This week I finished:

The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920, Manisha Sinha: From the author of The Slave’s Cause: a History of Abolition, winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize and other awards, and one of my undergraduate teachers.

Like The Slave’s Cause, this book is encyclopedic in detail and being comprehensive. It treats the Civil War and Reconstruction as a different period, as the title suggests. I confess I knew little about this period in American history, so can’t speak to how this view compares with the old one.

A big point, as I understood it: Reconstruction didn’t fail. A counterrevolution against the new republic of authoritarianism and racism defeated it.

It covers many aspects of the revolution restoring a republic and the counterrevolution. The Civil War began it, beginning with the election of a president with a mandate to end slavery. The end of the war began what most people call Reconstruction: the Freedman’s Bureau and federal enforcement, activism by freedpeople, activism by women, and passing the three Reconstruction constitutional amendments.

Then enforcement waned, stymied by a president who liked the confederacy, then attacked by former Confederates and people who missed slavery, like the KKK and groups like it.

The troops who helped win the Civil War then were repurposed to accelerate imperial conquest of lands west, then around the Pacific, like Alaska, Hawaii, the Philippines, and smaller islands, and the Caribbean. Slavery had always required expansion and it continued. Along with imperialism, capitalism grew, leading to greater disparities in power relative to labor, wealth, and safety.

It ends with the completion of the last surge of Reconstruction progressivism: passing a fourth Reconstruction constitutional amendment, on women’s right to vote.

Sinha names many important players, their accomplishments, and their flaws.

One thing I looked for but didn’t find: what motivated people to counterrevolt? Why did people pursue and promote racism, imperialism, and capitalism even when they hurt so many people so obviously? Should we believe some people innately want power? Do some people innately believe skin color makes them better to the point they want to enslave and kill others? Were they born that way? If not, what motivated them to act so cruelly?

My upcoming book explains where these motivations come from, since it doesn’t make sense to me that being racist or imperialist could be innate. Do white people just want to take over the world because they are white? If so, do non-whites not want to? Or do also they want to, but don’t have the ability, in which case, would they if they got the ability? If so, the problem would seem to be not racism but what enabled whites to do it (and presumably Japanese in the 1930s).

I’m interested to talk to her about these questions.

I recommend the book. I can’t compare it to others on the topic since I haven’t read them. Most of my experience of this book was learning many historical events and name from scratch. The importance of so many things relevant to today that I didn’t know made me keep having to remind myself that I did learn a lot of things in school.

Since I believe a constitutional amendment is as necessary to solve our environmental situation as I understand Lincoln (and peers) came to believe one was necessary to solve our slavery situation, I was motivated to learn what worked after the passage of the Thirteenth and what didn’t.

Another focus of mine I’m curious her thoughts on: a main thrust of this book and Slave’s Cause was to show the importance of work by those low in status—that is, without power in the dominance hierarchy. To center or privilege the voice of the formerly marginalized, in this book, freedpeople; in Slave’s Cause, the enslaved. To learn from history how to act more effectively today, I see it as critical to see some new perspective.

I agree with Eric Williams and Ibram Kendi that racism didn’t cause slavery, but that slavery caused racism. In my upcoming book I ask and answer where slavery came from. There are many answers, but a key trail that led to slavery on the scale and with the cruelty of North American chattel slavery was colonialism (and its distance between landowners in Europe and enforcers in the Caribbean and the US), which arose from imperialism.

Which raises the question: what drove imperialism? Sinha’s book doesn’t ask so I saw it implying that some people are just racist and some harbor imperialist dreams.

By contrast, I see the pattern coming (the following paragraphs are a way-too-short summary of a few chapters in my upcoming book) from the combination of surpluses that could be stored, which emerged with agriculture, which emerged from the climate stabilizing 12,000 years ago and never before in human existence, and living unsustainably. Those surpluses led to cultures of defending and attacking to obtain food as well as living unsustainably, as populations grew to match the surpluses, thereby overshooting what other resources could sustain.

In other words, a culture living unsustainably means running out of some resource. If it doesn’t restore sustainability, it will need that resource or those resources. It may be able to trade for it, but if other cultures need it too and there isn’t enough for all, they will fight over it. Taking resources from another is imperialism. Taking their land is colonialism. Taking their labor and freedom is slavery. All necessarily result from living unsustainably.

If we could end racism today in all systems, hearts, and minds, but we continued living unsustainably, we would drive the forces and processes that would recreate imperialism, colonialism, and slavery. Even if we only created those three but distributed the misery, horrors, and unfreedom of slavery equitably by whatever you define as race, we’d still have as much misery, horror, and unfreedom.

What I’m getting at: if we want to restore freedom, health, safety, and security today or ever, we must live sustainably. I agree with Sinha on the importance of the voices, actions, and results of those with low status, like freedpeople and enslaved, but if we want to change today the unsustainability driving misery, horror, and unfreedom, we have to realize that nearly all of us today pollute, deplete, and fund plunder, lobbying, and advertising promoting more of those things. That is, we have status in today’s dominance hierarchy, independent of our skin color, national origin, sex, gender, etc. We with status are the most important people who could change things, yet our status protects us from being forced to change.

If we want to avert miserable results, we have to motivate people with intrinsic motivation. I see it as critical to show that we with status must change. Without taking away from actions of people without status or power who acted, I suggest that we can use role models from history of those who could have avoided acting but did anyway. Consider Union soldiers and Robert Carter III who voluntarily freed his slaves.

Sinha covers many abolitionist actions. She’s writing as a historian, not as a leader, but what motivated them to act so much and to take such risk? What other role models can we find for people who had status yet acted?

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