The Second American Revolution: The Civil War–Era Struggle over Cuba and the Rebirth of the American Republic by Gregory P. Downs (review)

In the preface to this provocative book, Gregory Downs confesses he set out to take risks, and that he has done. The result is a genuine intervention in historical debates that for ages have remained confined to a nation-bound narrative sealed off from the fascinating world stage on which Civil War–era history played out.

Downs invites readers to see the American Civil War as a revolutionary event whose causes and consequences were linked to Cuba and Spain in ways few have imagined. He is dissatisfied with the way historians have “whitewashed” the conflict as a brothers’ war and celebrated the Union’s survival and the emancipation of four million enslaved as a self- congratulatory narrative of national success. The problem, Downs explains, is that “assumptions about continuity shape how people see the country and how scholars analyze its past. These assumptions constrain our political history and our political imagination” (15).

The book begins with a strong argument for the war as a violent revolution that, instead of preserving the Union, overthrew it. The old Constitution of the Founders, having proven inadequate to the challenge of slavery, was effectively replaced, not just amended. This marked the death of America’s First Republic and the birth of its Second Republic.

No sooner does his interpretation of revolutionary change settle in, however, than Downs insists the revolution failed for lack of nerve. Instead of a sweeping transformation to set America right, Republican leaders settled for a “reluctant, managerial revolution.” The author calls it “bloody constitutionalism,” a halfway revolution that sought to limit violence, return to peace and national unity, then “whitewash” its history as an optimistic narrative of national perseverance (6). There was “no greater example of this whitewashing than the Gettysburg Address,” in which Abraham Lincoln portrayed the war as a fulfillment of the nation’s founding ideals and the means to a “new birth of freedom.” The Civil War “was defanged long before it was completed,” Downs protests (51).

Chapter 2, “The Civil War the World Made,” decenters the familiar national focus on the causes of the war to locate its origins in Cuba. Downs wants to do for the Spanish Caribbean something like what Edward Rugemer did for the British Caribbean by linking turbulence in a neighboring slave regime to the heightened tensions inside the United States.¹ Although events in Cuba “seem a world away from the Civil War, the road from Santiago to Fort Sumter . . . reveals the political and ideological fractures in global affairs that turned isolated rebellions into interconnected revolutions, a general American crisis that disrupted the Gulf World and the surrounding Caribbean” (59). Cuba experienced nothing so dramatic as the Great Jamaican Slave Revolt of 1831–32 or Britain’s subsequent decision to abolish slavery, which served Rugemer’s case for the Caribbean origins of the war. As a site for southern imperialist ambitions, however, we see Cuba playing a crucial role in mounting sectional tensions within the United States.

In chapter 3, “The World the Civil War Might Have Made,” the author returns to Spain and Cuba to illustrate the failure of the U.S. Civil War to transform the world. Spanish liberals were elated by the U.S. victory in 1865. Men like Emilio Castelar, an ardent republican (and brilliant historian), admired America as a model Spain might emulate. The chance to do so came in September 1868, when a revolutionary cabal of generals and politicians drove Queen Isabella II into exile and set about building a new liberal state. At the same time, Cubans, fed up with Spanish exploitation, seized their chance to break with Spain. Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, a wealthy sugar planter imbued with revolutionary ideals, proclaimed independence in October 1868 and issued vague promises of freedom to slaves...