Jamaica’s Morant Bay Rebellion and the Making of Radical Reconstruction

In chapter 3, Edward Rugemer examines how Jamaica’s Morant Bay Rebellion was not only reflected tensions in postemancipation Atlantic societies but was also related to US Reconstruction and the ways in which its advocates envisioned life for freed slaves. The example of the Morant Bay Rebellion, Edward Rugemer argues, provided an example of the dangers of emancipation without political rights. American politicians did not have to look far in other postemancipation societies to be alarmed. Rugemer demonstrates that Radical Reconstruction—or how Congressional Republicans decided on intervention in the spring of 1867—reflected these fears.

The Legacies of the Second Slavery

Chapter 1 by Rafael Marquese compares the impact of the demise of slavery in the US and Brazil and the transformation of the coffee economies and cotton economies. Marquese connects American Reconstruction with larger global processes to explore the reorganization of the national state and American capitalism that took place in the Era of Globalization (1870–1914). He shows how “Second Slavery,” a concept articulated by Dale Tomich, provides a model for understanding both the integrated trajectory of slavery in Brazil and the United States and the ways the coffee plantationa and economies and the cotton plantations and economies of these nations interacted after emancipation.

Reconstruction and Anti-imperialism

In chapter 2, Don Doyle shows how, for Americans and Mexicans, the regime of Emperor Maximilian I represented an extension of the same concepts underlying the Confederacy. Not accidentally, when the war ended, the Maximilian regime harbored and even sponsored about 2,000 Confederate exiles in the northern part of the country. Through diplomacy and military pressure, Secretary of State William Seward eliminated both a possible Confederate revival and a continued French presence in Mexico. Rather than an aggressive act of expansion, argues Don Doyle, US policy reflected a spirit of republican camaraderie that coincided with Reconstruction and ended once Reconstruction ended.

Introduction

William Link introduces key contexts for the book, namely that the origins, onsets, and resolutions of the American Civil War are best understood as a global struggle. Not only was the creation of a new American nation a result of the war, but this creation also occurred in concert with a worldwide emergence of modern nationalism. By 1860, the American South contained the world’s largest and most valuable enslaved population, and the huge wealth in cotton, rice, sugar, and tobacco secured through slave labor is what drove exports, trade, and profit in American and global financial centers. This book suggests new ways to situate US Reconstruction as affecting and being affected by global events, and it argues that Reconstruction cannot be understood unless we extend our analysis beyond national borders.