that despite recent calls for a more internationalized approach to the study of US history, the majority of Civil War historians remain resolutely focused on domestic events, particularly those occurring on the battlefield. 1