"John Wilkes Booth fired his fatal shot on the evening of April 14, 1865, and as the news reached nearly every corner of the globe, President Abraham Lincoln lay dying. Pervasive sympathy for America-and the martyred Lincoln-provoked restless agitation for democratic reform on both sides of the Atlantic. While most readers are familiar with Reconstruction as a deeply contested domestic struggle, Viva Lincoln: The Legacy of the Civil War and the New Birth of Freedom Abroad by historian Don H. Doyle explains how the Union victory helped drive European imperialism from the Americas, bring slavery to an end in Latin America, and spark a wave of democratic reforms in Europe. The 1860s proved to be a crucial decade in the history of democracy. While Reconstruction reforms were implemented to establish the American South on firm republican principles; internationally, a contagious flurry of democratic reforms and revolutions in Britain, Spain, France, and Italy made democracy the wave of the future. However, bythe end of the nineteenth century, Doyle argues, the United States had forsaken the main achievements of Reconstruction as new theorists and politicians reconciled democratic principles and white supremacy in the new Jim Crow era. The United States, oncea model of democratic reform, became a model for mass segregation, racialized disenfranchisement, and immigration restriction. Grounded in extensive diplomatic correspondence, US and foreign legislative debates, international newspapers, and hundreds of speeches, memoirs, biographies, contemporary books, and pamphlets, Viva Lincoln will be the first general-interest global history of Reconstruction from Lincoln's assassination to Jim Crow"--
A sweeping history of how Union victory in the American Civil War inspired democratic reforms, revolutions, and emancipation movements in Europe and the Americas
The Age of Reconstruction looks beyond post–Civil War America to tell the story of how Union victory and Lincoln’s assassination set off a dramatic international reaction that drove European empires out of the Americas, hastened the end of slavery in Latin America, and ignited a host of democratic reforms in Europe.
In this international history of Reconstruction, Don Doyle chronicles the world events inspired by the Civil War. Between 1865 and 1870, France withdrew from Mexico, Russia sold Alaska to the United States, and Britain proclaimed the new state of Canada. British workers demanded more voting rights, Spain toppled Queen Isabella II and ended slavery in its Caribbean colonies, Cubans rose against Spanish rule, France overthrew Napoleon III, and the kingdom of Pope Pius IX fell before the Italian Risorgimento. Some European liberals, including Victor Hugo and Giuseppe Mazzini, even called for a “United States of Europe.” Yet for all its achievements and optimism, this “new birth of freedom” was short-lived. By the 1890s, Reconstruction had been undone in the United States and abroad and America had become an exclusionary democracy based on white supremacy—and a very different kind of model to the world.
At home and abroad, America’s Reconstruction was, as W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, “the greatest and most important step toward world democracy of all men of all races ever taken in the modern world.” The Age of Reconstruction is a bracing history of a remarkable period when democracy, having survived the great test of the Civil War, was ascendant around the Atlantic world.
