The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic by Manisha Sinha
Reconstruction, the post-Civil War federal project to reconstitute the defeated South into a society of opportunity for the formerly enslaved, has long been libeled by Confederate sympathizers. University of Connecticut history professor Manisha Sinha joins the line of historians who have, since the ‘70s, reexamined Reconstruction in a positive light.
In The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic, Sinha expands the Reconstruction’s timeframe and its range, stopping at 1920 when women achieved voting rights. With good reason, she points to the abolition of slavery and women’s suffrage as facets of a larger movement. She also begins her account in 1860 with the election of Abraham Lincoln, crediting his evolving vision for inaugurating Reconstruction as “a new understanding of American democracy” inclusive of everyone. And yet, as she concedes, women’s suffrage was delayed, the oppression of Native Americans continued, and the labor movement was violently put down.
Sinha might err in overestimating the enthusiasm among Civil War Yankees for abolishing slavery or granting civil rights to Blacks, but she restores agency to the enslaved (no longer depicted as passively awaiting liberation) and, especially, to Black women. The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic recontextualizes American history by linking events usually studied separately into a broader pattern of resistance. The struggle, she writes, “is far from over.”
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