Reviewed by: United States Reconstruction across the Americas ed. by William A. Link Joseph A. Fry United States Reconstruction across the Americas. Edited by William A. Link. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2019. ISBN 978-0-8130-5641-8-6. 136 pp., cloth, $34.95. William A. Link, the editor of this initial volume in the Frontiers of American South series provides a lucid and informative introduction. He contends that a proper understanding of US Reconstruction requires an “analysis” that reaches “beyond national bounders” (3). Essays by Rafael Marquese, Don H. Doyle, and Edward B. Rugemer impressively realize this objective. Marquese focuses on the growth and demise of slavery and the labor systems that replaced it in the United States and Brazil. This national juxtaposition is not new, but he argues persuasively that, rather than being distinctly independent and different, developments in the two most important slave economies in the Western Hemisphere were interconnected and influenced one another. Marquese establishes the US–Brazil nexus in several informative ways. Prior to the American Civil War, this connection economically and politically reinforced Brazilian slavery. The consistently proslavery US government provided a reassuring ally for Brazilian slaveholders, and by the 1850s, the United States had become the principal market for coffee, Brazil’s primary slave-produced crop. Following the American war and the abolition of slavery in both the United States and Cuba, [End Page 64] Brazil’s isolated position in the Western Hemisphere contributed to its gradual ending of slavery by 1888. As this process unfolded, owners of Brazil’s coffee plantations continued to observe US developments, where sharecropping by both freed slaves and poor whites maintained and expanded cotton production. In contrast to the relatively decentralized form of management under sharecropping, Brazilian coffee planters developed the colonato system, a free-labor alternative that sustained “centralization of managerial decisions” while employing former slaves and Italian immigrant workers (34). Buttressing his theme of US–Brazil connections, Marquese notes that the burgeoning postwar US market was the primary consumer of both American cotton and Brazilian coffee and that the vast expansion of US grain production displaced the Italian agricultural workers who immigrated to Brazil. While Marquese emphasizes Brazilian observation of US developments, Rugemer focuses on US responses to the October 1865 rebellion of free blacks against government rule in Morant Bay, Jamaica. The rebellion derived from blacks’ systematic depravation following abolition in 1833. The rebels killed 22 people and sacked twenty plantations. British authorities responded by killing 85 and executing another 354. Rugemer lucidly explains the historical context for these explosive racial tensions by demonstrating how Jamaican blacks had received no land, no legal protections, and no political rights when freed in 1833. As the US war ended, black Jamaicans were overwhelmingly poor, illiterate, and unable to vote. Word of this rebellion reached the United States as policymakers debated the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the First Reconstruction Act of 1867. Did events in Jamaica portend developments in the American South? Responding to this question, US newspaper editors and public figures utilized the rebellion to buttress their positions. Those who sought to establish and safeguard the rights of black people cited the need to avoid the depravation suffered by freed slaves in Jamaica. Others were more concerned about the threat of black-on-white violence and emphasized the need to restrict black people’s rights and freedom. Both sides cited Morant Bay as a disaster to avoid, and this “intersection” of postemancipation events “in the Atlantic world” convincingly illustrates Rugemer’s contention that it is necessary to look beyond domestic influences and considerations when recounting US Reconstruction (107). Unlike Marquese and Rugemer, who focus on slavery and its aftermath, Doyle employs US foreign relations in the late 1860s as the vehicle for analyzing Reconstruction in global terms. He contends that US foreign policy was primarily defensive, sought to safeguard republicanism in the Western Hemisphere, and was strikingly successful, given the “massive withdrawal of European empires from the Americas” (49). From this perspective, Emperor Napoleon III’s failed attempt to impose a [End Page 65] French-sponsored monarchy in Mexico was the most serious European threat to US ideological and security interests and the...