The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920 by Manisha Sinha published by Liveright Press (2024)
Manisha Sinha is the author of a groundbreaking study of the Abolitionist Movement in America, The Slave’s Cause (2016), so I looked forward to her study of Reconstruction that was released earlier this year. When I saw that the book was in the stores, even the title told something about the groundbreaking nature of this new work: The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920. American students were taught that Reconstruction was neatly structured between the end of the Civil War in April of 1865 and the “deal” that allowed Rutherford B. Hayes to be inaugurated in March of 1877. So claiming that Reconstruction began before anyone was killed in the Civil War and that elements of it lasted until after World War I is both astounding and more right than many students of history might suspect.
While this work tells the story of Reconstruction through a very modern 21st Century lens, it, unlike several other academic works on the subject, is accessible to the average educated reader. If you have been wanting to pick up a book on Reconstruction to understand modern voting laws, the disqualification of insurrectionaries from holding Federal offices, or the extension of the rights in the Bill of Rights to citizens facing discrimination by state-level actors, this is a good place for the history that protects everyone. The background that Professor Sinha offers shows the beneficial impact of the most disenfranchised citizens of the American Republic, former Black enslaved persons, working with political elites in Washington to craft legal and de jure protections that had never been seen before in world history.
In her introduction, Professor Sinha demonstrates the expansive nature of the narrative she relates. She takes in immigration, doubts about Northern capitalism, gender relations, labor unions, the self-organization of African Americans, and movements like anarchism, socialism, miscegenism, and feminism. Here is what the University of Connecticut historian writes about former-Confederate Albert Parsons, who would be executed by the State of Illinois, involvement in the fight for the 8 Hour Day:
Conservatives, however, designated the [Workingmen’s] party a “communist organization” and deemed the workers mere foreigners—German, Irish, and “half-savage Bohemians.” One of the speakers at such a gathering was Albert Parsons, a repentant onetime Confederate from Texas who had married a former slave, Lucy Parsons, a labor leader in her own right, and supported Reconstruction. Both had escaped racist terror in Texas and resettled in Chicago, their trajectory revealing the connections between the fight for democracy in the South and the North. As Parsons put it, “My enemies in the southern states consisted of those who oppressed the black slave. My enemies in the North are among those who would perpetuate the slavery of the wage workers.” Women activists like Lucy Parsons are central to the history of the Second American Republic. Reconstruction not only inaugurated the women’s suffrage movement in the United States, it also unleashed broad emancipatory goals for American women. While freedwomen like Amy Circuit sought to protect a “homegrown citizenship” against violent assaults in the postwar South, abolitionist feminists demanded the social and gendered reconstruction of American democracy. Histories of Reconstruction are riddled with simplistic racial dualisms of northern white teachers and black freedpeople. But relatively forgotten northern black abolitionist teachers like Ellen Garrison Jackson and Rebecca Primus left behind a record of their work with freedpeople, the racist abuse they suffered, and their efforts to expand the boundaries of American democracy in fighting for black and women’s rights simultaneously.
That one hundred word excerpt tells you how broad the book is in its scope!
Sinha says that the first act of Reconstruction came in 1860 when Abraham Lincoln was elected president as the first candidate to take on containing slavery and its last act was the passage of the constitutional authorization for women to vote. This may sound like a feel-good story of fundamental values winning out over the narrow self-interests of the white male-dominated slaveholding elite, but as Professor Sinha concludes, the story is one of the:
“great contest” for and against interracial democracy that played out not just in the South, but in the North and West and even beyond American shores. The main concern of Reconstruction was the plight of the formerly enslaved, but its fall affected other groups as well, from women and workers to immigrants and Native Americans. The defeat of black freedom was the defeat of American democracy.
Professor Sinha says that the “tragedy of Reconstruction was not that it failed but that it was destroyed and subverted,” first by former Confederates, and then by monied national power brokers using the easily mobilized bigotry of so many Americans in all sections of the country.
While The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic is not the last word on Reconstruction, it both asks a lot of questions about events that made race relations much less equal in 1920 than they had been in 1870, the effect of the reforms enacted in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War that were submerged for nearly seventy-five years but which became the basis for the Second Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s, and why Americans today with seemingly adequate educations rarely are even familiar with Reconstruction’s actual course or its seeming destruction. The volume is also a very good book for readers who want to learn more about the Reconstruction Era but are turned away by the dense academic language of Eric Foner’s classic
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