American Civil Wars: The United States, Latin America, Europe, and the Crisis of the 1860s ed. by Don H. Doyle (review)

In recent years, the “transnational turn” in American historiography has inspired a growing number of works that situate the Civil War in a global context. Few of these works, however, venture beyond Europe. To begin to remedy this deficiency, Don H. Doyle convened a conference at the University of South Carolina in 2014. Funded in large part by the National Endowment for the Humanities, it brought together a group of regional specialists in the history of the Americas. The published proceedings offer the reader a richer understanding of the hemispheric context in which the Civil War was fought.

Doyle introduces the volume by positing that the American Civil War was “part of a larger global crisis that seized the Atlantic world in the 1860s” (1). He identifies three common issues that New World nations and empires had to sort out during the mid-nineteenth century: the future of slavery, the future of republican government, and the problem of national sovereignty. Though Doyle carefully avoids implying a direct causal relationship between the Civil War and internal political developments in other countries, he maintains that the crisis of the American Union “often enabled ensuing events,” including European imperial ventures and the final abolition of slavery in the Americas (3).

The essays that follow respond in a variety of ways to Doyle’s concerns. Three of the chapters deal directly with the American Civil War. Jay Sexton wrestles with the impact that the war had on the trajectory of American imperial endeavors. He concedes that the war allowed the United States to emerge as the dominant power in the Western Hemisphere, but he argues that the country never developed a truly centralized imperial state. Howard Jones challenges the notion that the Emancipation Proclamation staved off outside intervention in the conflict; instead, he argues, European nations behaved according to diplomatic self-interest. Patrick J. Kelly explores the Confederacy’s relations with Mexico, both under the government of Benito Juárez and under the French puppet regime led by Emperor Maximilian. Kelly argues that the Confederacy’s obsequious support for a French empire in Mexico revealed its surprisingly weak diplomatic position in the Americas, especially given its prewar goal of expanding into the tropics. “Secession,” he concludes with irony, “marked the death knell of the slave South’s dream of creating an empire for slavery in the Western Hemisphere” (62).

Two essays provide a more detailed understanding of the French presence in Mexico. Stève Sainlaude explains that French emperor Napoleon III devised the venture as a way to block U.S. imperial ambitions, even if his advisers did not always agree with the means. Erika Pani explores the factors within Mexico that enabled the French project. Mexican conservatives, she argues, welcomed Maximilian because they had come to believe that monarchical forms of government would protect their interests better than republican ones.

Richard Huzzey shifts the focus to the British Empire, arguing that a series of crises called into question Britain’s “assumed power across the Americas” (82). Fear of the weak position of Canada prompted reforms that led to Canadian confederation, while suppression of an insurrection in Jamaica led to increased imperial involvement in the Caribbean. The Spanish Empire responded even more decisively to the Civil War, at least initially, as Christopher Schmidt-Nowara shows. The government in Madrid sought to take advantage of the crisis in the United States by moving to shore up the security of its colonies in Cuba and Puerto Rico. In 1861, the Spanish Empire reannexed the Dominican Republic, an episode that is narrated in its entirety in an essay by Anne Eller. Spain’s ventures, Schmidt-Nowara concludes, were met not with imperial glory but with existential crisis.

Indeed, Matt D. Childs argues that the outcome of the American Civil War fatally undermined...