A Revolution for our Time

In The Second American Revolution, Gregory Downs makes an important argument for the U.S. Civil War as part of a revolutionary wave in the North Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico that remade the United States republic by casting aside its constitutional norms. This is an admirably sweeping thesis that draws on longstanding traditions of American historiography as well as more recent academic interest in the international dimensions of the Civil War. Adapted from lectures delivered in 2016, this book is a brilliant example of what fresh thinking about familiar narratives can accomplish.

To define the Civil War as a revolution, Downs rejects an older understanding of true revolutions as transformations of society and political thought brought about by an ideological vanguard. Viewed through this lens, only a few revolutions (France, Russia, China) fit the bill, whereas innumerable others, including recent ones in the Arab World and the former Soviet Union, only bore the name, not the form. More expansive definitions of the term emphasize revolutionary situations created by crises of divided sovereignty that force ordinary people to take extraordinary measures, often aimed at restoring order, that then lead to far-reaching changes. In addition, revolutions are inherently international because their leaders must necessarily pursue changes to their nation's standing abroad as well as at home. Thus revolutions often occur in waves that cross international borders.

Using this guide, Downs's first chapter explains Civil War-era Republicans as reluctant revolutionaries whose success within normal political channels—the election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency in 1860—provoked a crisis, South Carolina's secession from the Union. That crisis created "competing governments claiming sovereignty over the same ground" (p. 21). Thrust into this revolutionary situation, the Lincoln administration had to resort to extraordinary means to suppress the rebellion. Those actions included suspending the writ of habeas corpus; liberating slaves through confiscation acts and an executive proclamation; passing transformative laws on railroads and western land settlement; and then securing freedom, equal rights, and Black male suffrage through amendments to the Constitution and using the army to enforce them. These measures happened either through executive action or congressional majorities that originally excluded the seceded states, then included some but only under military rule admitted to the Union by the same rump Congress. These actions form Downs's "bloody constitutionalism" theory of Civil-War-era Republicans. Their stated aim was to uphold the old Union and its institutions, but they used revolutionary means to do so and completely transformed the legal and political order that they promised to preserve.

The book's second chapter shifts focus to an international revolutionary wave that "spread from Cuba and Spain to the United States in the 1850s" (p. 56). To make this case, Downs challenges the growing body of scholarship on the power of slaveholding planters in American foreign policy. Downs sees the settlement of the Mexican American War in 1848 as slaveholders' last major victory. A new period in which antislavery imperialists held an edge began with the Compromise of 1850, which gave free states a numerical majority in the U.S. Senate and bought them time to build power.

The tendency to highlight the initiatives of proslavery expansionists has not only obscured the strength of antislavery imperialism in the United States, but also the dynamism of Cuba's independence movement of the early 1850s, which is often treated in U.S. historiography as a creature of the South's political ambitions. Cuban exiles in New York City drew allies from the Young America wing of the Democratic Party, which, like the exiles, cared more about freeing Cuba from Spanish control than about preserving slavery on the island. Just as proslavery imperialists saw an opportunity in Cuba, their opponents added its future to their case against extending slavery to the Kansas territory. In the process of advocating for freedom in Spain's colonies, antislavery...