Gregory P. Downs. The Second American Revolution: The Civil War-Era Struggle over Cuba and the Rebirth of the American Republic. The Steven and Janice Brose Lectures in the Civil War Era Series. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. 232 pp. $27.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4696-5273-3.
Reviewed by Eric Walls (Johnston Community College)
Published on H-Atlantic (October, 2021)
Commissioned by Bryan Rindfleisch (Marquette University)
American Civil War or Atlantic Revolution?
In the annals of American historiography, the American Civil War has long held a very special, arguably even sacred, place within the hearts and minds of both American historians and the general public. Much of the historiography, especially in the century or so that followed the conflict, took an insular, even microscopic, view of the war and its effects on the social and political landscape of the United States, casting it as a particularly American issue with causes and effects that only tacitly reached beyond the shores of the nation itself. Setting aside considerable and noteworthy scholarship regarding the Confederacy’s ill-fated attempt at “King Cotton Diplomacy” in luring Great Britain into the conflict on its behalf, most American scholars tended to downplay or ignore any international influences and connections and instead focused their analytical and interpretive lenses decidedly inward. Considering the vast ramifications of the conflict on the social, economic, and political institutions of the United States, as well as the continued relevance of how the Civil War is framed and remembered to the current sociopolitical moment, this insularity is to be at least somewhat expected, as historians and the American public continue to grapple with its meaning and legacy to the present and future of the nation.
Such an insular view, however, tends to obscure as much, if not more, than it reveals. With the advent of the Atlantic World analytical approach among scholars in the second half of the twentieth century, some began to question the traditional historiography on the subject of the American Civil War and projected their analytical view beyond the borders of the United States to contemplate the ways contemporaries outside the country interpreted and reacted to the events of the war and exactly what that meant for how the conflict fit within the broader paradigm of the nineteenth-century transition from the pre-industrial early modern to the industrial modern period. Despite such efforts, much of the popular history of the war, exemplified in media, such as television and movies, remains mired in the earlier, more insular paradigm. Similar to some recent scholars who seek to reframe the American Civil War in a more international, and specifically Atlantic, context, University of California professor and historian Gregory P. Downs, best known for his work on the Reconstruction period (After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War [2015]), presents a provocative salvo in the ongoing historiographical battle with The Second American Revolution: The Civil War Era Struggle over Cuba and the Rebirth of the American Republic. Downs’s work argues several separate but interrelated points, none of which are entirely original on their own (by the author’s own admission) but when presented together constitute a remarkably novel and potentially—pardon the pun—revolutionary interpretation of the causes and effects of the American Civil War.
Downs’s initial argument, as implied by the title of the work, is that the American Civil War can be seen in many ways as a second American revolution. This interpretation provides the foundational principle that structures his entire work. The heart of Downs’s argument is that the Reconstruction-era constitutional amendments—the Thirteenth through Fifteenth—fundamentally remade the nature of the Constitution itself and its relationship to government and the American people. Thus was born a second version of the American republic that marked a stark departure, if not a complete reset, from the first. Indeed, “The Second American Republic” is the title of the first chapter. Downs is not the first to couch the Civil War in such revolutionary terms and he gives credit to such historians as David Quigley, Jeffrey Rosen, Tom Donnelly, and, most notably, Eric Foner who have also viewed the conflict through such a lens, to varying degrees. Downs may be the first, however, to synthesize the previous work and, along with his own primary source investigation, contribute a cogent argument that such a revolutionary interpretation is not a product of the anachronistic historical rhetoric of modern scholars but was indeed the way many contemporaries—both Union and Confederate—interpreted the events at the time. He also argues that this more revolutionary interpretation was ultimately supplanted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in favor of a “myth of stability” as the two conflicting halves of the country sought to reconcile with one another and their understanding of the nation’s founding principles (p. 14). While this myth helped to reassure future generations of Americans “that political problems can be solved within normal boundaries” and “the Constitution provides reliable guardrails,” it has also obfuscated Americans from recognizing the revolutionary nature and consequences of the Civil War and the fragility of its founding document (p. 15).
Downs rests his argument for the revolutionary nature of the Civil War in two separate but related concepts: “bloody constitutionalism” and “white-washed revolution” (p. 22). “Bloody constitutionalism” refers to the willingness to use “force and irregular methods” outside of pre-subscribed legal boundaries, using “powers of necessity long enough to embed changes” permanently within the system (p. 31). Embedded within this concept of “bloody constitutionalism” is another concept Downs calls “revolutionary time.” “In revolutions,” argues Downs, “time accelerates. What may have taken generations becomes possible in months or days” as “normal politics and legal processes break down” and “due process dissolves in the face of outside, potentially violent authority” (p. 14). Downs essentially argues, quite convincingly, that the circumstances of the war and its aftermath—especially the uncertain legal grounds of succession and emancipation and the issues raised in the reformation of the republic after the war—invoked “revolutionary time” and provided the circumstances necessary for “bloody constitutionalists,” especially radical abolitionist Republicans, to push through fundamental changes (p. 31).
This “bloody constitutionalism” was subsequently covered up after the Reconstruction era as the two halves of the reformed United States sought to reconcile with each other. This process was at the core of what Downs calls “white-washed revolution.” He notes numerous ways that politicians and public figures, both North and South, invoked revolutionary language to describe the events that unfolded during the war and Reconstruction. Downs leaves little room to argue that there were few who did not recognize the revolutionary nature of the conflict or that there were those who did everything they could to ensure the revolution’s success. However, the reemergence of white supremacist Democrats to power in the South and failure of Reconstruction to fundamentally remake the South in the image of the North changed things dramatically. This process itself Downs refers to as a “counter-revolution” that sought to reset the American republic to the antebellum status quo (p. 48). According to Downs, however, the failure of Reconstruction is not “evidence that Republicans were not real revolutionaries or that the Civil War era was not in fact a revolutionary moment.... The Second American revolution did not fail; it succeeded, then was overthrown” (p. 50).
Of course, some of the fundamental changes of the radical Republicans’ revolution could not be overthrown; slavery did not return and the Thirteenth through Fifteenth Amendments prevented any new laws on strictly racial grounds. Yet Southern Democrats and their Northern allies did much to limit the scope and reach of the revolutionary changes through both coercion (including violence if deemed necessary), judicial interpretation, and creative legislation that bypassed the issue of race, at least at the surface level. As the Democrats’ counterrevolution unfolded, Republicans changed their rhetoric to fit the circumstances, downplayed the revolutionary nature of their Reconstruction legislation and policies, and “increasingly aimed ... to naturalize the new nation by making it an extension of the old, to turn from Emancipation to Unity without abandoning the promise of emancipation” that “Republicans hoped to cast themselves as moderates, conservators of the true United States” (p. 51). Indeed, this “white-washing” began even before the end of the war itself and Downs presents Abraham Lincoln’s famous Gettysburg Address as evidence. After Reconstruction, Republicans returned to Lincoln’s basic premise and insisted that all they essentially did was fulfill the original intent of the founders and not radically remake the country in a new image.
Considering the often-violent backlash that radical Republicans’ Reconstruction policies faced, once Democrats began to return to power it is no wonder that Republicans changed their tune in hopes to finally calm the storm and avoid protracted conflict. In many ways, this strategy worked. The United States was able to emerge from its internecine conflict in the mid-nineteenth century and transformed itself into one of the world’s most industrialized imperial nations by the end of that century. That result had much to do with both Republicans’ and Democrats’ efforts to reimagine the Civil War as a brotherly conflict that had been fully resolved and forgiven. That reimagining, however, was not without its consequences and challenges. At the end of the chapter, Downs arrives at some poignant, if controversial, conclusions: “Americans tend to believe that their institutions are permanent.... The Civil War represents a gnawing challenge to American exceptionalism and to American sense of stability.... Unknotting that confusion—seeing clearly the failure of the Constitution and the political system—may be crucial for understanding how the American political and constitutional system does and does not work, arriving at a more mature sense of its dangers and a more robust sense of its possibilities, and writing bolder and more sweeping and weirder and thus more accurate political history” (pp. 52-53).
The second chapter, titled “The Civil War the World Made,” explores the international influences of the conflict and places the American Civil War more broadly within a global process of abolition/emancipation and the sociopolitical ramifications that movement entailed. Downs builds on his theme of the Civil War as revolution but takes it a step further in invoking the ways domestic revolution was a manifestation of a larger global revolution from a premodern era, with its emphasis on coercive labor systems, toward the modern era, with its emphasis on “free” wage labor. “The Civil War,” Downs claims, “was fought over the future of slavery inside and outside of the United States.... Although the Civil War was not a world war,” he continues, “it was in part a war over the future of the world” (p. 56). The United States “seemed uniquely poised either to destroy or to save global chattel slavery” (p. 57). The outcome of the Civil War, in the eyes of many Americans across ideological and political lines, was the linchpin that would decide the institution’s fate for the future.
The international scope of Southern expansionism during the antebellum period, reflected in part by the filibuster expeditions into Latin American countries like Mexico, Nicaragua, and Cuba, has long been a subject of study among American and Atlantic historians. Much emphasis has been placed in the historiography on Northern abolitionists’ fears of the Southern “Slave Power,” its intent in the Western Hemisphere, and abolitionist politicians’ efforts to thwart it. According to Downs, however, “the acquisitive Slave Power described the fears of Northern abolitionists and the hopes of some Southern politicians, but it did not describe reality.” All American filibuster dreams of taking over Latin American countries and transforming them into Southern plantation societies failed for many different reasons and Southern leaders found little success, domestically or internationally, in spreading the institution. Downs argues that “antislavery expansionism” was just as significant, if not more so, to the international scope of the debates over slavery in the United States as its much-discussed proslavery counterpart (p. 57). “To destroy slavery in the United States,” he contends, “they would need to destroy slavery in the world, and they could only do so by expanding U.S. power and turning it to good.” Northern Republicans, in the spirit of Thomas Jefferson’s “Empire of Liberty,” envisioned “bold plans for an empire of liberty, plans that drew upon the settler colonialism that formed the backbone of the Republican Party, and then applied that settler colonialism to the world” (p. 58).
This conflict, international in scope but also rooted in the domestic politics of the United States, between the “Slave” and “Liberty” Powers is precisely where Cuba comes into play in Downs’s narrative. Much ink has been spilled over the issue of American, especially Southerners’, desire for Cuban annexation prior to the Civil War. In the early nineteenth century, American politicians like Jefferson, James Monroe, and John Quincy Adams all spoke of the inevitability of Cuba one day becoming a territory, if not a state, within the Union. By the mid-nineteenth century, Cuba became a focal point for many Southern politicians to strengthen the institution of slavery abroad and their political power at home through the creation of a new slave state and the attendant seats in Congress and Electoral College votes. As a result, there were numerous efforts by both Americans and Cubans to bring about such an outcome, including several offers to purchase the island directly from Spain and Narciso Lopez’s filibuster expeditions. In fact, Cuban annexationist “revolutionaries” like Lopez and Ambrosio Jose Gonzales became something of celebrities in the late 1840s and early 1850s United States, meeting with many high-ranking politicians, schmoozing with elite socialites (which included for Gonzales marrying into one of the oldest and wealthiest South Carolina planter families, the Elliotts), and receiving support—moral, monetary, and manpower—for their ventures.
Southern dreams for Cuba, however, were only half the story, according to Downs. Antislavery expansionists also set their sights on the island and hoped to influence the direction of slavery in Cuba to stop their Southern opponents, and thus “Cuba became a battleground between these contradictory visions of the future” (p. 62). American abolitionists (with added assistance from their British counterparts) fanned the flames of antislavery sentiment in Cuba that reverberated back and forth between island and mainland—simultaneously sowing the seeds of conflict in the United States, culminating in the Civil War, and in Cuba, culminating first in the Ten Years’ War and then in the second war for Cuban independence. Throughout the second chapter, then, Downs makes connections between events in Cuba and the United States, as well as their relationship to similar events throughout the Atlantic World, to make the case that Cuba can be seen as an international nexus point for proslavery and antislavery forces. The issue of the future of slavery was thereby international and Cuba’s status—within or without the United States and with or without slavery—was a crucial fulcrum in the debate.
Downs then traces the development of the showdown over slavery beginning in the 1830s with events in Texas, Mexico, Spain, Cuba, and California, and even draws in the influences of the 1848 European revolutions, but his primary focus begins in the 1850s. It was in this decade that the issue of the acquisition of Cuba by the United States became central to the debate over the future of both the island and the mainland to many Cubans, Americans, and international observers. Downs actually downplays the overall influence of the aftermath of the US-Mexican War to the political polarization in the United States that led to the Civil War. Although the argument for its influence has much “narrative utility,” he argues that many historians often let that utility “overwhelm their analysis of its significance.” Instead, Downs argues that the Compromise of 1850, although profoundly flawed and really only a stop-gap measure, temporarily broke tensions and quieted the political crisis over the expansion of slavery in the United States. “What broke the armistice, in part,” Downs contends, “was the prospect of acquiring Cuba.” It was precisely at this moment when polarization in the United States seemed to abate that white Cuban creoles and their American allies began to vigorously lobby for Cuba’s emancipation from Spanish rule and “in the process helped reinvigorate battles within U.S. politics” (p. 69).
Despite the failures of the filibusters, the “Slave Power” was not done with Cuba yet. Cuban exiles and their allies among the fledgling group of Democratic Party reformists known as the Young Americans found new hope with the election of proslavery expansionist Franklin Pierce in 1852. It was Pierce’s election, however, that reinvigorated the forces of antislavery in the United States and these forces also saw Cuba as crucial to their battle to end slavery throughout the world. Abolitionists began to transform the “battle over slavery ... from an internal one to an external one, from an allocation of authority within the nation to the use of the nation to remake the Gulf World” (p. 74). They countered their proslavery opponents by “developing a global critique of slavery that tied its survival in Cuba to its persistence in the United States.” As both proslavery and antislavery forces jostled over the future of slavery in Cuba, Spain threatened to undermine slavery on the island in hopes that such a move would disincentivize annexation. This emboldened abolitionists but sparked fear among their opponents, particularly the Young Americans, who responded with the Ostend Manifesto that declared Cuba was “as necessary to the American republic as any of its present members” and “the United States would be ‘justified in wresting it from Spain’ in order to prevent Cuba from becoming ‘Africanized and become a second Santo Domingo [Haiti], with all its attendant horrors to the white race’” (p. 77).
Before the ink was even dry on the Ostend Manifesto, however, domestic events in the United States drew attention inward. The Kansas-Nebraska Act is rightly seen as a pivotal moment in the polarization of the US that led to the Civil War, but Cuba’s role in the debates are seldom acknowledged, much less analyzed. Downs contends that the joint issues of “Cuba, Kansas, and fugitive slaves ... redefined politics” and “together radicalized both North and South.... Antebellum Americans connected” Cuba and Kansas “through the Kansas-Nebraska Act’s recasting of federal policies in the territories, the ongoing threat of Spanish emancipation, and the belief that Southern senators intended to use the threat of Kansas as a trading piece for the richer and more useful acquisition of Cuba” (p. 77). “The wording of the act,” continues Downs, “explicitly cleared the way for every new territory to judge slavery for itself.” (Under the old rules, the federal government controlled new territories and determined the fate of slavery. Under the Kansas-Nebraska Act, this decision was left to the citizens of the territory itself. This was significant regarding Cuba as fear of US intervention and international abolitionist pressure seemed to work in favor of abolition. If Cuba ended slavery before annexation, “the U.S. government would face the legal and political problem of reimposing, rather than sustaining, slavery.” Antislavery advocates saw the Kansas-Nebraska Act, in part, as a cynical effort by their proslavery opponents to secure the future of slavery in Cuba regardless of Spain’s actions regarding the institution on the island. If the act worked, regardless of the outcome in Kansas, it could be used in Cuba in the event of Spanish abolition and US annexation. Many saw it as not about Kansas at all but rather, and even more cynically, as a “bargaining chip to be traded for Cuba in future negotiations” (p. 78). Given that the climate in Kansas was not really conducive to plantation agriculture, most did not see a future for slavery in that territory. The pressure by abolitionists, then, to prevent Kansas from becoming a slave state could easily result in a compromise where Kansas remained free in exchange for the continuation of slavery in Cuba in the event of annexation.
It was precisely the domestic turmoil invoked by the Kansas-Nebraska Act that did much to prevent the Pierce administration from taking any direct action regarding the island. At the moment when the Slave Power’s desire for Cuba seemed to once again be ascendant with the Ostend Manifesto, the tensions over Kansas consumed the administration and forced the US to back away from the manifesto and restore “normal relations with Spain.” Much as Pierce’s election reinvigorated abolitionists’ ire and rhetoric, the fallout from the Kansas-Nebraska Act further “inflamed Northern opinion against slavery” and secured a “crushing defeat” of Northern Democrats in the 1854 mid-term elections (p. 79).
It was in this moment that the momentum began to shift decidedly in the direction of the abolitionists and “inspired some antislavery Northerners to embrace an expansionist, antislavery Liberty Power.” This shift in US domestic politics inspired a similar shift in the rhetoric and aims of Cuban revolutionaries. The Ostend Manifesto and Kansas-Nebraska Act “represented high water marks of Southern grasping, but not of Southern power” (p. 79). As that high water began to ebb after 1854, Cuban revolutionaries began to see that their chance to emancipate themselves from Spanish rule, their primary goal, lay more with the forces of antislavery than with proslavery, which had failed them. Thus, seeing the proverbial writing on the wall, Cuban revolutionaries abandoned their proslavery allies and increasingly “turned to Northern antislavery politicians for support” (p. 86). These efforts did not fall on deaf ears and found purchase with a new political party, Republicans, who were forthright in their advocacy of free wage labor. Of course, their full support depended first on abolition in Cuba, a fact that more and more Cuban revolutionaries came to understand. Seeing US support as crucial against imperial Spain, many Cuban revolutionaries were more than willing to switch sides in the ideological struggle over the future of the institution. This shift, in turn, emboldened the rising Liberty Power to increase their own brand of expansionist rhetoric and cast the future of slavery in the US and Cuba as especially significant to the future of the institution in the Atlantic World.
Lincoln’s election in 1860 embodied the ascent of this new Liberty Power. Many Southerners certainly recognized this and saw his election as dire for the future of slavery in not only the US but also the world. “Southerners believed,” states Downs, “that the future of world slavery depended on them” (p. 88). This belief, as much as anything else, inspired secession. Republicans shared this belief and saw the battle between proslavery and antislavery forces in the United States in like terms, albeit from the opposite perspective. As Downs quotes Charles Sumner: “The war we wage is not merely for ourselves; it is for all mankind.... We conquer for Liberty everywhere. In ending slavery here, we open its gates all over the world” (p. 92). The fate of Cuba, however, was put on hold until the outcome of the war on the mainland.
Anything and everything seemed possible as the United States descended into internecine conflict. What seemed certain, however, was that “the Civil War could not conclude with domestic transformation because it had not been animated solely by domestic issues.” It remained to be seen whether or not the Civil War would “remake the world,” as Republicans envisioned. Northern victory, though, did initiate a new phase of hopes and dreams that the Liberty Power would envelop the globe, but “the reality of the world the Civil War made did not of course live up to the fantasies unleashed by the conflict.... The transformation of the world, like the transformation of the United States, would be fraught, incomplete, and in many ways disappointing, but only such monumental dreams could produce such monumental disappointments” (p. 93).
Meanwhile, Downs, in chapter 3, examines the transformations wrought by the Civil War beyond the shores of the United States. The title, “The World the Civil War Might Have Made,” alludes to a more speculative nature in his last chapter. However, the chapter is firmly rooted in clean scholarship that examines the reality of events as they unfolded and compares and contrasts those realities with the different worlds that either abolitionists or their opponents envisioned in the wake of the war. By doing so, Downs reveals several interesting points. First, he revisits the transitory nature of revolutionary movements in general and the inevitable conservative pushback that reigns them in. Second, he illustrates the ambiguities inherent within revolutionary movements themselves as allegiances and ideologies that seem rooted in a specific cause; they can be remolded to fit new purposes or changing political winds, both domestic and international. This point is related to the first in that such shifting allegiances reveal the cracks within revolutionary movements that help to slow their spread and dull their impact. Finally, Downs makes the case that the Civil War did indeed play a significant role in world events of the nineteenth century, but it did not exactly change the world in the ways that either proslavery or antislavery advocates envisioned.
Downs begins the chapter in 1873 with US minister to Spain Daniel Sickles—who fully supported the annexation of Cuba as a slave state in the 1850s—marching up the steps of the Spanish Cortes in Madrid to meet the new president of the Spanish Republic. This was meant to be a monumental moment signifying the spread of the republican antislavery revolution inaugurated by the American Civil War to Europe with the overthrow of the Spanish monarchy and the birth of a new republic designed on American principles—including antislavery. Indeed, the success of the Spanish republicans in their civil war appeared to be the crest of what Downs terms a “revolutionary wave” that began in 1868 as both Cubans and Spaniards simultaneously but separately unleashed revolutions that took direct and indirect inspiration from the war in the United States. Despite Reconstruction faltering at the same moment, this event seemed to demonstrate that “antislavery, republicanism, and U.S. power [was] ascendant by 1873” and the world was taking notice, for better or worse (p. 96).
Could this revolutionary wave, however, “be nothing more than a wish, a tale that lulled people into believing that they understood an irreducibly complex world” (p. 96)? Downs’s analysis of the twin but opposing revolutions that began in Cuba and Spain in 1868, and their connection to the Civil War, does much to support the idea of both the transitory nature of revolutionary movements and the ambiguities within such movements. For Cuban revolutionaries, Union victory only solidified their growing antislavery sentiments which they hoped to parlay into attaining American assistance against Spain. They had to bide their time, however, until Republicans in the US became firmly entrenched and their other hoped-for ally, Mexico, had thrown off French rule. That moment seemed to come in 1868 when Carlos Manuel de Cespedes issued his Grito de Yara, freed his slaves, and inaugurated the Ten Years’ War.
To many Americans, “the Cuban revolution of 1868 represented the next step in the Civil War’s remaking of the world” (p. 104). In some ways, this was accurate: the Civil War did embolden Cuban revolutionaries to take action, and their embrace of antislavery certainly can be significantly traced to Republican ascendency in the United States. Yet their primary goal was more anticolonial than antislavery. Cuban revolutionaries recognized a new balance of power in the Atlantic “as a vitalized and antislavery United States angled” to make good the promise of the Monroe Doctrine and “displace Britain, Spain, and other European countries.” To take advantage of this development, “Cubans on the island combined their anticolonialism with antislavery.” To begin with, however, Cuban antislavery was more rhetoric than reality. Although de Cespedes freed his slaves at the beginning, firmly signaling the antislavery aspect of the revolt, the actual emancipation of slaves was approached initially with caution, mostly in efforts to appease slaveowners sympathetic to the anticolonial aspect of the revolution but not so much its antislavery position. Much like in the American Civil War where antislavery, not just the institution’s expansion, slowly but inexorably became the primary issue of the war due in no small part to the actions and pressures of the enslaved themselves, once the proverbial cat was out of the bag in Cuba the enslaved there seized the initiative and “wrenched the movement towards freedom.” By 1870, de Cespedes formally declared an end to slavery and the “bonds between Cuban insurgents and Republicans ... were now mature” as Cuban exiles and insurgents continued to lobby for their cause in the US and found many sympathetic ears (p. 105).
It was not quite so easy, however, for the United States to step in and assist the revolution. One thing about revolutionary waves, warns Downs, is they tend to “crash against the entrenched self-interest of nations.” Unresolved grievances over British and French recognition of the Confederacy during the Civil War and a separate failed attempt in the Senate to annex Santo Domingo made recognition of Cuba problematic for the United States. Downs also notes a similar self-interested move by Cuba’s other primary potential ally, Mexico. Despite many high-level Cuban insurgents’ previous support for Benito Juarez’s battle against the French less than a decade before, Juarez forsook his Cuban friends and instead used the threat of recognition of Cuba as a bargaining chip to “persuade Spain to forgive older Mexican debts” (p. 110).
Meanwhile, in Spain, a similar revolution was underway concurrently with the one in Cuba, which made the situation even more delicate for the United States. Here is where Downs diverges from previous scholarship on US policy during the Cuban Ten Years’ War. By analyzing the effect of the Spanish revolution on the Grant administration’s policy toward Cuba, he adds an extra layer of complexity to the story and reveals its full Atlantic dimensions. The “terrible irony” was that one of the biggest barriers to US intervention in Cuba was not that there was “too little revolutionary fervor but because of too much” (p. 110). The revolutionary wave that rose from the Civil War had reached the shores of Europe. If successful, a potentially republican and antislavery Spain would prove the power and influence of the United States on the world stage and provide a new and valuable ally. Although when Juan Prim led the coup in 1868 he envisioned Spain becoming a constitutional monarchy patterned after such examples as Britain, the revolutionary forces his coup unleashed in Spain opened the floodgates to a more radical, and republican, movement. In the resulting revolutionary moment across Spain, “the United States example, and the particular lessons of the Civil War, loomed large” (p. 112). This “posed a terrible quandary to U.S. republicans. Oblivious to local causes, they asked, which was the rightful fruit of the U.S. Civil War? A fledgling Spanish government, potentially a republic, with leaders who looked to the United States as a model? Or a Cuban insurgency backed by familiar exiles?” (pp. 112-13). Many within the US had differing opinions on these questions, which stalled the US into inaction in Cuba.
Spain did have its champion within the Grant administration. Sickles believed a republican Spain would “prove the impact of the United States on the Atlantic World” and became the nascent Spanish Republic’s staunch supporter. Downs highlights Sickles’s involvement as minister to Spain during this revolutionary period to showcase the ambiguities, contradictions, and motivations that fractured the movement itself, leading to unexpected and unintended outcomes. Sickles was certainly a man full of contradictions who “mingled self-interested expansionism with sincere revolutionary beliefs.” As an aide to James Buchanan in the 1850s, he participated in the drafting of the Ostend Manifesto and fully supported Cuban annexation, slavery or no, particularly the idea of purchasing the island from Spain. He then joined the Union army during the Civil War, fought at Gettysburg, and then became the commander of the Carolinas district during Reconstruction where he “protect[ed] the rights of freed-people” (p. 113). After being appointed minister to Spain by Ulysses S. Grant, he “used the same techniques to end slavery that he had used in the 1850s to save the institution” (pp. 113-14). Sickles is often portrayed in the historiography as a “scoundrel, and opportunist, and a crook.” But here is where Downs makes one of his more poignant observations: “revolutionary history, like most history, illustrates that human behavior is not nearly so consistent, human agency not nearly so meaningful. Revolutionary situations compel people to judge their self-interest anew, to act boldly where once they had been cautious, to back positions they previously opposed. Revolutions transform crooks into radicals, just as the absence of revolutionary situations may turn bold radicals into blowhards” (p. 114). The Sickles example also helps make some sense of the conservative reaction to radical change, or counterrevolutions, when people reevaluate their interests and often back away from positions they once held so passionately when the tide of history appeared to be on their side. While such reactions often do not rescind all the changes wrought by revolutionary forces, they certainly mitigate them to varying degrees and allow space for continuity and, ultimately, a retrenchment from “revolutionary time.”
The conservative reaction in Cuba, like in the United States during Reconstruction, did not take too long to emerge. One might imagine that a revolutionary Spain would sympathize with a revolutionary Cuba. Yet an entrenched “Slave Lobby” in Cuba and Spain conspired to “bribe government officials to prevent any change on the island,” funding proslavery propaganda (p. 115). Despite a small success for antislavery advocates in the passage of the Moret Law in 1870, which promised a gradual end to the institution, conservative forces within Cuba took the initiative and “launched an un-proclaimed revolution against both Spain and the island’s rebels” (p. 117). They recruited their own armies and joined the already confused and chaotic fray of the Ten Years’ War, now a contest between three sets of belligerents, in order to reinstall the old order on the island. This echoed similar developments in the United States itself with the emergence of conservative paramilitary groups like the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction. By 1873, just as the forces of republicanism appeared to be triumphant in Spain, this conservative counterinsurgency had effectively nullified the authority of the mother country in Cuba.
By 1874, the wave of counterrevolution swept over Spain as well. After losing US support, including Sickles who was steeped in a scandal related to the execution of Americans in Cuba after they were caught trying to smuggle in arms and men for the rebels, Spanish republicans were deposed in another coup that placed the head of the Liga Nacional, Francisco Serrano, in power. A year later they crowned a new monarch. When Serrano named “Slave Lobby favorite” Jose Gutierrez de la Concha as captain-general of Cuba, the island effectively fell back into Spanish control as the forces of the counterrevolution rallied to the flag (p. 128). Instead of rallying to the aid of Cuban revolutionaries against a restored monarchy, US self-interest once again prevailed as it grappled with the failures of Reconstruction and growing economic woes.
And so, the Atlantic revolutionary wave unleashed by the American Civil War ended in Spain and Cuba much as the domestic revolutionary wave did in the United States at approximately the same time and for approximately similar reasons. Alas, against the hopes of the Liberty Power that looked to parlay its victory in the US and spread its wings to usher in a new era of change (and US power abroad) across the Atlantic and beyond, the “Civil War had not made a new Atlantic system” (p. 128). The institution of slavery, however, was not reinvigorated by the conservative counterrevolution, just as it could not be reinstated in the US. That genie had been let out of the bottle and, again like in the United States during the final years of the Civil War, it was the slaves themselves who did the most to ensure their freedom by continuing to press the issue, even after it appeared their struggle was lost. Slavery officially ended in Cuba in 1886 and in Brazil, the last major holdout in the Atlantic, in 1888. The tide of republican transformation was not erased either as it lived on in the hopes and dreams of many in the twentieth century to become the dominant form of government in much of the world. Indeed, it is precisely the power, and fragility, of hopes and dreams that Downs asks readers to contemplate here. Although to “engage in what might-have-beens is to risk ahistoricism,” it allows scholars to “see clearly possibilities embedded in the post-Civil War moment” (p. 130). Even though revolutionary waves often include more than just a “touch of blinded romance, of naïve hope,... a history that does not address the plausibility of those hopes cannot capture the realm of dreams and expectations, mysterious engines of history” (pp. 130-31). To understand the significance of studying and applying this concept of revolutionary waves, Downs provides this: “More than most moments, revolutionary waves lead us to contemplate the transformation of human societies, the seeming velocity of history when the world seems turned upside down and sudden change is the order of the day everywhere, all at once, immediately. Many hopes bloom and spread. And then, just as suddenly, revolutionary waves crash; their mysterious energy disperses; the past endures with all its furniture still in place. Thus, revolutionary waves help us grapple with the torpor of history” (p. 99).
In his afterword, Downs contends with this “torpor of history” and what it means for students of the past and present, especially as Americans are once again actively engaging and trying to come to terms with the ghosts of their past. He asks readers to eschew Foner’s idea of the Civil War and Reconstruction as an “unfinished revolution” and instead see it as a successful one that resulted in “perhaps the greatest emancipation in world history, and perhaps the greatest confiscation of property in world history.” That success, however, came at a high cost. “The Second American Revolution’s forcible methods,” Downs cautions, “remind us that none of these gains was inevitable or simple to achieve or even constitutional, and those methods warn us against the idea that fundamental change might be easy to enact” (p. 135). Change is never easy as it invokes the thing that tends to drive human behavior more than just about anything else—fear of the unknown. Humans are more often than not creatures of habit and comfort, if they have a choice in the matter, and tend to be at their most violent, selfish, and unreasonable when motivated by fear. That is just as true today as it was in the nineteenth century or any other century. It is perhaps such fear—fear of dealing with the uncomfortable unknowns of its past—that has prompted many Americans to accept and defend the “white-washed” version of their history, especially when it comes to the role of force and violence in shaping its institutions. This has consequences. The “United States,” Downs posits, “still has not addressed the basic role of brute force in shaping its own republic, with a new constitution made through martial law, and we therefore have failed to take seriously some of the basic dilemmas of American life or of life inside a democracy” (p. 142). Perhaps it is this failure that has led to the polarization present within the United States today. Yet, as evidenced by Downs’s arguments in the last chapter, hope is also a significant motivating factor in human behavior. It may indeed be true that “lasting hope, the kind that can endure the crushing disappointment and years in the wilderness that can greet most efforts to improve the human condition, can only be forged in the face of hopelessness” (p. 141).
Altogether, Downs has crafted a stunning reimagining of the role of the United States and Cuba in the nineteenth century Atlantic World. He fearlessly upends much of the traditional historiography and weaves together a complex tapestry that illuminates much and presents bold new challenges for historians of the era and region to contemplate. His astute scholarship grounds his work in hard fact, while his interpretive flair injects fresh air into the historiography and raises poignant questions that are as timely as they are profound. Although the work can be accused of being a bit too imaginative at times, especially in the third chapter, even at his most speculative moments Downs remains firmly grounded in reality; the possibilities he explores never fall outside the realm of the plausible; and the questions he invokes reveal much about the intentions, motivations, contradictions, ambiguities, and influences of the individuals, groups, and nations involved. At only 142 pages, the work is densely packed with insights but concisely written in an easy-to-follow narrative that injects action and drama in all the right places to keep the reader engaged. Although in many ways the three chapters are independent of each other and have their own lines of argument, Downs deftly laces them together into a coherent narrative that steadily builds to a crescendo. For students and scholars of the US Civil War, Cuba, the United States in the Atlantic World of the nineteenth century, or American history in general, The Second American Revolution is a groundbreaking work that scholars will contend with for years to come.
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Citation:
Eric Walls. Review of Downs, Gregory P., The Second American Revolution: The Civil War-Era Struggle over Cuba and the Rebirth of the American Republic.
H-Atlantic, H-Net Reviews.
October, 2021.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=56681
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