Civil Wars and Reconstructions in the Americas

In his first published monograph, Evan Rothera has taken on the titanic enterprise of comparing the civil wars of the 1860s and their “reconstructions,” or governmental efforts toward “order,” in three different countries: the United States (1861–65), Mexico (1862–67), and Argentina (1853–61). He aims to show how these processes were interrelated, by focusing on transnational flows of people and ideas between these regions.Like many comparative histories, Rothera's project faces the challenge of covering enough of each country's past to understand their comparative nuances. He has also proposed to examine transnational influences. Rather than focusing his analysis on the illustrative travels of one migrant, or one group, as per Rebecca Scott and Jean Hébrard or Elliott Young, he chooses to cover these intertwining histories in broad, thematic strokes, using terms such as “liberty” and “reaction” as a comparative rubric (p. 27). Occasionally this leads to a fresh point of analysis, such as in his chapter on “violence and politics” from 1861 to 1867, in which he compares different governments’ uses of amnesty to mitigate postwar violence. Yet his conclusion, which brings together “liberal” (in the nineteenth-century sense) histories buttressed by presidential or congressional speeches, consular gleanings of the status of war and violence, and newspaper and military reports, is unsurprisingly vague. Each of the three conflicts, he summarizes, “pitted the liberal state against premodern conservative forces” (p. 11), and “by 1880, violence and disorder gave way to a particular type of stability and order” (p. 213) augmented during this period by “intense Pan-American cooperation” (p. 219).Analyses of the wars of the 1860s that include comparisons and connections between the Americas and Europe are not particularly new; excellent works in both English and Spanish exist, with varying points of focus (for instance, by Dean B. Mahin and Guillermo Palacios and Erika Pani). In the last five years, a number of critical transnational histories of the United States and Mexico during both countries’ 1860s conflicts have also been published (by Alice Baumgartner and William S. Kiser, among others). Rothera's contribution includes a new analysis of the connection between the United States, Mexico, and Argentina, but his evidence of transnational cooperation with Argentina is limited to very few instances of debatable influence on international or local politics. These include an 1861 letter from Abraham Lincoln to the soon-to-be-president of Argentina, Bartolomé Mitre, congratulating him on his election, Argentine soldier turned statesman Edelmiro Mayer's odyssey fighting in the United States and then Mexico, Argentine (and Mexican) Fourth of July celebrations, and the “redefinition” of the Monroe Doctrine, by 1867 invoked to condemn European intervention in the Americas (pp. 52, 62).Latin Americanists are especially likely to chafe at Rothera's repeated reference to “sister republics” and “Pan-Americanism” based on this kind of evidence, which flattens obvious political inequities between the United States and these countries while also ignoring the local, national, or international economic contexts informing these inequities. Perhaps Rothera's most convincing argument for “Pan-Americanism” lies in his claim that US aid helped oust Napoleon III's forces from Mexican territory. Yet this claim falls apart when we look beyond the bombast of congressional speeches and local papers. Napoleon III pulled troops out of Mexico himself, for a variety of reasons, but only partly because the United States refused to recognize Maximilian. Most US soldiers fought for Benito Juárez's republican armies because of the promise of land grants in Mexico, Ulysses Grant being among the most famous of these prospectors.Needless to say, Rothera's arguments that “reconstruction” (a term he does not define) was a continuation of civil wars and the fight to defend the “liberal state” (p. 11) reveal his failure to analyze the contradictions of the various sides of these wars, as well as their changes over time. While his coverage of anti-Black violence during Reconstruction in the United States is thorough, Rothera glosses over the basic fact that many “liberal” leaders consistently incorporated racism and even genocide in their campaigns. Contemporaneous to these wars and postwar efforts of rebuilding were numerous campaigns against the Indigenous populations in all these countries, a point Rothera only mentions briefly in book's conclusion (p. 215). In other cases, Rothera's comparisons are dangerously misleading: comparing the Union's fight against the Confederacy to the Unitarios’ fight to impose centralized rule in the Argentine provinces—for example, against the caudillo Ángel Vicente Peñaloza (pp. 142–49)—misconstrues complex social and political relationships undergirding these battles, as does calling Mexican hatred for “gringos” before the 1860s “xenophobia” (pp. 92–98).Rothera is passionate about his topic, and this book often feels like his own call to arms. He even manages to connect his discussion of the 1860s to the 2021 storming of the US Capitol (p. 217). For scholars of US history, his work may well prove a useful entrée into the world of nineteenth-century Latin American wars and politics. But for scholars of Latin America, who are accustomed to thinking and writing about Latin American countries in relation to the United States and Europe, Rothera's work stands as a reminder that we should keep doing so

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