The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic is engaging, elegantly written, provocative, and destined to become the new standard text on the period. Sinha’s approach allows her to tell a fast-paced story that is deeply informed by decades of research and teaching. Sinha’s grand narrative incorporates a deep reading of the secondary literature and a fresh examination of primary sources, in a similar vein to historian Nell Irvin Painter’s classic work, Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877-1919 (1987), succinctly capturing the political, social, and economic forces at play. Over the course of a dozen cogently written chapters, Sinha demonstrates how the U.S. military that battled against southern counterrevolutionaries was redeployed to the West to engage in the Indian Wars. Southern efforts to disenfranchise Black Americans were repackaged and deployed in the North to target immigrants and the industrial working-class. Of particular importance is Sinha’s treatment of the women’s suffrage movement. Sinha clearly demonstrates how the failures of Reconstruction led not just to the loss of an interracial democracy, but also delivered a crushing blow to the equal rights battle for women.
Sinha begins by weaving together several strands of the emancipation story usually treated separately: abolitionism, the story of liberated slaves and missionaries who worked with them, and accounts of slaves achieving their freedom in the tumult of war. Sinha chronicles how abolitionist reformers, Black and white, male and female, understood the meaning of the Civil War and fought for change after four years of brutal carnage came to an end in April 1865. As the abolitionist U.S. Senator Charles Sumner proclaimed in June 1865 to the New England Freedmen’s Aid Society: “Liberty has been won, the battle of Equality is still pending.”
Building on Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction, Sinha uses the phrase “abolition democracy” to detail the new vision of democracy that radical Republicans and Black leaders came to embrace in the postwar period and into the twentieth century. For classroom teachers, the author’s discussion of what she calls “grassroots reconstruction”—the significance of a “range of actions by disenfranchised groups on the ground to expand the boundaries of national citizenship and belonging”—will serve to expand the curriculum in rich and meaningful ways. Sinha’s mining of Freedmen’s Bureau records offers readers a “glimpse into how freedpeople tried to deploy it in defense of themselves, their homes, families, and communities, even when confronted with racist or unsympathetic agents” (131). Sinha also details the impact of the Union Leagues and Republican clubs, along with Black conventions, and the actions of Black leaders at constitutional conventions in the South.