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The Second American Revolution: The Civil War–Era Struggle over Cuba and the Rebirth of the American Republic. By Gregory P. Downs. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Pp. 212. Cloth, $27.95.)
In the preface to this provocative book, Gregory Downs confesses he set out to take risks, and that he has done. The result is a genuine intervention in historical debates that for ages have remained confined to a nationbound narrative sealed off from the fascinating world stage on which Civil War-era history played out.
Downs invites readers to see the American Civil War as a revolutionary event whose causes and consequences were linked to Cuba and Spain in ways few have imagined. He is dissatisfied with the way historians have "whitewashed" the conflict as a brothers' war and celebrated the Union's survival and the emancipation of four million enslaved as a self-congratulatory narrative of national success. The problem, Downs explains, is that "assumptions about continuity shape how people see the country and how scholars analyze its past. These assumptions constrain our political history and our political imagination" (15).
The book begins with a strong argument for the war as a violent revolution that, instead of preserving the Union, overthrew it. The old Constitution of the Founders, having proven inadequate to the challenge of slavery, was effectively replaced, not just amended. This marked the death of America's First Republic and the birth of its Second Republic.
No sooner does his interpretation of revolutionary change settle in, however, than Downs insists the revolution failed for lack of nerve. Instead of a sweeping transformation to set America right, Republican leaders settled for a "reluctant, managerial revolution." The author calls it "bloody constitutionalism," a halfway revolution that...