United States Reconstruction across the Americas ed. by William A. Link (review)

The outcome of the American Civil War extended citizenship and increased federal intervention in the U.S. South. American emancipation and the struggles of black people for freedom and justice were interconnected by dissimilar but knotted historical processes. This collection of essays addresses the entanglements between American Reconstruction and the social and political milieus developing in countries as diverse as Brazil, Mexico, and Jamaica. The contributors to United States Reconstruction across the Americas follow the pioneering works of W. E. B. Du Bois, Eric Foner, and Steven Hahn, who framed U.S. developments within an Atlantic perspective. Editor William A. Link contends that “Reconstruction, with all its implication for national self-identity, cannot be understood unless we extend our analysis beyond national borders” (p. 3).

In his chapter “The Legacies of the Second Slavery: The Cotton and Coffee Economies of the United States and Brazil during the Reconstruction Era, 1865–1904,” Rafael Marquese argues that the eradication of slavery in the American South affected Brazilian coffee planters’ behavior toward labor regulation. São Paulo landowners learned from the labor transition experience in the United States and were able to control the transition of their workforce from slave to free through the colonato, a system that preserved certain features of labor organization and agriculture management prevalent under the slave regime while using a free workforce. The colonato and the expansion of the railway system permitted greater labor exploitation in Brazil than the alternatives available to cotton planters in the former Confederacy, and paulista farmers maintained higher levels of profitability. In this way, former slaveholders during Brazil’s First Republic (1889–1930) were able to keep federal government support for their endeavors, whereas former Confederates lost influence over state action as a consequence of their military defeat. Radical Reconstruction had dramatic consequences for controlling the intensity and rhythm of the labor in the southern workforce.

Don H. Doyle analyzes Mexican-American relations during the French occupation of Mexico and the Maximilian empire. As the Civil War depleted American resources, U.S. influence in Latin America was temporarily weakened. Taking advantage of the temporary lapse in the Monroe Doctrine to forward France’s Grand Design, Napoleon III intervened in Mexico to install Maximilian of Austria as emperor. At the end of the Civil War, U.S. secretary of state William H. Seward formulated what the author denominates as a “new pro-republican iteration of the Monroe Doctrine,” emerging in support of Mexican republicans during the War of the Reform. This action drew attention to the hemispheric entanglements that characterized the 1860s as a turbulent decade of crisis. By abandoning direct intervention, Seward and President Andrew Johnson engaged in a struggle against both the French and the Confederate presence in Mexico, while simultaneously endorsing a new U.S. strategy to deal with Mexican nationalists. “During his eight years as secretary of state,” Doyle writes, “Seward continued to voice Whiggish confidence in the inevitable spread of republican ideals and ‘institutions’” (p. 48). Seward’s crusade discarded practices common to pre–Civil War supporters of manifest destiny, which had emphasized “conquest and acquisition of territory,” in favor of a softer approach to foreign affairs (p. 48). Through the lens of anti-imperialism, this move advanced the struggle against both French interventionists and Confederate exiles.

Edward B. Rugemer discusses the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica and reactions to it in different sectors of U.S. society. This chapter deals with entanglements in the public sphere that “allow historians to formulate an Atlantic history of slavery’s abolition that recognizes both the distinctions of political context and the cumulative dimensions of slavery’s demise” (p. 83). Taking as his point of departure Jürgen Habermas’s distinction between periods of “opinion formation” and “will formation,” Rugemer reveals how coverage of repression in Jamaica shaped public opinion in the United States in ways that reinforced...