The Age of Reconstruction
How Lincoln’s New Birth of Freedom Remade the World
Don H. Doyle
In The Age of Reconstruction, Don Doyle looks beyond post–Civil War America to tell the story of how Union victory and Lincoln’s assassination set off a dramatic international reaction. It would drive European empires out of the Americas, hasten the end of slavery in Latin America, and ignite a host of democratic reforms in Europe.
An international history of Reconstruction, the book chronicles the world events inspired by the Civil War. Between 1865 and 1870, France withdrew from Mexico, Russia sold Alaska to the United States, 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, including Victor Hugo and Giuseppe Mazzini, 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 United States 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.
Forthcoming from Princeton University Press
Praise for The Age of Reconstruction
With this pathbreaking transnational history of Reconstruction and its impact on the Euro-American world, Don Doyle has provided us with a much-needed sequel to The Cause of All Nations, his acclaimed international history of the U.S. Civil War. By thoroughly investigating the myriad ideological and political links between the United States and a host of democratic movements, initiatives, and ideas in Europe and the Americas, The Age of Reconstructiondemonstrates that it is now impossible to think about the United States after Lincoln in isolation from the Euro-American context. —Enrico Dal Lago, University of Galway
By tracing the reverberations of Union victory and Reconstruction beyond the borders of the United States, The Age of Reconstruction shows how the convoluted efforts to put a shattered Union back together turned the United States into an instigator of freedom and the precursor of a more democratic world, if for a brief moment. —Erika Pani, El Colegio de México
In this gem of a book, Don Doyle uncovers the largely untold international history of American Reconstruction. Significantly, he reveals the worldwide struggle for democracy inaugurated by Lincoln and Reconstruction, which was overthrown at home and abroad by racist reaction and the quest for empire. At this fraught moment in U.S. and global history, this revelatory book and its lessons could not be timelier. —Manisha Sinha, author of The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860–1920