Reconstruction, Democracy, and United States Imperialism
Authors: Wheelock Stefan M. 
Published: February 2023

The era of Reconstruction (beginning roughly with the drafting of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862 and ending, in effect, with the Republicans’ loss of control over the House in 1874) ushered in a seismic shift in US domestic polices as well as its cultural and international relations. The close of the US Civil War resulted in the emancipation of approximately four million slaves. Reconstruction-era policies sought to transform slaves into wage laborers, extend to blacks the rights of citizenship, and guarantee the right to vote to a greater share of the US male population. The period’s policies also reverberated through the political and economic crosscurrents of the Atlantic world from the 1860s into the early twentieth century, significantly transforming the global logic of empire and expansionism. The defeat of the Confederacy communicated to the world that the US government was ostensibly willing to contend for principles of freedom and equality. But as the historian David Prior straightforwardly contends, it took approximately thirty years for the United States to shift from engaging in one of the most radical experiments in democracy the world had ever seen to “constructing a racist empire” that exerted its hegemony over Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and other parts of the Caribbean as well as the Philippines. On the domestic front, blacks’ postwar economic and political gains were diminished by discrimination, racial terror, and novel forms of enslavement. The late 1870s saw the global demand for cotton surge, and the United States seized on the opportunity to compete aggressively in world markets, becoming the majority supplier of cotton for Britain, France, Germany, and their respective territories. This surge in demand drove prices down, forcing many recently emancipated blacks and poor whites into debt peonage and sharecropping, but it also helped establish the United States as a global player. Presidents such as Ulysses S. Grant expressed perennial interest in annexing the Spanish colony of Cuba and the Dominican Republic from as early as the 1860s, and the US government, by 1900, acquired the Philippines and Hawaii as territories. Ironically, the abolition of slavery in the United States formed part of the rationale for the presumed cultural superiority of Anglo-Protestant civilization over nonwhite peoples. The United States would bring freedom, civilization, and progress to supposed benighted nations, or so the logic went. If ideologies of white supremacy were rarely explicitly articulated in American policy documents of diplomacy, US patterns of post–Civil War racism and racial paternalism, nevertheless, shaped the cultural practices of expansionism as white settler colonialism extended westward, resulting in the extermination of indigenous populations, and as the United States annexed Atlantic and Pacific islands in what would now be characterized as the nations of the Global South. Set in motion by consequential turn-of-the-century figures such as then President Theodore Roosevelt and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, the new blueprint for a rising global racial order also reshaped patterns of geopolitical cooperation and resistance among nonwhite populations, forging new alliances and fostering cultural tensions among US black, white, Latin and Afro Caribbean, Mexican, and Asian peoples. In the century after Reconstruction, the US South devolved into a collection of de facto apartheid regimes that established separate and unequal conditions for whites and blacks. And the emphasis on the Anglo cultural superiority of the United States over darker peoples and other nations in what has been called “the American century” helped eclipse national legislation on racial justice and equity until the civil rights movement.