The Last Atlantic Revolution: Reconstruction and the Struggle for Democracy in the Americas, 1861-1912

Abstract

This dissertation explores the Atlantic history of Reconstruction in Cuba, Brazil and the United States, the last three slaveholding societies in the Atlantic World. Drawing on archival research in three languages, it makes two key arguments. First, it argues that U.S. Reconstruction precipitated a revolutionary crisis, during which the constitutional rules that had protected slavery since the Haitian Revolution began to collapse, and the rules of political inclusion and exclusion could be re-written across the Atlantic World. Second, it argues that white elites resolved this crisis by constructing a new international order grounded on the principle of Black exclusion from democratic politics. The dissertation uses a transnational methodology to challenge two longstanding assumptions in comparative history: first, that a racist legal system emerged in the U.S. after emancipation, but not in Latin America; and second, that these distinct political regimes developed in isolation from one another, within two American “systems.” This literature has overlooked the ways that transnational conversations and international collaboration shaped the politics of reconstruction in both the U.S. and Latin America. By tracing the Atlantic counterrevolution that followed emancipation, this dissertation reveals how race-based legal discrimination emerged across the hemisphere.