Don H. Doyle.  American Civil Wars: The United States, Latin America,
Europe and the Crisis of the 1860s.  Chapel Hill  University of North
Carolina Press, 2017.  272 pp.  $90.00 (cloth), ISBN
978-1-4696-3108-0; $29.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-4696-3109-7.

Reviewed by Michael A. Hill (Department of History, University of
Kansas)
Published on H-Nationalism (November, 2020)
Commissioned by Evan C. Rothera

Innovative scholars within well-established historiographical fields
are pushing their fields to adapt to the growing interest in
comparative, transnational, and global history. American Civil Wars:
The United States, Latin America, and the Crisis of the 1860s, a
collection of eleven essays edited by esteemed US Civil War historian
Don Doyle, represents a bold effort to define the 1860s as a decade
of international revolution rather than simply the temporal setting
of the American Civil War. As is to be expected in collected
editions, the quality of essays is at times a little uneven, but
taken as a whole the book serves as an important reminder, especially
to United States specialists, that much more happened during the
1860s than the Civil War.

The first three essays, by Jay Sexton, Howard Jones, and Patrick J.
Kelly, internationalize the US Civil War. Sexton's essay argues that
Northerners interpreted Union victory as the culmination of the
American Revolution and that national consolidation accompanying the
victory not only strengthened the US national government, but in so
doing erased fears of European intervention in North America.[1] Even
so, writes Sexton, US projection of power following the Civil War
"proceeded in fits and starts," representing "one of the great
riddles of nineteenth-century U.S. history" (p. 26). Sexton also
locates Confederate defeat largely in the failure of Confederate
diplomacy rather than battlefield losses or home front subversion.
Jones delves even deeper into US and Confederate diplomatic
machinations, particularly efforts to influence British and French
responses to the war. Jones concludes that slavery played very little
role in the decision-making of European powers. The threat of an
actual war with the United States, and not slavery, is "the key to
understanding why London and Paris decided against intervention,"
concludes Jones (p. 51). Kelly addresses the failures of Confederate
diplomacy among Latin American countries. Confederate inconsistency
regarding questions of expansion and commitment to democracy, argues
Kelly, weakened Confederate hemispheric standing. In the end, any
"clout the South might enjoy, in fact, was contingent upon the
strength and influence of the United States" (p. 77).

These essays are followed by three describing European reaction to
the US Civil War. Richard Huzzey examines British responses. Like
Jones, Huzzey concludes that Britain avoided intervention in the
North American conflict out of a desire to avoid war with the Union.
The US Civil War served to expose Britain's weakening hold on its
remaining colonies in the Americas, especially Jamaica and Canada.
The 1860s, argues Huzzey, "confirmed and accelerated the waning
influence of a monarchical, European empire and the rising power of
the republican, American empire" (p. 100). Stève Sainlaude tackles
French reaction to the American Civil War, arguing that intrigue
between Napoleon III and his advisors hampered the French response to
the American Civil War.[2] The Mexican intervention, intended to
weaken both the Union and the Confederacy, backfired horribly, and
"instead of creating a balance of power in North America, it left the
United States more powerful than before" (p. 120). Christopher
Schmidt-Nowara investigates how Spanish officials interpreted the US
Civil War. Initially seen as an opportunity to reassert Spanish will
in the Americas, Schmidt-Nowara concludes that, instead, the conflict
served as "a dress rehearsal, a 'broken image,' for their empire's
own crisis of slavery and sovereignty" (p. 125). Not only did Spain
fail to regain lost territory while the North and South fought one
another, the war contributed to a growing abolitionist movement in
Spain which served to undermine the authority of the Spanish crown in
both Iberia and Cuba. 

The final five essays focus on Latin America during the 1860s.
Whereas the first six essays use the American Civil War as an
organizational device, the essays on Latin America tend to focus more
on specifically Latin American histories. Consequently, the US
conflict plays a far more peripheral role than in the first six
chapters. The authors of these essays importantly demonstrate that
the US Civil War occurred during a contentious period within the
entire Western Hemisphere, during which North American concerns,
while important, were far from central.

In the first Latin American essay, Anne Eller explores how the
beginning of the Civil War allowed Spain to recolonize the Dominican
Republic, seemingly in opposition to contemporaries' perceptions of
the forward march of civilization.[3] Spanish re-annexation failed,
but destabilized the Dominican Republic, leading to later annexation
proposals involving the United States. Most importantly, though,
according to Eller, Puerto Rican and Cuban rebels drew inspiration
from Dominican resistance to Spain, which led directly to
independence movements on those islands. Erika Pani then explores the
French intervention in Mexico, made possible by the US Civil War.
Whereas Sainlaude looks at French motivations for intervention, Pani
places French intervention in the context of the decades-long
struggle between Mexican Conservatives and Liberals. Conservatives
supported Maximilian, made emperor of Mexico by Napoleon III, because
they had long been fighting for a centralized Mexican monarchy.
Interestingly, Pani shows how liberal many of Maximilian's policies
were, including reformist economic and religious principles, and how,
in the wake of the republican victory, "an ideology of combat became
one of Mexico's most enduring unifying political myths" (p. 181).
Hilda Sabato describes the American Civil War as another example of
the conflicts pitting central and local authorities against one
another throughout the Western Hemisphere, especially in South
America. Sabato argues that conflicts such as the American Civil War
and the War of the Triple Alliance, during which Brazil, Argentina,
and Uruguay joined forces against Paraguay, helped consolidate the
power of nation-states by producing well-armed and trained
professional armies in places that had traditionally relied on
militias and national guards. Despite mythologies surrounding citizen
soldiers, the professional armies of the 1860s did much to
consolidate a "strong national state that would monopolize the use of
force, discipline the elites, and reshape the citizenry" (p. 198). 

The last two essays of the book look more closely at Latin America's
two largest slave societies--Cuba and Brazil. Matt Childs argues
that, although slavery survived the 1860s in Cuba, it was thrown into
crisis by the US Civil War. The war brought about the Lyons-Seward
Treaty of 1862, in which British and US forces joined together to put
an end to American participation in the Cuban slave trade. In 1865,
drawing inspiration from US abolitionists, the Spanish Abolitionist
Society formed and worked to abolish the transatlantic slave trade.
These circumstances contributed to the start of the Ten Years' War in
1868, during which thousands of Cuban slaves took up arms for reasons
of emancipation. "When the final abolition of Cuban slavery arrived
in 1886," writes Childs, "the crisis of the 1860s born out of the
U.S. Civil War most certainly began the process that resulted in the
destruction of Cuban slavery" (p. 218). In the book's last essay,
Rafael Marquese argues that prior to 1861, slavery in the US South
protected slavery in Brazil. Although the full abolition of slavery
in Brazil was not achieved until 1888, the end of slavery in the
United States led directly to the passage of a free-womb law in
Brazil in 1871. Also, claims Marquese, the world economy experienced
significant reorganization after the American Civil War and
significantly redefined the range of actions available to Brazilian
elites. While abolition in Brazil was a Brazilian decision, Marquese
concludes that without the US Civil War "it seems likely that the
institution would have continued into the twentieth century--and
perhaps beyond" (p. 240).

Readers looking for a book that places the US Civil War at the center
of the international story of the 1860s will find themselves
disappointed by American Civil Wars. This is not a critique, however.
The book seeks to redefine the 1860s as a global revolutionary
period; the Civil War was only one manifestation of what Don Doyle
calls a "transnational complex of upheavals that included multiple
civil wars, European invasions, separatist rebellions, independence
and unification struggles, slave uprisings, and slave emancipations"
(p. 1). If the impulse behind this project is correct, the 1860s
might be better understood as one of the most revolutionary decades
in history and should be included with discussions of similar
periods, such as 1848. While a collection of essays such as this one
cannot hope to make this point with a single forceful argument, the
sheer number of examples does lend weight to the argument and demands
that scholars take up the work proposed by the volume.

Notes

[1]. Most recently, Gregory Downs provided an interpretation of the
Civil War as a Second American Revolution rather than the culmination
of the American Revolution, with significant Cuban ties in The Second
American Revolution: The Civil War-Era Struggle over Cuba and the
Rebirth of the American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2019).

[2]. Sainlaude delves much deeper into this topic in his recently
translated book, France and the American Civil War, trans. Jessica
Edwards (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019).

[3]. Andrew J. Torget sheds light on a similar phenomenon in Texas
prior to US annexation in Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the
Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800-1850 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2015).

Citation: Michael A. Hill. Review of Doyle, Don H., _American Civil
Wars: The United States, Latin America, Europe and the Crisis of the
1860s_. H-Nationalism, H-Net Reviews. November, 2020.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55454

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