Introduction

What is a revolution and why should we think of the U.S. Civil War Era as part of a revolutionary wave? The introduction lays out theories of revolutions and revolutionary changes and explores why the United States’ domestic transformation fits categories of a revolution because of its reliance on bloody constitutionalism, as well as its relation to a broader international revolutionary wave connecting Spain and Cuba and Mexico to the United States.

The World the Civil War Might Have Made

What type of revolutionary change did the U.S. Civil War have on the world? This chapter follows the impacts of the Civil War onto the world stage, focusing upon the simultaneous revolutions in Cuba and Spain. By tracing the relationship between the U.S. Civil War and republican, anti-slavery risings in both sites, the chapter examines the development of an international revolutionary movement. It also, however, traces the disappointments of those hopes in the simultaneous retreats of revolutionary change in the 1870s in all three sites, and in the related events in Mexico.

The Second American Republic

What made the U.S. Civil War a domestic revolution? This chapter examines the reliance upon military force and oddly constituted congresses to override judicial controls and create constitutional change meant to permanently remake the country’s economic and political base. The chapter narrates the reliance upon military rule and unusual forms to create the constitutional changes of emancipation, civil rights, and voting rights. Thus the chapter demonstrates that the U.S. Civil War did not merely restore a republic but created a new one.

A Finished Revolution

Where did the memory of this revolutionary change go? The afterword asks what happened to the revolutionary fervor after the 1870s. In Spain, the U.S., and Cuba, and Mexico, the period after the 1870s witnessed a rollback of earlier changes, a consolidation of power, and amnesia around earlier changes. Thus the afterword asks what happens to dissipate revolutionary change and obscure its meaning, and why Americans might need to access this revolutionary spirit today.

The Civil War the World Made

How did world events help create the Civil War? This chapter examines the impact of global revolutionary movements in shaping U.S. politics in the 1840s and 1850s crisis. Particularly it follows crises in Cuba and Spain over the survival of slavery and the resilience of imperial rule and follows Cuban exiles into U.S. politics to show their role in helping turn U.S. political debate toward expansion.