The Civil War in the United States and the Crisis of Slavery in Brazil

With Cuban slavery on the path to extinction, the Empire of Brazil stood as the last nation sanctioning slavery. Rafael Marquese’s essay shows that Brazil’s political leaders were keenly aware of the implications of the Union’s emancipation policy, and its ultimate victory, for their own country. Brazilians also followed closely the post-emancipation conditions of the South and debated what lessons it held for Brazil. In 1871, alone in a world that had repudiated slavery, Brazil passed its own free-womb law, which spelled the eventual end of slavery in Brazil, and all the Americas.

Manifest Dominion

This chapter analyses how Britons responded to the febrile political and social crises of the Americas in the 1860s. Although the American Civil War created a particular challenge – and great confusion – to observers in the United Kingdom, that conflict was one of a wider range of concerns in balancing the demands of rival imperial and new post-colonial powers to preserve British influence. Considering opinions expressed travel writing and political commentary, the chapter argues that Britons struggled to balance competing interests – in economic affairs, in geopolitical strategy, in imperial authority, and in suppression of the slave trade – to maintain a manifestly uncertain dominion over the Americas. Touching on British concerns stretching from the Mosquito Coast to the Pacific north--west, the chapter suggests that crises in the Americas illuminated diverse priorities and anxieties.

The Cat’s-Paw

In the decades before the Civil War many Southerners argued that their slaveholding region should expand territorially beyond the boundaries of the United States into Latin America and the Caribbean, especially Cuba. Instead, during the Civil War the Confederacy renounced the capture any new territory in the Americas. Historians have neglected to explain fully the South’s failure to to fulfill its prewar ambitions to expand territorially in the New World after secession. Patrick J. Kelly argues that examining the Southern rebellion from the perspective of Mexico City, Havana, London and Paris reveals the stark geopolitical realities facing the Confederate nation in the New World. Instead of dominating the New World, the Southern rebellion served as a pawn, especially to the French Emperor Napoleon III, in hemispheric affairs. Ultimately, the Confederacy proved too weak internationally to to capture any new hemispheric territory or gain the foreign recognition it sought in order to operate as a sovereign state in the family of nations. In an ironic twist, instead of insuring the future of Southern slavery, secession marked the death knell of the South’s dream of creating an empire for slavery in the Western Hemisphere.

Dominican Civil War, Slavery, and Spanish Annexation, 1844–1865

One of Spain’s most perilous foreign adventures was the takeover of the Dominican Republic in March 1861.Anne Eller’s essay takes us to what will be less familiar territory for most readers. Dominican guerrilla fighters and their Haitian allies, many of them former slaves, forced Spain to leave in defeat. Their valiant struggle also inspired Cubans and Puerto Ricans to take up their own quest for independence from Spain.

The Civil War and U.S. World Power

Jay Sexton’s opening essay focuses on the role of the Civil War in the realization of U.S. national and global power in the nineteenth century. Though the Civil War gave evidence of the immense military and economic power of the United States, he shows, the projection of that power on the world stage also required foreign collaboration.

Introduction

For more than a century and a half, historians have told the story of America’s Civil War within a familiar nation-bound narrative. Most accounts center on the growing tensions between North and South over slavery, the clash of arms, the generals and political leaders on each side, the civilians at the home front, and the ordeal of Reconstruction. It is a quintessential American story about the nation’s defining crisis....

Juárez vs. Maximiliano

The French intervention in Mexico is far more familiar than the Dominican war, but it is too often reduced to a pat story of French intervention and Mexican victimhood. As Erika Pani demonstrates, the idea of restoring Mexico to monarchy had been nurtured by Mexican Conservatives for decades. Their dreams of monarchical stability revived with the advent of liberal reforms during the 1850s. Conservative designs for the restoration of order and progress in Mexico became possible to realize once the U.S. Civil War suddenly opened the way for Napoleon III and his abiding interest in Mexico as the site for his Grand Design to regenerate the Latin race in the American hemisphere.

Wrapping the World in Fire

Too often overlooked in the American Civil War was the crisis over foreign intervention and possible diplomatic recognition of the Confederacy as a sovereign nation. Outside observers watched events in America with great interest, some noting how the South’s struggle for independence could provide an example for their own aspirations for liberty. The controversy involved the central characters on the international scene: Abraham Lincoln and William Seward in Washington, Jefferson Davis in Richmond, Lord Palmerston and Lord John Russell in London, Napoleon III in Paris, and, perhaps a lesser known figure, the British secretary for war, George Cornewall Lewis. The actions considered in Britain and France included mediation, arbitration, and even a forceful intervention in the name of peace, but always based on self-interest. The chief opponent of intervention was Lewis, who warned that such action might lead to war with the United States. Had Britain recognized the South, France and other nations would probably have followed, perhaps permanently dividing the United States and crippling the republic for decades.

Cuba, the Atlantic Crisis of the 1860s, and the Road to Abolition

Matt D. Childs’s essay shows how two key external events set the stage for abolition in Cuba. The Lyons-Seward Treaty of 1862 between the United States and Britain banned participation by U.S. citizens in the Atlantic slave trade. An antislavery movement in Madrid pressured Spain to end its involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade as well, which meant an end to the replenishment of Cuba’s slave population. Then, in 1868, the revolutionary independence movement that began the Ten Years’ War promised freedom to slaves who joined the cause. In 1870, Spain countered with its own emancipation plan by promising freedom to all slaves who fought for Spain and to all children born to slave mothers.

Arms and Republican Politics in Spanish America

By the 1820s, Spanish America had become a republican area. While in Europe nineteenth century experiments in the republic had been short-lived, the post-colonial Spanish American nations in the making adopted republican forms of government that proved long-lasting. A crucial dimension of republicanism occupied centre stage in the following decades: the model of defence and the role of armed institutions in the polity. This chapter explores the main features of that model, which was based upon the figure of the citizen-in-arms and deeply enmeshed in the values and institutions of self-government. It focuses upon the organization of military forces; the role of the militia, the National Guard, and the professional armies in the polity; the use of force and the resort to revolutions as a regular feature of politics. Finally, it examines the impact of “the crisis of the 1860s” that initiated a long and tortuous process of change, which eventually brought about the dismantling of the initial system.