Reconstruction and Empire: The Legacies of Abolition and Union Victory for an Imperial Age ed. by David Prior

Abstract

Reviewed by: Reconstruction and Empire: The Legacies of Abolition and Union Victory for an Imperial Age ed. by David Prior Brian Matthew Jordan Reconstruction and Empire: The Legacies of Abolition and Union Victory for an Imperial Age. Edited by David Prior. Reconstructing America. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2022. Pp. xii, 348. Paper, $35.00, ISBN 978-0-8232-9865-5; cloth, $125.00, ISBN 978-0-8232-9864-8.) Scholars have often regarded Reconstruction and empire building as discrete phenomena. Seeking to remedy this peril of traditional periodization, [End Page 158] David Prior has collected eleven penetrating essays that reveal how “developments stemming from Union victory and abolition anticipated, shaded into, and intersected with the geopolitical rise of the United States” (p. 13). Building connections between historiographies, deftly tracing intellectual lineages, and extending a growing body of scholarship that has situated Reconstruction in a global context, this welcome volume demonstrates how domestic politics and foreign policies were entwined in postbellum America—all while casting into sharp relief the U.S. Civil War’s consequences. “Union victory and abolition,” Prior contends in his thoughtful introduction, “contoured the rise of the United States as a regional hegemon with an overseas empire” (pp. 9–10). The essays—many of which use biography to develop their claims—are uniformly well written and tightly argued. However, several stand out for their interpretive punch. For instance, the first chapter, written by Andre M. Fleche, recalls Cuba’s struggle to achieve independence from Spain in the Ten Years’ War. By studying the participation of two U.S. Civil War veterans in the conflict (one Union veteran and one former Confederate), Fleche not only reveals how “Reconstruction-era debates over race relations, slavery, and citizenship transcended U.S. borders,” but also clarifies “how much the Civil War reoriented American policy toward abolition in the hemisphere” (pp. 47, 29). Gregg French demonstrates how the “threat of racial, political, and sectional instability in the United States” charged the pitched debates over President Ulysses S. Grant’s attempt to annex the Dominican Republic (p. 94). Lawrence B. Glickman convincingly argues that James Redpath’s “emerging anti-imperialism” is a key to making sense of the radical abolitionist’s postbellum sympathy for Jefferson Davis. Redpath’s work in Ireland both “undermined his commitment to Black freedom” and informed his “critique of Reconstruction” (p. 155). Recent scholars have inventoried how the Civil War continued to annex the lives of its participants. Centering the postwar lives of Oliver O. Howard, Julia Ward Howe, Lyman Abbott, and Clara Barton, Mark Elliott’s brilliant essay demonstrates still another way the Civil War generation toiled in the conflict’s shadow. Because many white northerners interpreted Union victory “as a moral triumph” over slavery and secession, the war promoted a unique sense of national mission that animated interventions abroad (p. 15). This “humanitarian nationalism” at once affirmed American exceptionalism and justified military occupation (p. 161). While Julia F. Irwin and other historians have dated this “nationalist construct” to the Great War, Elliott suggests that “it was already influential in the 1890s, and its foundations were laid in the 1860s” (p. 163). Elliott’s conclusions are important, for they invite us to rethink the “humanitarian rationales of the early twentieth century” as something more than “disingenuous covers for colonial ambitions” (p. 183). In a chapter that harmonizes nicely with Elliott’s piece, David V. Holtby finds that the Grand Army of the Republic, the largest fraternal order for U.S. Civil War veterans, “rallied to imperialism largely because its members equated martial valor with national greatness” (p. 191). Precisely because empire entailed military occupation, many white southerners—still recalling Reconstruction as “bayonet misrule”—subscribed to anti-imperialism. Yet as DJ Polite’s essay reminds, “Southern white anti-imperialism was often conditional” (p. 216). Many white southerners were willing to erect an empire, but [End Page 159] they demanded it “extend from a firm white supremacist political foundation at home” (p. 216). A short review can capture neither the full range of topics nor the many questions provoked by these essays. The book has very much to say about Cuba and the Caribbean, though comparatively little to say about...