We are told that the present moment bears a strong resemblance to
Reconstruction, the era after the Civil War when the victorious North
attempted to create an interracial democracy in the unrepentant
South. That effort failed--and that failure serves as a warning today
about violent backlash to the mere idea of black equality.
In The Rise and
Fall of the Second American Republic, acclaimed historian Manisha
Sinha expands our view beyond the accepted temporal and spatial
bounds of Reconstruction, which is customarily said to have begun in
1865 with the end of the war, and to have come to a close when the
"corrupt bargain" of 1877 put Rutherford B. Hayes in the
White House in exchange for the fall of the last southern
Reconstruction state governments. Sinha's startlingly original
account opens in 1860 with the election of Abraham Lincoln that
triggered the secession of the Deep South states, and take us all the
way to 1920 and the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, which
granted women the right to vote--and which Sinha calls the "last
Reconstruction amendment."
Within this grand
frame, Sinha narrates the rise and fall of what she calls the "Second
American Republic." The Reconstruction of the South, a process
driven by the alliance between the formerly enslaved at the
grassroots and Radical Republicans in Congress, is central to her
story, but only part of it. As she demonstrates, the US Army's
conquest of Indigenous nations in the West, labor conflict in the
North, Chinese exclusion, women's suffrage, and the establishment of
an overseas American empire were all part of the same struggle
between the forces of democracy and those of reaction. The main
concern of Reconstruction was the plight of the formerly enslaved,
but its fall affected other groups as well: women, workers,
immigrants, and Native Americans. From the election of black
legislators across the South in the late 1860s to the Great Railroad
Strike of 1877 to the colonial war in the Philippines in the 1890s,
Sinha narrates the major episodes of the era and introduces us to key
individuals, famous and otherwise, who helped remake American
democracy, or whose actions spelled its doom.
A sweeping narrative
that remakes our understanding of perhaps the most consequential
period in American history, The Rise and Fall of the Second
American Republic shows how the great contest of that age is also
the great contest of our age--and serves as a necessary reminder of
how young and fragile our democracy truly is.