Manisha Sinha’s The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic is a sweeping history of the United States from the Civil War to World War I. It is meant for a broad readership, akin to Richard White’s The Republic for Which It Stands (2017). Like White, Sinha interprets the Gilded Age as a part of what has been called the “Greater Reconstruction,” a concept that emphasizes continuity between the federal occupation of the South after the Civil War and concurrent and subsequent events in other regions of the country. For Sinha, however, the through line is not the occupation, but its downfall. The “Second American Republic” of Sinha’s title, a term borrowed from French history, refers to Congressional Reconstruction, when Radical Republicans, joining with their moderate colleagues, realized the failed promises of the first American republic of the Revolutionary era and established an interracial democracy with full social and political equality for all. The Radical Republicans are the heroes of Sinha’s telling, the inheritors of the antebellum abolitionist spirit she heralded in her previous book, The Slave’s Cause (2016).

The chapters on Reconstruction, comprising over half of this long book, are the strongest. Sinha narrates the struggles of freedpeople to build their lives, mobilize their communities, and demand an activist federal government. She emphasizes the role of women, especially former abolitionists, Black and white, in the story of Congressional Reconstruction, which, she posits, did not splinter the women’s suffrage movement but energized it. And she confronts the view that Reconstruction failed because it was incomplete – that Republicans were too timid and did not do enough to secure freedpeople’s rights, that they focused on a political rather than an economic, restructuring of the South, all of which left freedpeople vulnerable to violence, oppression, and exploitation. Instead, Sinha argues for the importance of the political rights and power that African American men gained, without which economic and legal security would be impossible. The Second American Republic collapsed not because it failed, she writes, “but because it was overthrown” (192). It was no match for the reactionary fury of white southern Democrats who, through fraud, intimidation, and outright violence, toppled democracies across southern states. These regimes were an “American Thermidor,” in another allusion to the French Revolution (xxiv). Indeed, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic has transnational aspirations. For Sinha, the “growth of reactionary authoritarianism” in the postwar period not only coincided with the rise of European nationalistic colonialism but set the stage for oppressive regimes across the globe from German fascism to South African apartheid (xix). This claim, though, which presents an inverted image of American exceptionalism, is made only in the introduction. Most of the book is concerned with U.S. domestic politics. The anti-democratic forces that toppled Reconstruction affected all other developments in the late nineteenth century, Sinha argues: Jim Crow, of course, but also the conquest of western lands and the decimation of Indigenous people and cultures; the brutal exploitation of Gilded Age capitalism; and the spread of American imperialism abroad.

Sinha’s narrative falters somewhat in the book’s latter chapters. Sinha suggests that reactionary forces were able to flourish because the Supreme Court perverted the original intention of the Reconstruction amendments to serve corporate interests. More significantly, for Sinha, the Radical Republicans and former abolitionists lost their influence as the Liberal Republicans came to dominate the party. How that happened is not explained, and the reasons for the advance of conservative or reactionary politics are otherwise treated as self-evident. After the sections on Reconstruction, except for a brief section on the emergence of Jim Crow, the villains of the story are Liberal Republicans for whom capitalist expansion triumphed over all other values. To fit complex events into her narrative, Sinha must sideline uncomfortable truths, such as the racial prejudices of some of her heroes, from the Populists to the progressives, or the fact that white southern Democrats were anti-imperialists. Even laissez-faire politics and social Darwinism do not fit easily into a narrative of rising authoritarianism.

Sinha ends the book with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, which she terms “the last Reconstruction amendment,” because its proponents carried the vision of democracy and an activist welfare state of the second American Republic into the twentieth century (424). The chapter on women’s suffrage appears like an anomaly in a history otherwise concerned with the persistence of reactionary authoritarianism in the United States. Its inclusion likewise seems at odds with Sinha’s conscious distancing of herself from earlier consensus interpretations of the period that focused on the incremental expansion of democracy and rights to previously excluded groups. If the legacy of Reconstruction was the Nineteenth Amendment, then Sinha is more aligned with the consensus view than she admits.

The last chapter aside, Sinha maintains that hers is a story of “disjuncture rather than continuity” because, in her telling, the collapse of interracial democracy that ended Reconstruction was the pivotal event of the late nineteenth century (xx). At the same time, in interpreting this collapse as a “long overthrow” that remade not just the South, but the West and the North, she expands the geographic and temporal boundaries of the Reconstruction Era (xx). The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic engages us to consider the dynamics of continuity and change after the Civil War but, alas, does not provide much clarity about them.