Napoleon 111, by Jean Hippolyte Flandrin, credit wikipedia
Deconstruction Time
Don H Doyle, The Age of Reconstruction; How Lincoln’s New Birth of Freedom Remade the World, Don H Doyle, Princeton University Press, Princeton & Oxford, 2024, hb, 369pp, reviewed by Leslie Jones
In Garibaldi, Invention of a Hero, Lucy Riall recalls how nuns in a Sicilian convent in 1860 became so excited by Garibaldi’s “resemblance to ‘our Lord’ that they queued up to kiss him on the lips”.[i] As Professor Doyle observes, “secular heroes in the nineteenth century”, especially those who were ‘martyred’, attracted a quasi- religious devotion and sense of obligation from their admirers.[ii] Thus, news of Lincoln’s assassination (quickly spread by telegraph networks, “the internet of its day”) turned him into “a global hero and martyr to the cause of human freedom”.[iii] In due course, messages of condolence poured into US diplomatic outposts from around the world. Secretary of State William H Seward subsequently published a selection of these missives in Tributes of the Nations to Abraham Lincoln (1867), “a handsome large-format leather-bound volume” sent to members of Congress and various foreign governments. Seward considered this document a useful adjunct of American foreign policy.
One of the letters in the State Department’s Tributes was signed by Parisian journalist Sainte-Suzanne Melvil-Bloncourt and 150 of his fellow Guadeloupeans. Melvil-Bloncourt was of mixed-race and a veteran abolitionist. The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 and the subsequent Union victory in the Civil War revived the anti-slavery movement. The Comité Français d’émancipation was established in early 1865. Its target now was “the remaining bastions of slavery in the empires of Brazil and Spain”. [iv] In Cuba, which had remained loyal to Spain, “white fears of black domination sustained slavery”, [v] the basis of the lucrative sugar plantation system. Enslaved Afro-Cubans looked to Lincoln as a potential liberator. The Emancipation Declaration and the defeat of the Confederacy “cast a heavy shadow”[vi] over slavery in Cuba. Seward’s adhesion in 1862 to Britain’s campaign to suppress the slave trade led inexorably to its extinction.
The American Civil War enabled Napoleon 111 to conquer Mexico and install Maximilian as Emperor as part of his Grand Design (or gran pensée) to promote French military and commercial influence in central America. In an 1864 article ‘The Key of a Continent’, Massachusetts clergyman Joshua Leavitt (author of The Monroe Doctrine) surmised that Napoleon’s ultimate objective was “to make France the master of global commerce by building a canal across Mexico or central America…” Opposing republicanism and upholding the influence of the Catholic Church and of conservative landed interests was central to this policy. But the victory of the North sealed the fate of these ambitious plans.
Napoleon’s ultimately abortive intervention in Mexico was a godsend for the French left. Maximilian, a member of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine and the brother of Emperor Franz Joseph 1 of Austria, was executed on June 19th,1867. Many of Europe’s reigning princes were related to Maximilian and had gathered in Paris at the Exposition Universelle, intended as a showcase of the revival of Bonapartism. The New York Times reported that the execution of Maximilian “hangs like a black cloud over all these splendours of royalty”.
Execution of Maximilian, Edouard Manet, credit Wikipedia
The French Empire’s internal critics, such as Adolphe Thiers, attributed Maximilian’s downfall to Napoleon 111’s “personal government”. The introduction of the ‘Liberal Empire’ was a belated attempt to buy time for the dynasty. But the new press law engendered a plethora of often critical new journals like Rappel, Tribune and Réforme. Public meetings were now permitted and at one such meeting, Édouard Laboulaye made invidious comparisons between the American republic and the Second Empire. Américomanie, eulogising Lincoln, was prevalent in French republican circles at this juncture. The radical journalist Edouard Portalis, author of Les États Unis, le self-governement et le césarisme, who had travelled extensively in the US, depicted democracy as a motor of progress. Georges Clemenceau, likewise, wrote a pseudonymous column entitled Nouvelles des États-Unis for the republican Parisian paper Le Temps. Clemenceau had participated in a demonstration in Paris following Lincoln’s demise. The demonstrators presented an address to John Bigelow, US minister to France, at the US legation. It called for the establishment of a “true democracy”. Clemenceau considered the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson, in 1868, as “unimaginable in France at that time” and a model for how to deal with “a tyrannical head of state”. [vii] Historian Jules Michelet, in similar vein, saw America as “…the pride, the hope, the salvation of the world…”. [viii]
If, in death, Lincoln was the “unimpeachable embodiment of government elected by the common people and the prophet of world democracy”,[ix] Pope Pius IX, conversely, was for American Protestant opinion the inveterate enemy of the US republic. He had reportedly sympathised with the South and supported France’s Mexican adventure. Mary Surratt and her son John were devout Catholics and allegedly Lincoln assassination conspirators. When the Pope banned American Protestant Church services in Rome, the New York Times denounced this “corrupt, dying remnant of despotic rulership…’. [x]
Professor Emeritus of History at South Carolina, Doyle contends that Lincoln’s assassination rejuvenated the democratic movement not only in France but also in Great Britain.[xi] Although the author acknowledges that Lincoln’s death “…did not cause the wave of democratic reforms…” [xii] after 1865, the sub-title of his book belies this contention. In an article for the Fortnightly Review in October 1870, entitled ‘England and the War’ , the distinguished Liberal statesman John Morley averred that the North’s victory in the Civil War “was the force that made English liberalism powerful enough to enfranchise the workmen”. (In fact, the Conservative Party enfranchised the workers, in 1867). At a mass meeting at St James Hall, in London, in March 1863, leading Liberals, notably John Stuart Mill and John Bright, lambasted the Tories for supporting the slaveocracy. Another speaker, the historian and leading Positivist Edward Beesly, compared the British proletariat to black slaves, a Marxist trope. Professor Doyle makes the dubious claim that “British workers admired Lincoln” not just for winning the war and ending slavery but because, in the words of The Bee-Hive, “he was the first President elected from the working classes…” He also endorses Marx’ assertion that the British workers stopped the “ruling classes” from supporting the Confederacy. Professor Doyle evidently has a stereotypical view of Britain’s governing classes in the 19th century.
On February 12, 1866, Lincoln’s birthday, the distinguished Harvard historian and diplomat George Bancroft addressed Congress. Author of the History of the United States of America (1834-1874), Bancroft had studied at Heidelberg, Göttingen and Berlin. He approached history, accordingly, from a nationalist perspective à la Treitschke. Bancroft considered slavery incompatible with the republican tradition and an adjunct of aristocracy. He trenchantly criticised Britain’s ‘aristocratic’ government and Napoleon 111 for granting belligerent rights to the southern states. Ditto the latter’s attempt to install a monarchy in Mexico. For Bancroft, America was “the advance guard of democracy and republicanism”. [xiii]
In 1865, the US had a standing army of one million men. In July of that year, Seward sent a veiled threat of the use of force to Foreign Minister Drouyn de Lhuys unless France withdrew its troops from Mexico. The French duly departed in early 1867. It transpired, however, that Seward’s goal after the Civil war was “national security and peace, not territorial aggrandizement or imperialist conquest”. [xiv] The Union, accordingly, disarmed. The author highlights Seward’s “Pan-American commitment to independent republics in solidarity against European imperialism”.[xv] Yet United States Minister to France John Bigelow put it to Seward that because the population of Mexico were of a different race and religion, they were incapable of self-government. Napoleon 111, in similar vein, regarded republicanism as a unique product of Anglo-Saxon culture. The ‘Latin Race’, in his estimation, required hereditary monarchy and Catholic discipline. Note also that, republican principles notwithstanding, cordial relations with autocratic Russia facilitated Seward’s purchase of Alaska in 1867. Unlike France and Britain, Russia posed no threat. Alexander 11’s emancipation of the serfs in February 1861 was naively depicted by the American press as a step towards modern democracy.
The Age of Reconstruction is ambitious and wide-ranging and the author skilfully combines the history of ideas with that of international relations. Dr Doyle is clearly a supporter of democracy and equality. He implicitly criticises President Trump for “…undoing…the civil rights gains accorded blacks and other minorities” and views this as part of “a more ominous international movement against racial equality and democracy”. Unlike such luminaries as Marx, Michels and Mosca, Professor Doyle takes western democracy at face value. This caveat aside, we commend his labours.
William H Seward, 1849, credit Wikipedia
ENDNOTES
[i] Garibaldi…Yale University Press, 2007, p282
[ii] Doyle,p16
[iii]Ibid., p17, 15
[iv] Doyle,p 233
[v] Doyle, p152
[vi] Doyle, p155
[vii] Doyle, p243
[viii] Ibid., p243
[ix] Doyle, p16
[x] Doyle, p272
[xi] Doyle, chapter 7
[xii] Doyle, p16
[xiii] Doyle, p45
[xiv] Doyle, p61
[xv] Doyle, p98
Dr Leslie Jones is Editor of QR
For the record, Abraham Lincoln did not believe in racial equality.