Remaking North American Sovereignty: State Transformation in the 1860s ed. by Jewel L. Spangler and Frank Towers

Abstract

Reviewed by: Remaking North American Sovereignty: State Transformation in the 1860s ed. by Jewel L. Spangler and Frank Towers Alice L. Baumgartner (bio) Remaking North American Sovereignty: State Transformation in the 1860s. Edited by Jewel L. Spangler and Frank Towers. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020. Pp. 288. Cloth, $125.00; paper, $35.00.) The 1860s was a decade of constitutional crisis in North America. In 1861, eleven southern states seceded from the Union in defense of slavery. [End Page 429] As Union and Confederate soldiers fought the opening battles of the war, the French army invaded Mexico and installed an Austrian archduke as its emperor. In 1867, the same year that republican forces in Mexico executed the French-imposed emperor, Canadian provinces and territories entered into confederation, resulting in greater independence from Britain. By examining these constitutional crises in relation to one another, Remaking North American Sovereignty not only deepens our understanding of sovereignty and state formation in the 1860s, but also models several different methodological approaches to researching and writing transnational history. Remaking North American Sovereignty is divided into three parts. Part 1, “Making Nations,” examines how sovereignty was reshaped and redefined in the 1860s. Steven Hahn looks at the familiar history of the Civil War from the “inside out” and “the southside north” in order to interrogate our assumptions about the development of capitalism, the abolition of slavery, and the geography of the sectional crisis. Andrew Smith points out the hemispheric factors that helped to convince most Canadians to remain part of the British Empire: British military might promised to guard against threatened invasions from the United States at the same time that the U.S. Civil War and political instability in Latin America demonstrated the dangers of republicanism. Pablo Mijango y González takes up the question of why Mexico and the United States each experienced a “constitutional revolution,” while Canada underwent a more peaceful process of “constitutional gradualism.” Robert Bonner explores the visual vocabulary of sovereignty across North America in order to show how sovereignty was not only conceived but visualized in new ways in the 1860s. Part 2, “Indigenous Polities,” assesses how Native peoples shaped and responded to the constitutional crises in North America. Jane Dinwoodie asks how Native groups who had resisted removal responded to the Civil War, showing that some tribes, such as the Eastern Cherokee, fought for the Confederacy in order to secure their claim to their lands, while others, such as the Bayou Lacombe Choctaws, tried to protect their communities by retreating to remote, inaccessible terrain. Ryan Hall analyzes Blackfoot treaty-making to show both similarities and connections between state expansion in the United States and Canada. Marcela Terrazas y Basante studies how Indian raids shaped the construction of sovereignty at the national, state, and local levels in Mexico. Part 3, “The Complications of the Market,” looks at conceptions of sovereignty at a more granular level. Christopher Clark shows how the [End Page 430] expansion of freeholding, promoted by the distribution of homesteads and the allotment of tribal lands, extended and transformed national power in the United States. Benjamin H. Johnson compares Louis Riel and Juan Cortina to reexamine the consequences of greater national power in Mexico, Canada, and the United States. Mary P. Ryan takes up debates over landownership in the San Francisco Bay area to understand how different scales of authority—municipal, state, and federal—contest and, in the process, construct conceptions of sovereignty. These essays speak to one another in ways that enrich our understanding of state formation and transformation in the 1860s. One of the greatest ironies of Greater Reconstruction was, as Frank Towers writes in the introduction, “the simultaneous drive by President Abraham Lincoln to free slaves in the South and conquer indigenous states in the West” (8). The issue of sovereignty helps to resolve the apparent contradiction. As Steven Hahn explains, the constitutional crises of the nineteenth-century United States revolved around “the various challenges and obstacles to a national sovereignty, about competing sovereignties and their eventual defeats, whether they were slaveholding, Native American, Mormon, or some other” (25). Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in order to defeat the Confederate States of America. After...