The Age of Reconstruction: How Lincoln’s New Birth of Freedom Remade the World - REVIEW

by Don H. Doyle

A sweeping history of how Union victory in the American Civil War inspired democratic reforms, revolutions, and emancipation movements in Europe and the Americas

The Age of Reconstruction looks beyond post–Civil War America to tell the story of how Union victory and Lincoln’s assassination set off a dramatic international reaction that drove European empires out of the Americas, hastened the end of slavery in Latin America, and ignited a host of democratic reforms in Europe.

In this international history of Reconstruction, Don Doyle chronicles the world events inspired by the Civil War. Between 1865 and 1870, France withdrew from Mexico, Russia sold Alaska to the United States, and Britain proclaimed the new state of Canada. British workers demanded more voting rights, Spain toppled Queen Isabella II and ended slavery in its Caribbean colonies, Cubans rose against Spanish rule, France overthrew Napoleon III, and the kingdom of Pope Pius IX fell before the Italian Risorgimento. Some European liberals, including Victor Hugo and Giuseppe Mazzini, even called for a “United States of Europe.” Yet for all its achievements and optimism, this “new birth of freedom” was short-lived. By the 1890s, Reconstruction had been undone in the United States and abroad and America had become an exclusionary democracy based on white supremacy—and a very different kind of model to the world.

At home and abroad, America’s Reconstruction was, as W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, “the greatest and most important step toward world democracy of all men of all races ever taken in the modern world.” The Age of Reconstruction is a bracing history of a remarkable period when democracy, having survived the great test of the Civil War, was ascendant around the Atlantic world.

Don H. Doyle, is McCausland Professor of History emeritus at the University of South Carolina. He grew up near Berkley, California, graduated from the University of California, Davis, and earned his PhD in history at Northwestern University. He was a Fulbright professor in Rome, Genoa, and Rio de Janeiro and taught at Leeds University in England. He is retired from teaching and lives in Folly Beach, South Carolina. 

"My fascination with the past began one summer in California when my mother brought home a shoebox full of letters from my great-great grandfather, a drummer boy from Vermont who served in the Civil War and wrote home to his parents. Without quite realizing it, I became a historian that summer." 

His new book, The Age of Reconstruction: How Lincoln's New Birth of Freedom Remade the World (Princeton, 2024) breaks out of the usual focus on American events to examine the Reconstruction era within a larger international context. This book is a sequel to his acclaimed The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War (Basic, 2015), which offered a bold new interpretation of what America's Civil War meant to the wider world.

Princeton University Press
ISBN-13 978-0691256092