How Union victory in the American Civil War inspired democratic reforms, revolutions, and emancipation movements globally
In this international history of Reconstruction, Don Doyle chronicles the world events inspired by the Civil War. Between 1865 and 1870, France withdrew from Mexico, Russia sold Alaska to the US, and Britain proclaimed the new state of Canada. British workers demanded more voting rights, Spain toppled Queen Isabella II and ended slavery in its Caribbean colonies, Cubans rose against Spanish rule, France overthrew Napoleon III, and the kingdom of Pope Pius IX fell before the Italian Risorgimento. Some European liberals even called for a 'United States of Europe.' Yet for all its achievements and optimism, this 'new birth of freedom' was short-lived. By the 1890s, Reconstruction had been undone in the US and abroad and America had become an exclusionary democracy based on white supremacy-and a very different kind of model to the world.
At home and abroad, America's Reconstruction was, as W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, 'the greatest and most important step toward world democracy of all men of all races ever taken in the modern world.' The Age of Reconstruction is a bracing history of a remarkable period when democracy, having survived the great test of the Civil War, was ascendant around the Atlantic world.
American Civil Wars takes listeners beyond the battlefields and sectional divides of the U.S. Civil War to view the conflict from outside the national arena of the United States. Contributors position the American conflict squarely in the context of a wider transnational crisis across the Atlantic world, marked by a multitude of civil wars, European invasions and occupations, revolutionary independence movements, and slave uprisings-all taking place in the tumultuous decade of the 1860s. The multiple conflicts described in these essays illustrate how the United States' sectional strife was caught up in a larger, complex struggle in which nations and empires on both sides of the Atlantic vied for the control of the future. These struggles were all part of a vast web, connecting not just Washington and Richmond but also Mexico City, Havana, Santo Domingo, and Rio de Janeiro and-on the other side of the Atlantic-London, Paris, Madrid, and Rome. American Civil Wars creates new connections between the uprisings and civil wars in and outside of American borders and places the United States within a global context of other nations.
When Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address, he realized that the Civil War had taken on a wider significance—that in Europe and Latin America people were watching to see whether the democratic experiment in “government by the people” would “perish from the earth.”
In The Cause of All Nations, distinguished historian Don H. Doyle explains that the Civil War was more than an internal American conflict; it was a struggle that spanned the Atlantic Ocean. This book follows the agents of the North and South who went abroad to tell the world what they were fighting for, and the foreign politicians, journalists, and intellectuals who told America and the world what they thought this war was really about—or ought to be about. Foreigners looked upon the American contest as an epic battle in a grand historic struggle that would decide the fate of democracy as well as slavery for generations to come.
A bold account of the international dimensions of America’s defining conflict, The Cause of All Nations frames the Civil War as a crucial turning point in the global struggle over the future of democracy.
