Don Doyle’s new book The Age of Reconstruction opens with Europeans receiving the news that Abraham Lincoln has been assassinated by a Confederate cell at Ford’s Theater. While many conservatives in England, France, and Italy may have welcomed the news of the murder, the common people reacted with horror, sorrow, and a renewed commitment to the republicanism that Lincoln had come to embody. According to Doyle, “In death, Lincoln became the unimpeachable embodiment of government elected by the common people and the prophet of world democracy.” Where conservatives had expected the Civil War to tear down the democratic forms of America, or the assassination of Lincoln to unleash a holy terror inside the United States, the guarantees incorporated in the Constitution seemed even more secure by the summer of 1865 than they had five years earlier.
The United States had suffered through a great trial, but to the working and middle class people in Europe Lincoln had led a great revolution returning the New World country to its promise that it had offered the world in 1776. The victory over the Confederacy in 1865 “gave a sorely needed jolt of confidence to the democracy of Europe,” according to Doyle. He says that “The response to Lincoln’s death signaled a reveille that awakened people across the Atlantic world to the possibility of a new era for world democracy and what Victor Hugo called ‘universal brotherhood.'”
The news of Lincoln’s death spread to Canada where merchants reported that they sold out of black crepe for mourning. Weeks later it reached Latin America where the telegraph lines were still in their infancy. Wherever the news arrived, America’s loss was considered the world’s loss.
After the failed European Revolutions of 1848, many of the short-lived republican governments had been replaced by conservative and authoritarian regimes like that of Napoleon III in France which stood opposed to Democracy and the United States. As people were mourning Lincoln in open public manifestations, they were seen as challenging their rulers. So, when a crowd of thousands of Parisian students marched three miles to deliver an encomium of mourning to the U.S. ambassador on Lincoln, police waded into the crowd and arrested the mourners.
The political challenges set up by mourners in Europe, British North America, and Latin America were spontaneous but over the months that followed, United States diplomats and foreign policy leaders used foreign popular sentiments to promote democracy around the world. Doyle particularly focuses on William Seward, saying; “William Seward set out to make the American Continent safe for republicanism by driving out European imperialists, ending slavery, and fostering the spread of republican principles abroad.”
While we all know that French imperialism collapsed in Mexico after the Civil War and “Seward’s Folly” was the purchase of Alaska, Doyle gives us a good way of looking at these as connected phenomenon. Doyle writes that:
“The most tangible achievement of international Reconstruction was the withdrawal of European empires from the American Continent and the decolonization of British North America. Within days of one another, in the spring of 1867, France pulled its troops out of Mexico, Russia sold Alaska to the United States, Britain proclaimed the Dominion of Canada, an autonomous home-rule state, and Spain agreed to accept U.S. mediation in wars it had provoked with Peru and Chile. Spain had already vacated Santo Domingo, and in October 1868, Cuban rebels fed up with their Spanish rulers proclaimed independence. These European powers had many factors to calculate before deciding to withdraw, but America’s proven military prowess and powerful ideological appeal with the European people were foremost among them.”
Frankly, I had been brought up on Cornell Professor Walter LaFeber’s analysis of U.S. foreign policy which covers a later period when American colonialism was heralded by people like William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, so I wondered whether Seward was really making the world safe for democracy or whether he was trying to push out imperialist rivals to leave the spoils for the United States. Yet, the work of Seward and his successor Hamilton Fish was a quarter-century before the fin de siècle beginning of the expansion of the United States from a continental power to global hegemon.
Doyle presents a convincing case that that U.S. diplomacy saw the outpouring of public support after Lincoln’s death as a chance to mobilize the democratic elements of world society to create an international system that would support the United States while gaining human rights for people around the world.
After the outpouring of support in Europe after Lincoln’s death, George Marsh, U.S. minister to Italy, wrote “If we bear, as doubtless we shall, this hardest test of stability of our institutions, it will prove the severest blow that European despotism has ever received, and I trust we shall soon be in a position to show our bitterest enemies, the ecclesiastical and lay monarchies of [Europe], that their conduct towards us has been not only a crime, but, what they would more regret, a blunder.” Seward and his minions were intent on showing that Kings, Queens, Emperors. and the Pope had made a regrettable blunder in their behavior towards America.
Of course Seward had his own personal problems. Right before Lincoln’s assassination he had been confined to his room after he had been hurt in an accident and on the evening when Lincoln was shot, an assassin tried to tear his face apart with a knife. Still, he wanted to take the Monroe Doctrine against European interference in American affairs and transform it into an active policy to roll back European advances during the Civil War. This new version of the Monroe Doctrine gained ground not just among Republicans, but it also won over many Democrats. Andrew Johnson told the European rulers that the United States would not interfere in internal matters in Europe, but that those powers could not interfere in the Western Hemisphere.
While Seward and his agents were at their work, there was more and more attention given anti-imperialism in the public mind. Montgomery Blair, who left the Republican Party in 1865, became a leading spokesman for the Monroe Doctrine in his readopted Democratic Party. He blamed the “late rebellion” of the Southern states on the machinations of European empires. At the opposite end of the political spectrum, William Cullen Bryant, Radical Republican editor of the New York Post, held up Latin Americans resisting France, Spain, and England as heroes for the American people. Seward’s goal of making Latin America into a zone of independent republican states was widely supported by the voters.
Doyle delves deeply into not only American sources, but those from the European empires and Latin American writings. While I have been studying this era of American history for twenty years, many of these sources I had not heard of before. Some were real revelations. Doyle’s history of the conflict in Mexico could be a whole book in itself, as could his retelling of the Cuban rebellion. The professor’s discussion of the United State’s conflict with Pius the IX and the Vatican which contributed to Italian reunification gave great detail to the policies behind the turning of the Pope into the “prisoner of the Vatican.”
Many students of the Civil War are familiar with United States diplomacy during the war and Napoleon III’s efforts to install Maximillian as emperor in Mexico, This work looks behind the causes of these foreign policy conflicts and shows their continuation after Appomattox when the United States was on the verge of becoming a World Power.
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