June 7, 2024 10:46 am ET
Historians generally regard Reconstruction as an era whose aspirations, drama, and significance were confined to America alone. This perspective is understandable: In the decade following the Civil War, the U.S. underwent a dramatic departure from the prewar status quo, particularly in the South. This period included radical efforts to broaden rights, expand electoral participation, and emphasize equality in nearly all aspects of society and law.
In “The Age of Reconstruction,” Don Doyle, a history professor emeritus at the University of South Carolina, seeks to reveal a neglected aspect of Reconstruction—its revolutionary effects beyond America’s shores. Like a guidebook, Mr. Doyle surveys the international political landscape of the 1860s, moving from French-occupied Mexico to London’s bustling streets, from the vast serf-worked estates of czarist Russia to the sanctums of the Vatican, with many stops along the way. As he shows, citizens in various states and societies, inspired by events in America, demanded more representative government and the overthrow of aristocratic and monarchical rule.
Europeans and Latin Americans closely followed the Civil War. “The one event which knit us together more than any other was the American Civil War,” declared George Howell, the secretary of Britain’s Reform League. “For years, one test of a man’s Liberalism was—What was he on the American question?” Liberals in Europe, and not only in Britain, celebrated Abraham Lincoln as an icon of democratic self-rule and proclaimed the ill-paid workers in their own societies to be little better off than enslaved American blacks.
Meanwhile, conservatives rejoiced at the spectacle of the world’s only vibrant and stable democracy tearing itself apart in a fratricidal bloodbath, seeing it as evidence that republics were doomed to fail. With Americans distracted by war, European powers—with the notable exception of Russia—flouted the Monroe Doctrine, which had declared the Western Hemisphere off-limits to their ambitions. France installed a Habsburg princeling, Maximilian, as “emperor” of Mexico and backed him up with troops. Spain reoccupied the Dominican Republic. Although Britain was officially neutral during the Civil War, it allowed its shipbuilders to provide blockade runners for the Confederate navy. Papal authorities, defiant of the rising tide of Italian republicanism, disparaged Lincoln, tacitly recognized the Confederacy, and after the war harbored the Lincoln-assassination conspirator John Surratt.
The Union’s victory, followed by Lincoln’s martyrdom, awakened among long-quiescent republicans what Mr. Doyle calls “a contagious spirit of confidence and possibility,” and Reconstruction provided a practical example of democracy in action. From 1865 to 1877, the federal government, driven by Republican Radicals in Congress, extended full citizenship and civil rights to former slaves and sought to rebuild the defeated Confederate states on a foundation of full democracy, at least for men, both white and black.
After 1865, writes Mr. Doyle, foreign “liberals and radicals hailed America as the premonition of a democratic future for all modern nations.” John Stuart Mill wrote with surging hope to Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1867 that, in both Europe and the U.S., political crises had “shaken up and dislocated old prejudices.” By the end of the decade, the Latin American republics had almost everywhere rolled back the imperial advances made during the war, and on both sides of the Atlantic, liberals called for American-style freedoms. Prominent figures such as Victor Hugo and Giuseppe Mazzini even began to envision a “United States of Europe.”
In England, where over a third of members of Parliament were titled aristocrats, rallies attended by hundreds of thousands called for full manhood suffrage, a secret ballot, and a fairer allocation of parliamentary seats. In 1867, the government grudgingly capitulated, putting forward a reform bill that enfranchised almost a million new voters, doubling the electorate.
In 1868, Spanish reformers toppled the monarchy of Queen Isabella II and established a new, albeit short-lived, republican regime. In France, Napoleon III’s Second Empire collapsed two years later, following his humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, inaugurating the Third Republic. Just days later, Italian liberal forces captured Rome, ending the hegemony of the Vatican over much of the country. Even Russia embraced transformational change by elevating 20 million serfs to full citizenship, a process first announced in 1861. Mr. Doyle provocatively calls this Czar Alexander II’s program of “radical Reconstruction.”
In Britain and much of Europe, “democracy would grow within the husks of the old monarchical system,” as Mr. Doyle nicely puts it. There were exceptions. It would be decades before Russia took even hesitant steps toward substantive democratic reforms. And Mr. Doyle doesn’t suggest that Reconstruction was the sole cause of all these transformative events, but he argues persuasively that it energized diverse liberal movements in many other countries.
Moreover, the U.S. pursued a foreign policy designed to foster both the nation’s interests and a transnational republican future. Looming large in Mr. Doyle’s narrative is the deft politician William H. Seward. Prominent as a prewar abolitionist, Seward served as Lincoln’s chief wartime adviser and as secretary of state, continuing in that office during Andrew Johnson’s administration from 1865 to 1869.
Seward was a man of both long-term vision and diplomatic talent. He wanted above all, Mr. Doyle writes, to “drive European imperialism from North America, support independent liberal nations in their place, and foster the spread of republican institutions throughout the Americas.” Soon after the end of the Civil War, on Seward’s advice, troops were dispatched to the border in support of the republican forces of Mexican President Benito Juárez while Seward issued a blunt ultimatum to Napoleon III to cease his intervention. The chastened emperor complied, and the hapless Maximilian was overthrown and executed in June 1867.
Seward also invoked the Monroe Doctrine to scare the Spanish away from Santo Domingo and South America, where they had blockaded Peru on the pretext of collecting unpaid debts. Although Seward pursued a more amicable strategy in his purchase of Alaska from Russia for $7 million, also in 1867, his goal was consistent, says Mr. Doyle: to extend republican institutions by expelling yet another monarch from the continent.
Cuba taxed even Seward’s skills. A virtual cult of Lincoln had grown up among the island’s millions of still-enslaved blacks. In 1868, an insurrection broke out, in which Cuba’s enslaved and free blacks, with the support of some white allies, sought independence from Spain and an end to slavery. Its leaders hoped for support from the U.S., if not outright annexation. Seward declined to intervene, however, when too many white Americans recoiled at the prospect of absorbing millions more black and mixed-race citizens. Although the rebellion eventually failed, it helped to spell the end of slavery in Cuba.
Reconstruction in the former Confederate states, despite its initial success, eventually crumbled due to Ku Klux Klan terrorism, Northern political apathy, and the capture of Southern state governments by white supremacist “Redeemer” movements. Ironically, Reconstruction may have had more lasting success abroad, as Mr. Doyle vividly shows, by inspiring a generation of diverse and forward-looking leaders.