Between Freedom and Progress recovers and analyses the global
imaginings of Reconstruction's partisans, those who struggled over
and with Reconstruction, as they vied with one another to define
the nature of their country after the Civil War. The remarkable
technological and commercial transformations of the mid-nineteenth
century, in particular, steam engines, telegraphs, and an expanded
commercial printing capacity, created a constant stream of news,
description, and storytelling from across and beyond the nation.
Reconstruction's partisans contended with each other to make sense
of this information, motivated by intense political antagonism
combined with a shared but contested set of ideas about freedom and
progress. As writers, lecturers, editors, travelers, moral
reformers, racists, abolitionists, politicians, suffragists,
soldiers, and diplomats, Reconstruction's partisans made competing
claims about their place in the world. Understanding how, why, and
when they did so helps ground our understanding of Reconstruction,
itself a mysterious, transatlantic term, in its own intellectual
context. Three factors proved pivotal to the making of
Reconstruction's world. First, from 1865 to the early 1870s, the
interconnected issues of how to remake the Union and how to remake
the South exerted a powerful hold on federal politics, defining the
partisan landscape and inspiring rival arguments about what was
possible and what was good. The daunting nature of these issues
created a sense of crisis across the political spectrum, with
political discourse ranging in tone from combative to euphoric to
apocalyptic. Second, though domestic in nature, these issues were
refracted through two broadly held beliefs: that the causes of
freedom and progress defined history and that distinctive peoples
with their own characters composed the world's population. These
beliefs produced a disposition to think of developments from across
and beyond the United States as essentially relatable to each
other, encouraging an intellectual style that favoured wide-ranging
comparisons. Third, far from being confined to the elite, this mode
of thinking and arguing about the world lived and breathed in
public texts that were produced and consumed on a weekly and daily
basis. This commercialised and politicised world of mass publishing
was highly unequal in structure and content, but it was also
impressively vibrant and popular. Together, these three factors
made the world of Reconstruction a global landscape of information,
argumentation, and imagination that derived much of its vigor from
domestic political battles.
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