Murray State University's Department of History presents Civil War historian and professor emeritus of history at the University of South Carolina, Dr. Don H. Doyle, as part of its Sid Easley Lecture series. Doyle will discuss his book The Age of Reconstruction, a sequel to his 2014 work, The Cause of All Nations, which covers the international impact of the American Civil War. WKMS Morning Edition host Daniel Hurt spoke to Doyle about his upcoming lecture and what he hopes attendees will take from the presentation.
In Doyle's new book, The Age of Reconstruction, he discusses the international community's perspective on the conclusion of the American Civil War and Reconstruction, highlighting how the Union victory and President Abraham Lincoln's leadership inspired democratic movements in Europe and Latin America, including Britain's suffrage expansion, France's democratic revolution, and even the idea of a United States in Europe. The book picks up immediately after the conclusion of his 2014 book, following Lincoln's assassination in 1865.
"[The Cause of All Nations] ended with the description of the world's reaction to the Union victory and, of course, to the tragedy of Lincoln's assassination," Doyle began. "I alluded to a lot of different effects that it had on the world and what I thought was a burst of democratic activity and spirit in Europe and Latin America. But I really did nothing more than just gloss over what becomes now the main topic of the Age of Reconstruction. So, it's very much a sequel and an expansion on the ideas that I finished in The Cause of All Nations."
Doyle said his experiences traveling the world contributed to his fascination with the international perspective on American affairs. "I love to travel, and I think one of the experiences of traveling [is] looking back at your own country and trying to understand what's different," he explained. "What do we see? What do they see in America? It's that basic experience of getting outside the boundaries, psychological as well as physical boundaries, of being a citizen of one nation and looking at it within a broader context. It's a way of understanding better what's happening in the Civil War and Reconstruction — what it meant to the world and what it meant to America. I think an international or cosmopolitan approach can lead to a deeper and fuller understanding of what historical events like that meant."
"At the end of the war, there was the idea that democracies always fail," he continued. "Republics will always die, going back to the Republic of Rome. With the American example overseas, a lot of people call it the Great Republic. Aristocratic governments in Europe said, 'You know, look at this, America has imploded.' Many [of them] predicted that America would go back to some kind of constitutional monarchy and that all of the Latin American experiments, as they call them, in self-government would fail if they hadn't already. But the victory of the Union went against all expectations that a democracy could defend itself. I think that the re-election of Lincoln and the commitment to follow through on this war really strengthened the spirit of republicanism, democracy, reform, [and] abolitionism overseas in Europe and in Latin America. That democracy, which had been seen as this kind of failed experiment in 1861, then becomes seen as the inevitable wave of the future."
Rapid changes began to unfold across Europe, leading to the 1860s being a particularly tumultuous period in world history. "In Britain, there's a huge movement toward expanding the suffrage to workers and lowering property qualifications. Spain has a big democratic revolution that sends Queen Isabella, this ancient Bourbon monarchy, into exile and establishes, at least for six years, a democratic experiment in universal suffrage, abolition, and self-government. France also overthrows the second empire of Louis Napoleon, and it begins to resume its role as the leader of republicanism."
Doyle said a 19th-century precursor to the European Union came about during this era of optimism, including the concept of supranational states. "It's an idea that gets bandied about in a lot of different circles before the American Civil War," he explained. "Victor Hugo, the famous French novelist and great opponent of the Second Empire in France, begins to advocate the idea of the United States of Europe. Giuseppe Mazzini also talks about the unity of Europe and uses the United States of Europe as a way of signifying this. It is used again and again in the literature right after the Civil War."
"There was even talk of two hemispheric unions blending together and creating a kind of global government, so whether they met an actual merger or just kind of commonality of purpose, of forms of government, it doesn't matter," Doyle continued. "The idea is that they saw this as a kind of globalizing force that was reshaping Europe and the American hemisphere."
During the American Reconstruction, the main issue was how to handle the South post-war and whether the institutions themselves had to be changed. Radical Republicans wanted to dismantle the aristocratic system that had become an anti-republican elite. "Back on the American side of the globe, the main impact of reconstruction — we always think of reconstruction as meaning an internal domestic reform program aimed at rebuilding the South after the war. That was, itself, a really radical experiment."
"Because the radical Republicans believed that the problem with the South was not just that it had slavery," Doyle said, "it was that slavery had given birth to this aristocratic, anti-Republican elite, and they had to be dismantled. The states had to produce Republican forms of government, and that was the essence of what it meant to be a member of the United States of America."
Dr. Don H. Doyle will visit campus as part of Murray State's Department of History's Sid Easley Lecture series on Monday, September 23, at 7 pm in Wrather Hall. The presentation is free and open to the public.
