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

2018; Southern Historical Association; Volume: 84; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/soh.2018.0273

2325-6893

Gary Helm Darden,

Cuban History and Society

Reviewed by: American Civil Wars: The United States, Latin America, Europe, and the Crisis of the 1860s ed. by Don H. Doyle Gary Helm Darden American Civil Wars: The United States, Latin America, Europe, and the Crisis of the 1860s. Edited by Don H. Doyle. Civil War America. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. xii, 259. Paper, $27.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-3109-7; cloth, $85.00, ISBN 978-1-4694-3108-0.) It is well recognized that the U.S. Civil War was the most violent episode in ending African slavery in the Americas, especially since J. David Hacker's 2011 article in Civil War History revised the death toll to 750,000, the most lethal conflict in the Western world between the Napoleonic Wars and World War I. That the U.S. Civil War was, furthermore, the hinge on which republican institutions would stand or fall in the Western Hemisphere's most powerful nation is indeed enshrined in President Abraham Lincoln's fabled 1863 Gettysburg Address. Yet in American Civil Wars: The United States, Latin America, Europe, and the Crisis of the 1860s, Don H. Doyle edits an admirable volume with eleven essays by an equal number of scholars that casts a welcome and much broader global and comparative net on the topic of slavery's end and the survival of republican institutions. The volume engages the perspectives of Latin America and Europe in what is presented in its title as a series of interlocking "American Civil Wars." These layered conflict points, whose net results were determined by internal civil wars, European invasions, and multiple emancipations, engage several themes that Doyle ties to the fate of republics, empires, and colonies. "The crisis of the 1860s was one of the critical turning points in modern world history," asserts Doyle as the collection's core thesis; "It opened with what threatened to become a major reversal in the progress of the international antislavery movement and a mortal blow to the beleaguered republican experiment" (p. 14). Doyle's introduction includes a very useful graph to visualize these global linkages, which could enhance class discussion. But this volume is not the first attempt to pull back the lens on the U.S. Civil War as part of much larger global themes. A comparative view of the U.S. Civil War was handled most deftly and rather magisterially by Amanda Foreman's highly acclaimed A World on Fire: An Epic History of Two Nations Divided (London, 2010). Yet Doyle's volume does not diminish the role of the U.S. Civil War or Britain's pressing fate to its outcome—quite the contrary—but rather places this conflict in the much larger picture that broadly engages both Western Europe and Latin America. The volume's range includes the war's impact on abolition movements in Cuba and Brazil, in two chapters, while six other chapters consider more broadly the argument against the still-fragile [End Page 999] republican institutions in the Americas, institutions still threatened by the brewing imperial ambitions for the region in Britain, France, and Spain. Much as the Confederate armed rebellion tested the survival of democracy in the United States, the role of armed force weighed heavily on republican institutions in Latin America, as Hilda Sabato argues persuasively in chapter 9. The French intervention in Mexico, with the coronation by bayonet of Emperor Maximilian, and the "reintegration" of the Dominican Republic as a Spanish colony proved to be twin barrels of the same illiberal shotgun, or what Sabato calls the "monarchic drive," while "the devastating civil war in the United States, a country that had served as a model polity, shattered some of the certainties that had sustained the widespread republican convictions" in the Western Hemisphere (p. 185). European armed force to restore monarchical colonial authority in Latin America thus played as significant a role in the 1860s crises as Union armed force did to preserve democratic institutions against its proslavery Confederate foe. What is further argued in this volume is that a Confederate victory not only would have undermined republican institutions in North America but also would have invigorated the prewar colonial ambitions in the...