mexicanization of politics

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The Mexicanization of American Politics:The United States Transnational Path from

Civil War to Stabilization

GREGORY P. DOWNS

WHILE HISTORIANS TYPICALLY INTERPRETthe disputed 1876 U.S. presidential election

in terms of its impact upon postwar Reconstruction or its allegedly fraudulent out-

come, many contemporaries instead saw the crisis as proof of the nations funda-mental fragility. They worried that the line between violence and politicsobscured

by the Civil Warmight evaporate completely in the heat of a contested presidency.

With the disintegration of democratic institutions and habits, the U.S. might fall into

a spiral of civil wars. One anxious army general feared that the country might soon

collapse like Mexico and the Central American countries unless party leaders

tamped down the conflict. This turn to Mexican analogies to both describe anxieties

about civil war and chart a path to stabilization was not an anomaly but part of a

widespread, mostly forgotten discourse in the 1870s United States. The shorthand

terms Mexicanization and Mexicanized, born during overlapping 1860s wars,

spread rapidly after the disputed 1876 election, appearing in many hundreds of news-paper articles, in private correspondence, and on the floor of Congress. Soon-to-be

president Rutherford B. Hayes grimly disavowed the possibility of Mexicanization,

aHarpers Weeklycartoon mocked the Scarecrow of Mexicanism, andThe Nation

made a solemn observation: we hear every day strong expressions of a desire, and

also of a determination, that this government shall not be Mexicanized. Legal

scholar John Codman Hurd, in his 1881 political handbook, defined a Mexican-

ization of institutions in which all party contests have the character of civil war:

The same thing would occur in this country, he wrote, if a party, on the theory

of a war of ideas, should attempt to retain the control of the general Government

against the popular vote.1

A Mellon Foundation Fellowship from the CUNY Graduate Centers Center for the Humanities pro-vided time away from teach ing in 20082009 to begin this study, and grants from the Research Foun-dation of CUNY funded trips to archives in Ohio, Indiana, and Washington, D.C. Additionally, I wouldlike to thank Steven Hahn, Guy Ortolano, James Oakes, Scott Nelson, Clifford Rosenberg, AndreasKillen, Emily Greble, Judith Stein, Darren Staloff, Beth Baron, Anne Kornhauser, Danian Hu, AdriennePetty, Craig Daigle, Michael McCoyer, Gerardo Renique, Harold Forsythe, Daniel Amsterdam, DanielT. Rodgers, Konstantin Dierks, Sarah Knott, and theAmerican Historical Reviews anonymous reviewersfor their critiques and suggestions.

1 N. H. Davis to George B. McClellan, January 18, 1877, Reel 38, George Brinton McClellan Sr.Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. [hereafter LoC]; Thomas Nast, A Mexican Scarecrow,

Harpers Weekly, January 13, 1877, 24, http://elections.harpweek.com/1876/cartoon-1876-large.asp?UniqueID32&Year1876; What Is Mexicanization?The Nation, December 21, 1876, 365366; John


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On first glance, this discourse makes little sense. Not just U.S. narratives butmuch of modern history rests upon presumptions of a United States that was stable,analogous to Europe, and predatory toward Latin America. A discourse that usedopen-ended analogies to Mexico to explore the nations fragility fits none of theseframeworks. Furthermore, the U.S. did not, of course, sink into a cycle of civil wars

in the 1870s. Examining the Mexicanization discourse need not, however, invite at-tempts at counter-history; instead, analyzing the analogy makes aspects of the post-war U.S. newly visible. By reading the period through the lens of Mexicanization,historians can denaturalize the United States process of stabilization and considernew ways of thinking about state fragility, stability, and the practice of transnationalhistory. While U.S. historians have written voluminously about the postwar period,they have rarely focused on the countrys path toward stabilization. The failure toask why the end of the Civil War meant the end of all civil wars in the United Statesstems in part from the much-lamented, dissipating tendency of U.S. historians towork within exceptionalist frameworks, in part from the undeniable significance of

emancipation, Reconstruction, and sectional reconciliation in shaping the view ofthe postwar era.

But a tendency to discount stabilization extends beyond historians of the UnitedStates. Many scholars emphasize crisis and conflict even in periods of relative sta-bility, driven by the narrative power of rupture, the association of stability with ahis-torical stasis, and the negative example of triumphant national histories. While thebinary of stability and instability can indeed produce flat, decontextualized analysis,stabilizationthe dynamic, manmade process by which states emerge from crisesis as challenging a historical problem as revolution, argued Charles S. Maier.2

Nowhere are these opportunities more evident than in the famed debate about sta-

bility after the English Civil War. Provoked by J. H. Plumbs argument that stabilitywas important, rare, and deliberately fashioned, generations of scholars explored thebrevity of most crises, the dynamic nature of stability, and the roles of state structure,popular nationalism, political statecraft, and institutional fragility in fostering sta-bility or instability.3 For the twentieth century, Maier argued crucially for separating

Codman Hurd, The Theory of Our National Existence, as Shown by the Action of the Government of theUnited States since 1861 (Boston, 1881), 525526.

2 Charles S. Maier, The Two Postwar Eras and the Conditions for Stability in Twentieth-CenturyWestern Europe, American Historical Review 86, no. 2 (April 1981): 327352.

3 J. H. Plumb, The Origins of Political Stability in England, 16751725 (Boston, 1967); Plumb, SirRobert Walpole: The Making of a Statesman(Boston, 1956); Plumb,Sir Robert Walpole: The Kings Minister(Boston, 1961); Theodore K. Rabb,The Struggle for Stability in Early Modern Europe (New York, 1976);Paul D. Halliday,Dismembering the Body Politic: Partisan Politics in Englands Towns, 16501730 (NewYork, 1998); John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 16881783 (Cam-bridge, Mass., 1990); Jonathan Scott,Englands Troubles: Seventeenth-Century English Political Instabilityin European Context (New York, 2000); Jon Kukla, Order and Chaos in Early America: Political andSocial Stability in Pre-Restoration Virginia,American Historical Review90, no. 2 (April 1985): 275298;Jack P. Greene, The Growth of Political Stability: An Interpretation of Political Development in the

Anglo-American Colonies, 16601760, in John Parker and Carol Urness, eds., The American Revo-lution: A Heritage of Change (Minneapolis, 1975), 2552. For competing views of an emerging popularnational identity as a source of stability or of conflict, see Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation,17071837(New Haven, Conn., 1992), and Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture,and Imperialism in England, 17151785(New York, 1995). A recent overview of these debates is Richard

Connors, The Nature of Stability in the Augustan Age,Parliamentary History28, no. 1 (February 2009):2740. A fine analysis of the relationship between Plumbs work and contemporary arguments about

388 Gregory P. Downs


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the process of stabilization from the condition of stability. Maier, with AndrewPort and others, asked not why the Cold War era ended but why it lasted so long. 4

Most recently, Jose Javier Ruiz Ibanez and Gaetano Sabatinis examination of sta-bilization in the early modern Spanish monarchy explored the performative role ofstabilization, as rulers, after conquest, constructed a seeming continuity between

past and present, masking the role of the state by locating stability in society andculture.5

While historians underplayed the importance of stability, scholars in politicalscience, international studies, and area studies developed a vast, if often problematic,literature on state instability. Spurred first by the end of Cold War support for tot-tering governments, then by dubious but commonplace associations between statefailure and terrorism, international institutions and Western governments devotedconsiderable resources to the problem of stabilizing weak states.6 As flattened, de-contextualized lists of failed states piled up, critical scholars within those fieldsshifted away from the successful/failed state binary to an open-ended analysis of the

continuum of state fragility, recognizing the dynamic coexistence of stability andinstability.7 In other respects, however, the recent social science literature has pro-duced more heat than light. It remains largely ahistorical, expressly premised uponthe questionable assertion that state instability is a new product of decolonizationand the end of the Cold War. Absent engagement with the processes by which fragilestates stabilized or analysis of the problem of over-stabilized or dictatorial states,scholars cannot construct useful theories of stabilization. Nor can they explain the

politics and the practice of history is Guy Ortolano, Human Science or a Human Face? Social Historyand the Two Cultures Controversy, Journal of British Studies 43, no. 4 (October 2004): 482505.

4 Charles S. Maier, In Search of Stability: Explorations in Historical Political Economy(New York,1987), 263264; Maier, The Two Postwar Eras and the Conditions for Stability; Andrew I. Port, Con-flict and Stability in the German Democratic Republic (New York, 2007).

5 Jose Javier Ruiz Ibanez and Gaetano Sabatini, Monarchy as Conquest: Violence, Social Op-portunity, and Political Stability in the Establishment of the Hispanic Monarchy, Journal of ModernHistory 81, no. 3 (September 2009): 501536.

6 Much of the recent work has grown out of older social scientific investigations of state formation,including Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 9901992 (Malden, Mass., 1992);Bruce D. Porter, War and the Rise of the State: The Military Foundations of Modern Politics (New York,1994); Joel S. Migdal,State in Society: Studying How States and Societies Transform and Constitute OneAnother(New York, 2001); Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, vol. 2:The Rise of Classes andNation-States, 17601914(New York, 1993); Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies(New Haven, Conn., 1968).

In the vast literature on state failure, see particularly Gerald B. Helman and Steven R. Ratner,Saving Failed States,Foreign Policy89 (Winter 19921993): 320; Robert H. Dorff, Democratizationand Failed States: The Challenge of Ungovernability, Parameters 26, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 1731;Jeffrey Herbst,States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control(Princeton, N.J.,2000); Stuart Eizenstat and Robert I. Rotberg, The Failure and Collapse of Nation-States: Breakdown,Prevention, and Repair, in Robert I. Rotberg, ed.,When States Fail: Causes and Consequences(Prince-ton, N.J., 2004), 150; Stuart E. Eizenstat, John Edward Porter, and Jeremy M. Weinstein, RebuildingWeak States,Foreign Affairs84, no. 1 (January/February 2005): 134146; Seth D. Kaplan, Fixing FragileStates: A New Paradigm for Development(Westport, Conn., 2008); Marla C. Haims, David C. Gompert,Gregory F. Treverton, and Brooke K. Stearns, Breaking the Failed-State Cycle (Santa Monica, Calif.,2008).

7 See sharp criticisms from, among others, Jonathan Hill, Beyond the Other? A Postcolonial Cri-tique of the Failed State Thesis,African Identities3, no. 2 (October 2005): 139154; Morten Bs andKathleen M. Jennings, Failed States and State Failure: Threats or Opportunities, Globalizations

4, no. 4 (December 2007): 475485; Charles T. Call, The Fallacy of the Failed State, Third WorldQuarterly29, no. 8 (December 2008): 14911507.

The Mexicanization of American Politics 389


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irony that models of state stabilityespecially England and the United Statesarethemselves products of periods of deep, if past, violent instability.8

Given the worrisome interconnections between state instability studies and theneeds of the international organizations that sponsor them, it is surely tempting forhistorians to ignore the field altogether. This would, however, be a missed oppor-

tunity. Processes of state stabilization exerted an enormous influence over the fieldsscholarly tools, and also, of course, over the people who lived through those mo-ments. Despite globalization, states remain hugely influential in peoples lives, andnot solely as instruments to discipline, punish, and exterminate. If, as E. P. Thomp-son warned in the 1950s, stability has its own kind of Terror, the body counts ofethnic massacres and humanitarian disasters stand as a stark reminder that stateretreat can produce not just Terror but outright Horror. After a generation of schol-arship that located mass violence in state action, Mark Mazower has placed stateretreat and state failurenot state tyrannyat the center of twentieth-century massviolence. Even James C. Scott, a leading critic of the high modern state, calls it the

vexed institution that is the ground of both our freedoms and our unfreedoms.9 Atthe level of analysis, the stabilization of the United States and a few other countriesdrives a great deal of social and political theory about why some nations avoidedrevolution, communism, and fascism, as well as the so-called Anglo model for dem-ocratic stability. A United States enmeshed in decades of ongoing civil wars wouldhave meant not simply a different nation but a different set of concepts about rev-olution, crisis, democracy, and capitalism.10

Even though U.S. stabilization is crucial to many theories, to the construction ofthe twentieth-century international order, and to the countrys own history, we knowprecious little about it. Why didnt the United States succumb to a cycle of civil wars,

as many contemporary observers predicted or feared? Scholars have failed to answerthat question because they have largely failed to ask it. The Norths decisive CivilWar victory and the countrys twentieth-century power made its stability seem in-

8 Most models of instability emphasize the Eastern Hemisphere. For models of democratic stabilityin Latin America, see Mitchell A. Seligson, Toward a Model of Democratic Stability: Political Culturein Central America,Estudios interdisciplinarios de America Latina y el Caribe11, no. 2 (JulyDecember2000): 529; Miguel Angel Centeno, Blood and Debt: War and the Nation-State in Latin America (Uni-

versity Park, Pa., 2002); Josep M. Colomer, Taming the Tiger: Voting Rights and Political Instabilityin Latin America, Latin American Politics and Society 46, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 2958; J. SamuelValenzuela, Making Sense of Suffrage Expansion and Electoral Institutions in Latin America: A Com-ment on Colomers Tiger, ibid., 5967.

9 E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (New York, 1975), 258; MarkMazower, Violence and the State in the Twentieth Century, American Historical Review 107, no. 4(October 2002): 11581178; James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve theHuman Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn., 1998), 6.

10 In the middle of the twentieth century, the question of the United States stability was a centralone for historians. As a way to discuss why communism and fascism failed in the country, the issuesparked powerful efforts to capture a distinct U.S. cultural consensus that served as the counter-modelto state instability elsewhere. Werner Sombart, Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?, trans.Patricia M. Hocking and C. T. Husbands (New York, 1976); Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks,It Didnt Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States (New York, 2000); Louis Hartz, TheLiberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution(NewYork, 1955); George M. Fredrickson, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of theUnion (New York, 1965); Daniel T. Rodgers, Exceptionalism, in Anthony Molho and Gordon S.Wood, eds., Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past (Princeton, N.J., 1998), 2140;

Michael Kammen, The Problem of American Exceptionalism: A Reconsideration,American Quarterly45, no. 1 (March 1993): 143.



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evitable, even uninteresting. Within Civil War studies, the triumph of the funda-mentalist interpretation of the causal role of slavery also oddly displaced the ques-tion.11 In portraying the Civil War as the resolution of the contradiction of slavery,historians inadvertently suggest that another civil war could not have occurred. Inthe process, they forget that civil wars often pile atop one another, fragility spawning

new fragilities. After the American South learned the hard lesson of its militaryweakness, the Civil War surely would not have been repeated, but contemporariesworried instead about a different type of civil war, one that would not be sectionaland Southern, but internecine and Northern.12 Working through the Civil Warslens of defeated regionalism, scholars treat southern, western, and urban crises asdistinct problems, not as aspects of what Charles Maier called nineteenth-centurystates central concern with internal territorial control.13 Historians have spent moreenergy analyzing the later-developing reconciliationist memory of the Civil War thanthe institutional and political events that made such cultural developments possi-ble.14

Although other moments reveal the nations postwar fragilityincluding Con-gresss 1865 refusal to seat southern delegations, the impeachment of President An-drew Johnson, the public outcry against the growth of the Ku Klux Klan, and theviolent 1870s overthrow of southern governmentsthe 1876 electoral crisis is par-ticularly important because it contained the potential for national strife. The decade-long rapprochement between northern Democratic Unionists and southern Con-federates raised the possibility of a northern-led armed resistance, and inspiredpotentially destabilizing national paramilitary organizations led by General GeorgeB. McClellan. Additionally, this crisis presented the chance for actual institutionalbreakdown in the possibility that both Democrat Samuel J. Tilden and Republican

Rutherford B. Hayes would claim title to the White House on the basis of conflictingacts of the Senate and House of Representatives. In turn, the crisis reveals the roleof democratic retrenchment in manmade processes of stabilization and suggests thecomplex way that stabilization is made institutionally, then remade rhetorically. In-stead, however, too often the 1876 election becomes in the historiography a site offraud that outrages and also reinforces the centrality of electoral democracy to thenations story instead of prompting deeper examination of the central role of vio-lence in broadly defining what politics is.15 This narrow vision also causes scholars

11 Building upon interpretations by early postwar northern writers, the fundamentalist interpreta-tion of slaverys central role in causing the Civil War triumphed over revisionism in 1950s and 1960s

works such as Kenneth M. Stampp,And the War Came: The North and the Secession Crisis(Baton Rouge,La., 1950), and John Hope Franklin, The Militant South, 18001861 (Cambridge, Mass., 1956). Thecrowning fundamentalist achievement may be James M. McPhersons still-definitive Battle Cry of Free-dom: The Civil War Era(New York, 1988). For an ambitious rethinking of the periodization of Civil Warscholarship based upon paradigmatic research agendas, not historiographical arguments, see Frank Tow-ers, Partisans, New History, and Modernization: The Historiography of the Civil Wars Causes, 18612011,Journal of the Civil War Era 1, no. 2 (June 2011): 237264.

12 Quarterly Book-Table, Methodist Quarterly Review 53 (April 1871): 329335.13 Charles S. Maier, Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the

Modern Era, American Historical Review 105, no. 3 (June 2000): 807831.14 A sophisticated analysis of politicized national memories of the Civil War is David W. Blight,Race

and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (New York, 2002).15 Like much of American political history, the vast literature on the 1876 campaign is deeply re-

searched, vividly written, and also at times trapped within assumptions about the United States dis-tinctive politics that artificially narrow the literatures questions and impact. Rarely have historians



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to overlook the provocative, if ephemeral, vision at play in Mexicanization discourse,a portrayal of a hemispheric age of republican crisis, in which the Americas stoodtogether as the final defenders of republics against an increasingly conservative, mo-narchical Europe.

Because state fragility and state stabilization are inherently relational terms,

meaningless without external referents, their historical study has also been limitedby the historical practice of transnationalism. Questions of fragility and stabilizationare at once transnational, comparative, and domestically political. Then and now,discussions about the interconnection between countries crises circulated trans-nationally through networks of political observers, prompted comparative analysesof state instability, and figured in domestic political debates about stabilization. Butthe practice of transnationalism, born in binary opposition to comparative history,too often forecloses the very possibilities that it should raise. In seeking circulatorynetworks for ideas, capital, and people, transnational scholars invariably find them.Although they have developed nuanced methods to deal with power imbalances and

national contexts, the circulation remains the story, producing an often-repetitive,predictable literature that argues against the straw man of self-contained nation-hood. But circulatory networks are only one in a series of interconnected structuresthat affect history.16 Dividing internal politics from transnational movement fails notonly to capture the potential of political history but even to describe the world thatcontemporaries experienced. Although further studies of the circulation of Mexi-

moved beyond the controversial outcome of the election to the broader questions the crisis raised. Formore than 125 years, scholars have argued, without resolution, whether Tilden or Hayes actually de-served victory, an irresolvable debate that ends up treating the election as an exception to the flow of

democracy, rather than as an analytic window into what democracy is. Another, related body of literaturehas emphasized the elections central role in limiting national political support for Reconstruction ofthe South, analyzing the role of railroad lobbyists, southern Democrats, and Hayess emissaries in ne-gotiating the Compromise of 1877 to put an end to congressional delays. Michael F. Holt, By One Vote:The Disputed Presidential Election of 1876 (Lawrence, Kans., 2008); C. Vann Woodward, Reunion andReaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction (Boston, 1951); Allan Peskin, WasThere a Compromise of 1877? Journal of American History 60, no. 1 (June 1973): 6375; C. VannWoodward, Yes, There Was a Compromise of 1877, ibid., 215223; Michael Les Benedict, SouthernDemocrats in the Crisis of 18761877: A Reconsideration ofReunion and Reaction,Journal of SouthernHistory 46, no. 4 (November 1980): 489524; Keith Ian Polakoff, The Politics of Inertia: The Election of1876 and the End of Reconstruction (Baton Rouge, La., 1973); Roy Morris Jr., Fraud of the Century:Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden, and the Stolen Election of 1876 (New York, 2003).

16 Frederick Cooper, What Is the Concept of Globalization Good For? An African HistoriansPerspective, African Affairs 100, no. 399 (April 2001): 189213, here 189190; David Thelen, TheNation and Beyond: Transnational Perspectives on United States History, Journal of American History86, no. 3 (December 1999): 965975, here 965; Michael McGerr, The Price of the New TransnationalHistory, American Historical Review96, no. 4 (October 1991): 10561067, here 1067; Ian Tyrrell, Re-flections on the Transnational Turn in United States History: Theory and Practice, Journal of GlobalHistory 4, no. 3 (2009): 453474; Tyrrell, Making Nations/Making States: American Historians in theContext of Empire,Journal of American History86, no. 3 (December 1999): 10151044; Tyrrell, Trans-national Nation: United States History in Global Perspective since 1789 (New York, 2007), 3; ThomasBender, Historians, the Nation, and the Plenitude of Narratives, in Bender, ed., Rethinking AmericanHistory in a Global Age(Berkeley, Calif., 2002), 122. Recent, particularly nuanced efforts at nineteenth-century transnational U.S. history include Ian Tyrrell, Reforming the World: The Creation of AmericasMoral Empire (Princeton, N.J., 2010); Sven Beckert, Emancipation and Empire: Reconstructing theWorldwide Web of Cotton Production in the Age of the American Civil War, American HistoricalReview109, no. 5 (December 2004): 14051438; Matthew Pratt Guterl, American Mediterranean: South-

ern Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation(Cambridge, Mass., 2008); Timothy Mason Roberts, DistantRevolutions: 1848 and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism (Charlottesville, Va., 2009).



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canization discourse back into Mexican politics and culture in the 1880s and 1890swill likely prove fruitful, pausing to survey their impact upon the domestic politicsof the United States in the 1870s allows us to see the strangely vulnerable nationsreconstruction in new ways.

WHILE THE DISCOURSE OF MEXICANIZATION settled into domestic U.S. politics in the1870s, it emerged in the 1860s through a transnational circulation that began inMexico.17 For most of their histories, the two countries had defined themselves inopposition to each other. Although there were flurries of analogizing about sisterrepublics during Latin American independence movements, those openings seemedlong forgotten by the 1830s as U.S. expatriates instigated the secession of Texas fromMexico. When the United States launched a devastating war of territorial acquisitionin 1845, even U.S. critics of the Mexican-American War saw their neighbor nationas simultaneously prone to both anarchy and dictatorship, too little order or too

much.18 During the late 1850s, however, the emergence of parallel political parties,the Liberals in Mexico and the Republicans in the U.S., opened up new room forcomparisons. In concurrent 1861 crisesas Europeans occupied Veracruz and theConfederacy secededAbraham Lincoln, northern capitalists, and journalists madeMexico both an analogue and a warning, what the United States might but must notbecome. Anticipating the doubled use of the analogy, one university president in-voked Mexico to demonstrate the United States vulnerability to the laws, analogies,and outgrowths of the historical and political life of our race. At the same time, theanalogy was a warning meant to inspire young men to fight against its fruition, thepossibility that the disgraceful history of Mexico would be planted on our soil. 19

U.S. Secretary of State William Seward tied European support for the Confederacy17 Mark Wahlgren Summers is the only scholar to examine the discourse of Mexicanization during

this era. His nearly unsurpassed knowledge of the period gives his work depth and verve. By treatingMexicanization and other fears as inherently baseless, however, Summers assumes away the very ques-tion he could have asked. Instead, his work begins with the presumption that these hysterics cannot tellus much about the structural basis of U.S. politics, much less reveal any parallels between Mexico andthe United States. Summers,A Dangerous Stir? Fear, Paranoia, and the Making of Reconstruction(ChapelHill, N.C., 2009); Summers,Party Games: Getting, Keeping, and Using Power in Gilded Age Politics (Cha-pel Hill, N.C., 2004), 55, 116, 123; Summers, Party Games: The Art of Stealing Elections in the Late-Nineteenth-Century United States,Journal of American History88, no. 2 (September 2001): 424 435.

18 Francisco Valdes-Ugalde, Janus and the Northern Colossus: Perceptions of the United Statesin the Building of the Mexican Nation,Journal of American History86, no. 2 (September 1999): 568600;David Thelen, Rethinking History and the Nation-State: Mexico and the United States, ibid., 438 452;Rodrigo Lazo, La Famosa Filadelfia: The Hemispheric American City and Constitutional Debates,in Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine, eds., Hemispheric American Studies(New Brunswick, N.J.,2008), 5774; Rafe Blaufarb, The Western Question: The Geopolitics of Latin American Indepen-dence, American Historical Review112, no. 3 (June 2007): 712741; Jeremy Adelman, Sovereignty andRevolution in the Iberian Atlantic (Princeton, N.J., 2006); Andrew R. L. Cayton, Continental Politics:Liberalism, Nationalism, and the Appeal of Texas in the 1820s, in Jeffrey L. Pasley, Andrew W. Rob-ertson, and David Waldstreicher, eds., Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History ofthe Early American Republic (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2004), 303327.

19 Remarks Concerning Secession, c. January 1921, 1861, in Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln,ed. Roy P. Basler, vol. 4:18601861(New Brunswick, N.J., 1953), 175176; John William Draper,Historyof the American Civil War, vol. 2:Containing the Events from the Inauguration of President Lincoln to theProclamation of Emancipation of the Slaves (New York, 1868), 47; William C. Morey, ed., Papers andAddresses of Martin B. Anderson, LL.D., 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1895), 1: 130138; Thomas David Schoo-

nover,Dollars over Dominion: The Triumph of Liberalism in MexicanUnited States Relations, 18611867(Baton Rouge, La., 1978), 114 118.



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to French backing of Mexicos newly installed Emperor Maximilian as twin assaultson an American republican system.20 Together, they constituted what one U.S.diplomat termed monarchists effort to destroy the dragon of democracy in theAmerican hemisphere and preserve what Belgiums King Leopold I called the mo-narchical-aristocratic principle.21 Conditions on the ground seemed to verify these

fears. Spain reestablished control over the Dominican Republic; Guatemala, Ec-uador, and Bolivia considered joining either the Mexican or the French Empire; andGuatemalas dictator, Rafael Carrera, overthrew El Salvadors Liberal president,Gerardo Barrios. In response, the U.S. broadcast Liberal propaganda across thehemisphere. One such cartoon depicted Liberal president Benito Juarez and Lincolnas white knights preserving the freedom of the Americas and the existence ofall American republics.22

At the center of this circulation of ideas stood Mexican Liberals, especially theyoung diplomat Mat as Romero. Serving as minister of finance and then envoy tothe United States, Romero seems to have both believed in the sentiment of sister

republics and manipulated the idea to gain support. From the beginning, he triedto convince Lincoln, with limited success, that the fate of the nations of Americaare bound together.23 Although Romeros goals were commonplace for diplomats,his effectiveness at public relations set him apart. At numerous dinners, banquets,and lectures, he hosted influential officialsincluding fifty congressmen at sixteenbanquets in January 1864 aloneto convince them, in the words of CongressmanJames G. Blaine, that the French-backed Mexican Empire was at war with all ourinstitutions and our habits of political life.24 When the conclusion of the U.S. CivilWar threatened to decouple the nations woes, Romero kicked off a new frenzy ofpublic meetings and banquets in 1865 and 1866 to celebrate the general American

brotherhood against a grand conspiracy of the upholders of absolutism in Europe.The discourse was not flat, the rhetoric not merely celebratory. Discussions of thecontinental struggle between monarchy and republicanism frequently led to crit-icisms that the United States had, in the words of a Chilean minister, never doneus that justice of comparison according to history and truth.25 The effort was inmany ways effective; Romero confidant General Ulysses S. Grant did not consider

20 Message of the President of the United States to the Two Houses of Congress, at the Commencementof the Second Session of the Thirty-Seventh Congress (Washington, D.C., 1861), 6570.

21 George William Curtis, ed.,The Correspondence of John Lothrop Motley, 2 vols. (New York, 1900),2: 347348; Thomas Schoonover, Napoleon Is Coming! Maximilian Is Coming? The International His-tory of the Civil War in the Caribbean Basin, in Robert E. May, ed., The Union, the Confederacy, andthe Atlantic Rim (West Lafayette, Ind., 1995), 101130; James M. McPherson, The Whole Family ofMan: Lincoln and the Last Best Hope Abroad, ibid., 131158; David M. Potter, The Civil War in theHistory of the Modern World: A Comparative View, in Potter, ed., The South and the Sectional Conflict(Baton Rouge, La., 1968), 287299.

22 Alfred Jackson Hanna and Kathryn Abbey Hanna, Napoleon III and Mexico: American Triumphover Monarchy (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1971), 185 197; Schoonover,Dollars over Dominion, 114118; LesterD. Langley, Struggle for the American Mediterranean: United StatesEuropean Rivalry in the Gulf-Carib-bean, 17761904 (Athens, Ga., 1976), 125129, 142.

23 Message of the President of the United States to the Two Houses of Congress, at the Commencementof the First Session of the Thirty-Eighth Congress, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1863), 2: 12461248.

24 Schoonover,Dollars over Dominion, 180182.25 Message of the President of the United States, of March 20, 1866, Relating to the Condition of Affairs

in Mexico in Answer to a Resolution of the House of December 11, 1865 (Washington, D.C., 1866), 198,607, 650654.



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the Civil War completely terminated while the French remained in Mexico, andcongressional Radicals pressed the administration to support Mexicos Liberalsmore aggressively.26 These analogies necessarily simplified the historical record byexaggerating Mexican instability, flattening differences between Mexican Liberalsand U.S. Republicans, domesticating Mexicos wars, and internationalizing the

United States conflict.The discourse survived because it diagnosed the U.S. governments ongoing fail-

ure to exert territorial control.27 In particular, Mexicanization suggested the absenceof a central authority strong enough to restrain violence in politics or control thecountrys peripheries. The term also tied together a series of stability crises, whichmight be called a two governments problem.28 In Alabama, Texas, Louisiana, andArkansas, paramilitary organizations and federal troop interventions led to dual gov-ernors or legislatures that ran competing governments between 1870 and 1874. Twogovernors are becoming too familiar in our practice, General William T. Shermancomplained.29 Fights between competing local governments led to outright massa-

cres in New Orleans and Grant Parish, Louisiana, and private armies of Ku KluxKlan, White Line, and White League members ruled large sections of the easternPiedmont and the Mississippi River Valley. Republicans looked south and farthersouth for explanations, calling southern warlordism an armed revolution, in thewords of Indiana senator Oliver P. Morton, a little less sudden than those revo-lutions which have distinguished the states of Mexico and the countries of SouthAmerica.30 If southern society continued to tip toward anarchy, a North Carolinajudge told a Senate investigating committee, we shall become, as they say, Mexi-canized.31 By the mid-1870s, the United States seemed broadly, not just regionally,fragile. Looking west, the Lakota Sioux victory over federal troops at Little Big Horn

and Comanche control over parts of the U.S.-Mexican border raised questions aboutthe nations sovereignty over its own territory in a period that Elliott West has termedthe countrys Greater Reconstruction.32 In working-class uprisings and ongoingmobbing, the nations cities did not look much more pacified. In early 1876, Chicagopolitics dissolved when two men claimed the mayors office, seated themselves sep-

26 Mat as Romero,Mexican Lobby: Matas Romero in Washington, 18611867, ed. and trans. ThomasDavid Schoonover (Lexington, Ky., 1986), 23, 6465.

27 Maier, Consigning the Twentieth Century to History.28 I use the phrase two governments problem to capture the basic crisis of authority in the post-

bellum United States. Although it is easily lost among the myriad tales of political violence, the ongoingproblem of resolving disputed elections posed a particularly severe test of a republics resiliency. Re-cently many historians have emphasized postwar southern political violence. Steven Hahn portrayed this

violence as central to, not a failure of, a mid-century political style that he calls paramilitary. Hahn, ANation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South, from Slavery to the Great Migrations(New York, 2003), chap. 6. See also Carole T. Emberton, The Politics of Protection: Violence and thePolitical Culture of Reconstruction (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 2006).

29 William T. Sherman to John Sherman, January 19, 1877, Reel 23, William T. Sherman Papers,LoC.

30 Speech of Hon. O. P. Morton, Delivered in the United States Senate, January 19, 1876, on the Mis-sissippi Election (Washington, D.C., 1876), 3.

31 Report on the Alleged Outrages in the Southern States by the Select Committee of the Senate (Wash-ington, D.C., 1871), 91.

32 Summers,A Dangerous Stir?, 261264; Elliott West, The Last Indian War: The Nez Perce Story (NewYork, 2009), xxxxi; Pekka Hamalainen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven, Conn., 2008), chap. 8,

Conclusion; Brian DeLay, War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War(NewHaven, Conn., 2008).



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arately in City Hall, and roused armed crowds with talk of revolution. Althoughbusiness leaders, spooked by the impact on the citys credit, forced a legal resolution,the outcome seemed very much in doubt for weeks. Together these crises raiseddoubts about the possibility of drawing any semblance of a line between violence andnormal politics in the postwar United States.33

Like any discourse, Mexicanization was open-ended enough to offer contradic-tory readings of the complexity of Mexican history. Pointing to the famous seizuresof power by Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, Democrats after 1868 developed a coun-terdiscourse of Mexicanization as military dictatorship. They decried the abundance,not absence, of central authority, analogizing President Ulysses S. Grant to SantaAnna to warn that the Mexican disposition to look to force as the means for settlingpolitical disputes is becoming more influential in the United States.34 Continuedfederal occupation would lead to the Mexicanizing of our great country, with con-tinually recurring civil wars.35 More broadly, for much of the 1870s, Americansdoubted and debated the old sense of the nations providential history, once rooted

in faith in republics or in Puritan belief in a divinely chartered city on a hill. Whilemany prominent Americansincluding Wesleyan University president Cyrus Fossused the 1876 Centennial to revive a Christian exceptionalism that has guided allour progress and made the Civil War proof of the nations essential stability, otherswondered whether the Civil War foretold more disruptions to come.36

THE 1876 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION raised the prospect that regional fragility wouldspread to the center, creating a two governments problem in Washington, D.C. The

fears were neither historically nor analytically thin. The United States long-termstability masks the institutional fragility of presidential democracy; absent effectivepower-sharing, the prospect of a plurality- or even minority-elected president fre-quently prompts violence in other single-executive democracies. Sherman, in fact,worried that he and the army would be put into a position to choose between twopresidents in the electoral crisis.37 At first this seemed unlikely. After the Panic of1873 destroyed confidence in the Republicans, Democrats swept the 1874 midterms,reduced the size of the military, delayed appropriations for military pay, promisedan end to federal oversight of the Reconstruction South, and were favored to winthe White House. On election night, Tilden won a popular majority and appearedto have prevailed narrowly in the Electoral College, thanks in part to Democratic

33 ChicagoTribune, April 9, 1876, 1, 12; Chicago Inter Ocean, April 10, 1876, 67; April 12, 1876,1, 8; May 13, 1876, 8; May 23, 1876, 5; May 26, 1876, 8; Richard Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics:Class Conflict and the Origins of Modern Liberalism in Chicago, 186497 (Urbana, Ill., 1998), chap. 2.

34 Baltimore Sun, August 6, 1867, 2.35 Samuel Smith Nicholas, Conservative Essays, Legal and Political, vol. 3: Reconstruction, Georgia

& Mississippi Cases, Civil Rights Act, Cotton Tax, &c. (Louisville, 1867), 115, 186.36 Middletown, Conn., Daily Constitution, June 26, 1876, 2; Frederick Saunders, ed., Our National

Centennial Jubilee: Orations, Addresses and Poems Delivered on the Fourth of July, 1876In the SeveralStates of the Union(New York, 1877), 1718, 4951; Philadelphia Inquirer, December 1, 1876, 2; Susan-Mary Grant, Americans Forging a New Nation, 18601916, in Don H. Doyle and Marco AntonioPamplona, eds., Nationalism in the New World (Athens, Ga., 2006), 8098; Edward J. Blum, Reforgingthe White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 18651898 (Baton Rouge, La., 2005);

Nicholas Guyatt, Providence and the Invention of the United States, 16071876 (New York, 2007).37 William T. Sherman to John Sherman, January 19, 1877, Reel 23, William T. Sherman Papers, LoC.



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intimidation of black southern Republicans. Encouraged by Republican observers,however, officials in Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida used evidence of Dem-ocratic fraud to discount enough votes to tilt their statesand the White HousetoHayes.38

The nations fragility had its roots not just in ephemeral losses of legitimacy or

popular recourse to violence but, like many state stability crises, in basic institutionalbreakdown. The Constitution seemed to offer too few or too many recourses for adisputed election. With the Senate still heavily Republican, the House of Repre-sentatives Democratic, both parties could plausibly chart a course to the WhiteHouse. When Louisiana, South Carolina, Florida, and Oregon sent competing elec-toral returns to Washington, Republicans argued that the president of the Senatespower to count the electoral votes gave him the right to determine which votescounted. Democrats claimed that the House of Representatives constitutional au-thority to settle unresolved elections empowered that body to determine whether anelection had been resolved. Throughout November, December, and January, the

prospect that each house might name a different president raised real fears of apartisan civil war, a concern expressed largely through the term Mexicanization.

Once again, a particular actor played a key role in tying together available, butnot inevitable, strands of discourse. At a celebrated pre-election address in October1876, CincinnatiCommercialeditor Murat Field Marshal Halstead made the pres-idential campaign a test of Mexicanization. Having been cut from the partys in-nermost circles for disloyalty in 1872, Halstead now leapt at the chance to rally thewavering Republican base at a mass meeting at New Yorks Cooper Institute. There,in a line that was reprinted and distributed across the country, he warned that a closeresult could reduce the American Republic to the grade of Mexico. The lesson of

the Civil War that should never depart from us is, that the American people haveno exemption from the ordinary fate of humanity. Halstead explored the interre-lationship between institutional, social, and financial fragility. Institutional break-down threatened financial confidence, thus prompting further institutional break-down and even more popular alienation. At first his hyperbolic claim that Tildenwould bankrupt the United States through Confederate war claims created the mostcontroversy. Both Hayess and Tildens closest advisers considered that argument thecampaignspiece de resistance. After the election, however, attention turned to Hal-steads other prediction, that a civil war would result from a strangely overlookedinstitutional failing: the lack of a mechanism to resolve presidential succession crises.

For several months, the crisis suggested the power of Halsteads warning that a dis-puted Presidential election would Mexicanize us.39

38 In Oregon, Democrats contested one Republican elector who they argued was disqualified ontechnical grounds.

39 Murat Halstead,The War Claims of the South: The New Southern Confederacy, with the DemocraticParty as Its Claim Agency, Demanding Indemnity for Conquest, and Threatening a Disputed PresidentialElectionThe Candidacy of Hayes and the Relief of the Republic from Danger (Cincinnati, 1876), 3, 5,9, 36, 37; Rutherford Hayes to Murat Halstead, October 14, 1876, Box 1, Folder 7, Cincinnati HistoryLibrary and Archives, Cincinnati Museum Center, Cincinnati, Ohio; Halstead to Hayes, September 19,1876, Rutherford B. Hayes Papers, Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center [hereafter RBHPC], Fre-mont, Ohio; Charles A. Boynton to William Henry Smith, October 22, 1876, Box 3, Folder 4, William

Henry Smith Papers, Manuscript Collections, MSS 2, Ohio Historical Society Archives/Library, Co-lumbus, Ohio; Richard Jacobs Haldeman to August Belmont, October 31, 1876, Box 7, Catalogued



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Halsteads metaphor provoked a complex, divided response that placed the prob-lem of fragility at the center of public discussion. In the first weeks of the crisis, herepeatedly charged Democrats with Mexican statesmanship, and fellow newspa-pers in the Western Associated Pressincluding the Chicago Tribuneand the Lou-isville Courier-Journaladvanced, mocked, refuted, and analyzed his analogy.40 His

Democratic interlocutors, led by the Indianapolis Sentinel, turned the charge backupon the Republicans, especially the allegedly dictatorial President Grant, the manbest calculated to Mexicanize the government. Only a Tilden victory would rescuethe country from being still further Mexicanized.41As the discourse circulated, jour-nalists worried that a pronunciamento from Tildens Gramercy Park mansionwould drive the country deep in civil war, and businessmen complained that aMexicanized administration means the disorder and thriftlessness of Mexico.42 Thediscourse was simultaneously reductive and open-ended, both arrogantly insultingand also revealingly vulnerable. U.S. writers rarely used Mexicanization to signifypositive attributes, but they did deploy it to suggest common, unflattering charac-

teristics. Mexico was distinct but accessible, what the United States might be butcould not permit itself to become. The more contemplative Nation, foreshadowingthe work of later interpreters, turned from institutional to social explanations, de-fining Mexicanization as a particular state of mind, the absence of a popular cul-ture of constitutionalism or republicanism. Only good habits of legality could pre-vent instability. Southern violence, in turn, threatened exactly those habits. We havenot cured the South, we have ourselves caught the contagion. During this period,rigid, biological racism rarely overtook the discourse. Even when critics dismissedthe comparison between the United States and Mexico, they usually distinguishedbetween the countries on the basis of environmental, cultural, religious, and his-

torical traits, not race.43

The discourse remained pervious to outside events; rather than a linguistic hallof mirrors, it was a chamber that diffused and altered, but did not exclude, externallight. When Mexican general Porfirio D az overthrew President Sebastian Lerdo deTejada in the middle of the United States electoral crisis, U.S. writers immediatelyextended the analogies. Although D azs victory actually created stabilizationthenearly forty-year dictatorship known as the PorfiriatoU.S. journalists initiallyseized upon the overthrow as a reminder of Mexican instability. With a nod to thediscourses description of a political status, not an inherent condition, the Phila-delphia Inquirerdescribed the turmoil in a peculiar way. Mexico has been Mexi-

canized, the newspaper wrote when Lerdo de Tejada fled Mexico City.44 In January

Correspondence, Belmont Family Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University,New York City; A Change to Democratic Rule: What It MeansHints and Facts for IndependentVoters, Pamphlet Collection, Patricia D. Klingenstein Library, New-York Historical Society, New YorkCity, 4; Entry, November 11, 1876, vol. 50, John Bigelow Papers, New York Public Library, Manuscriptsand Archives Division [hereafter NYPL]; Donald W. Curl, Murat Halstead and the Cincinnati Com-mercial (Boca Raton, Fla., 1980).

40 Cincinnati Commercial, December 4, 1876, 4.41 IndianapolisSentinel, November 21, 1876, 4.42 CincinnatiDaily Gazette, November 24, 1876, 4; Wheeling, W.Va., Daily Register, December 29,

1876, 1.43

What Is Mexicanization? The Nation, December 21, 1876, 365366.44 PhiladelphiaInquirer, December 9, 1876, 4.



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1877, when Lerdo de Tejada arrived in the United States, the Baltimore Sun sug-

gested that he give lectures on Mexicanization to show our people, in his own per-

son, the inevitable result of trifling with constitutions and laws, and permitting the

military to override the civil power.45

While it is important not to overstate the meaning of overheated political rhet-

oric, the discourse was not mere hysterics. That these predictions turned out to bewrong does not prove that they were foolish. Those widespread misjudgments, as

Jonathan Scott wrote about similar English fears, were themselves historical phe-

nomena requiring explanation.46 In the United States, worries that the air is full

of coming trouble were legion, held not just by the conspiratorially minded but by

many leading politicians.47 One of Hayess strongest supporters, former senator Carl

Schurz, privately warned him against pressing his case too firmly for fear of insti-

gating the Mexicanization of our government!48 On Tildens side, his confidant

John Bigelow, former consul to France, wrote in his diary that another civil war may

be the consequence of this state of things and we may enter upon the next century

under a difft. Form of govt. from that of which for nearly a century we have beenboasting.49 More widely, a southern Democrat worried about a bloody revolution;

a West Point commander dreaded anarchy; a former attorney general feared that

the days of our republic are numbered; a Texan pledged to recruit hundreds

thousands of fellow Union veterans to defend Hayess title; a Tilden supporter

promised that if the Republicans wanted blood-letting, we will oblige; a Virginia

woman lived in a lamentable state of uncertainty as war of the most deadly kind,

is inevitable; and Missouris governor dispatched two prominent men to tell Tilden

that the state would fight to defend his inauguration.50 Against these possibilities,

President Grant called several companies of troops to garrison Washington, D.C.,

ordered naval batteries to protect the capitals bridges, and reopened Civil Warforts.51 These contemporary judgments lend weight to participants retrospective

views that, as one congressman wrote, perhaps the greatest peril that the Republic

had encountered was not that of the Civil War but the crisis of 1876. 52 Only careful

maneuvering prevented anarchy and open war, a senator later claimed.53 James

45 Baltimore Sun, January 11, 1877, 2.46 Scott, Englands Troubles, 23.47 W. Dennison to Bristow, January 9, 1877, Box 7, Benjamin H. Bristow Papers, LoC.48 Carl Schurz to Hayes, January 12, 1877, Hayes Papers, RBHPC.49 Entry, November 11, 1876, vol. 50, Bigelow Papers, NYPL.50 Gideon J. Pillow to Tilden, November 14, 1876, Box 20, Folder 26, Samuel J. Tilden Papers,

NYPL; John Schofield to William T. Sherman, December 26, 1876, Reel 25, William T. Sherman Papers,LoC; R. E. Goodell to Tilden, January 13, 1877, Box 12, Folder 34, Tilden Papers, NYPL; W. A. Craftsto William E. Chandler, January 17, 1877, Container 43, William E. Chandler Papers, LoC; Henry L.Fish to Tilden, February 24, 1877, Box 11, Folder 60, Tilden Papers, NYPL; James M. Scovel to Tilden,November 14, 1876, February 26, 1877, Box 22, Folder 19, Tilden Papers, NYPL; Mother to Dear Frank,November 13, 1876, Box 2, Noland Family Papers, 2718-d, Special Collections Department, Universityof Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Va.; C. H. Hardin to Tilden, December 13, 1876, Box 13, Folder32, Tilden Papers, NYPL.

51 W. T. Sherman to Col. J. C. Audenreid, November 18, 1876, William T. Sherman Collection,RBHPC; Morris, Fraud of the Century, 173174.

52 James Monroe, The Hayes-Tilden Electoral Commission,Atlantic Monthly, October 1893, 523,524, 537.

53 George F. Edmunds, Another View of The Hayes-Tilden Contest: A Reply to Colonel Wat-

terson in the May Century by Ex-Senator George F. Edmunds, the Sole Surviving Member of theElectoral Commission, The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, May 1913, 195200.



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Ford Rhodes, an industrialist who would later become a historian, believed that anyone, who lived through the days in an observing and reflective mood, or any one, whowill now make a careful study of the contemporary evidence, cannot avoid the con-viction that the country was on the verge of civil war.54

When viewed as a moment of state fragility, the elections aftermath looks dif-

ferent. Historians have discounted these anxieties by emphasizing two periods inwhich there were harsh words but little institutional drive for armed conflicttheearly weeks when the southern states were recounting the ballots and the last weeksafter the commission began to meet. During the two-month interim between thoseevents, however, there was no obvious path to compromise. Fear shattered the uni-tary vision of the nation and produced a series of fantastic but not wholly unrealisticdoubled images, visions of dual presidents, dual capitals, and dual armies. One ofthe most provocative rumors was that Tilden planned to stage a counter-inaugu-ration in New York City. Backed by a line of Democratic state militias from Con-necticut to Virginia, he would seize the federal Treasury Building in New York, fund

his government through customs collections in the harbor, and force Hayes from thecapital to his own shadow republic in the Midwest.55 These fantastic notions playedupon older fragilities in the nations territorial control, especially longstanding ten-sions between its financial and political capitals; early in the 1861 secession crisis,New York mayor Fernando Wood had urged the city to declare its independencefrom the United States. Of course, this view of dual capitals was fanciful. If Tildengained title from the House of Representatives, he did indeed plan to risk court-martial or execution by staging a counter-inauguration; he would have made theattempt, however, in Washington, not New York.56 Although he did not intend tolaunch a first strike, privately Tilden began to prepare two intertwined cases that

would box Republicans into a corner. First he defended the Houses right to namehim president, a necessary prelude to any claim he could make on the office. Nexthe asserted a states right to forcefully resist a usurpers inauguration. While Con-gress would elude Tildens control, he had better luck close to home. New Yorkgovernor Lucius Robinsons January inaugural included a Tilden-drafted sectionpromising state resistance to the revolutionary overthrow of the time-consecratedmethods of constitutional government.57

The fractured vision of dual presidents and dual capitals also produced, in bothimagination and reality, a counter-military led by George B. McClellan.58 The lead-ing Union general for much of the first two years of the Civil War, and an 1864

presidential candidate who lost to Lincoln, McClellan campaigned for his longtime

54 James Ford Rhodes, History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 to the McKinley-Bryan Campaign of 1896, vol. 7: 1872l877(New York, 1920), 243, 284.

55 L. C. Weir to Hayes, February 7, 1877, Hayes Papers, RBHPC; John Bigelow, ed., Letters andLiterary Memorials of Samuel J. Tilden, 2 vols. (New York, 1908), 2: 491.

56 John Bigelow, The Life of Samuel J. Tilden, 2 vols. (New York, 1895), 2: 115.57 Annual Message of the Governor of the State of New York, Transmitted to the Legislature, January

2, 1877(Albany, 1877), 3739; Entry, January 4, 1877, vol. 50, Bigelow Papers, NYPL.58 Although McClellans letters at the Library of Congress are frequently read by Civil War his-

torians, no scholar of the 18761877 electoral crisis has utilized them, precisely because the questionsthat lead to his papers are not relevant within national political frameworks of the betrayal of democracy.While McClellans biographer noted some of McClellans actions, political historians have barely noticed

his presence during the crisis. Stephen W. Sears,George B. McClellan: The Young Napoleon (New York,1988), 393396.



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ally Tilden across the Northeast and Midwest in 1876, urging his fellow-citizens andfellow-soldiers to resist any Republican effort to block Tildens inauguration.59 Pri-vately he warned his mother that any effort to deny Tilden the office must be forc-ible revolutionary must be met by force.60 Although fighting words are com-mon, McClellans history raises interesting questions about the boundaries between

politics and the military. Fifteen years earlier, during the Civil War, many people hadcalled on McClellan, in his telling, to save the nation, alluding to the presidency,dictatorship, etc. But for his love for his wife, he wrote, he might cheerfully takethe dictatorship and agree to lay down my life when the country is saved. 61 Afterthe 1876 election, Tilden asked Governor Robinson to name McClellan the stateadjutant general in view of possible contingencies. Following Robinson from Til-dens mansion, Bigelow urged the governor to wait, as McClellans command of thestate militia would be a red rag to Republicans. But Bigelows response was stra-tegic. Rather than denying McClellan, he convinced the governor to reserve theselection until it would have more impact. Bigelows response to the event is telling.

The fact that we have to contemplate such emergencies, is a melancholy commen-tary upon the anniversary we have been celebrating, he wrote. The chances are byno means inconsiderable that our form of govt. may not survive another 4 of Julywithout serious modifications, the results of a perhaps bloody strife.62

As institutional processes for resolving politics broke down, new openingsemerged for counter-mobilization. McClellan began to construct what appears tohave been a paramilitary organization. Because he did not save his outgoing cor-respondence during this period, his actions must be deciphered by reading betweenthe lines of his incoming letters. Some are evocative but not reliable, full of vaguebragging that a little bit of war to inaugurate Mr. Tilden would do us no harm . . .

speak the word, and you will have a hundred thousand boys in blue and in everythingelse, armed, at Washington by Sunday.63 Far-flung soldiers promised that they werewilling to fight and die under McClellans banner.64 More revealing, however, areletters from men working with him to organize such a resistance, including formerConfederate general Dabney Maury, one of McClellans West Point instructors.Maury urged McClellan to produce a pose of moral and physical power too greatto dare, discussed strategic allocations of divisions, brigades, and regiments, andwarned McClellan to hold units in reserve for later combat.65 In Massachusetts,former Union brigadier general John M. Tobin gathered an estimated 5,000 veteransinto a Conservative Soldiers and Sailors Association. Tobin made tantalizing ref-

erences to unnamed potent considerations set forth in a lost letter from McClellan.The few who have seen it open their eyes wide, and it nerves them on . . . Anymovement to which you may lend your name . . . would be the signal for arousing

59 Speeches of Gen. George B. McClellan during the Presidential Campaign of 1876 (Philadelphia,1877), 5859.

60 McClellan to My Dearest Mother, November 1876, Reel 56, McClellan Papers, LoC.61 George B. McClellan,McClellans Own Story: The War for the Union, the Soldiers Who Fought It,

the Civilians Who Directed It, and His Relations to It and to Them, ed. W. C. Prime (New York, 1887),8285.

62 Entry, November 22, 1876, vol. 50, Bigelow Papers, NYPL.63 E Pluribus Unum to McClellan, February 27, 1877, Reel 38, McClellan Papers, LoC.64

Henry C. de Alma to McClellan, November 29, 1876, February 6, 1877, ibid.65 Dabney H. Maury to McClellan, November 3, 1876, January 22, 1877, ibid.



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en masse here all the conservative soldiers and sailors.66Although these letters giveshape to rumors of paramilitary mobilization across the country, McClellans intentis impossible to define precisely. His New York office complained of a shortage offunds, a constant problem for people who worked with the legendarily cheap (andpersonally wealthy) Tilden. As far as I can see I am personally stuck for the office

room, the general in charge of the New York office wrote. To do a thing of thiskind without money is quite absurd.67

For U.S. historians, the story of a Tilden-McClellan paramilitary organizationdemonstrates that stabilization was contingent upon the candidates behavior. HereTildens aggressive actions conflict with contemporary and historical portrayals of hiscaution. Had Tilden claimed the position immediately, his election would have beena matter of course, Bigelow wrote. But it was impossible. A man who must havea man rub him every morning & evening for an hour or so, who must take a clysterevery morning to get a passage . . . how could such a man be expected to [demandthe presidency] and wind up perhaps at the last in a prison? Hyperbolic Democratic

editor Henry Watterson said that he had been willing to provide the physical meansof seating [Tilden] in office, but Tilden was hamstrung by his confidence in thepowers and forms of law.68 The candidates public silence frustrated financier Au-gust Belmont, who urged radical boldness and recklessness and a revolutionary. . . fight. With a careful eye to sequence, it is possible to reconcile the evidence forboth Tildens caution and his boldness. Tildens reticence was calculated to increasepressure at a different moment, after the Democratic House of Representativesnamed him president.69 By refusing to threaten civil war in December, he was in-creasing the possibility that it might eventually come later, once two presidents hadtitle. When Democratic congressmen threatened to derail his plan by considering a

compromise, his passivity evaporated. No need of hot haste but much danger in it,he wrote in a midnight draft memo. The Republicans had no way out but by usur-pation.70 Tilden lobbied congressional Democrats to simply count him the winner.When Democratic chairman Abram Hewitt told Tilden that House Democrats in factplanned to accede to an electoral commission to resolve the dispute, Tilden askedincredulously, Why surrender now? Why surrender before the battle, for fear youmay have to surrender after the battle is over?71

As Congress compromised on a fifteen-man electoral commission to count thedisputed votes, the crisis pivoted from fragility to stabilization. Overpressed by ex-aggerated fears of Mexicanization and civil war, Tilden fumed, Congress moved

toward an institutional solution.72 Thinking about Congresss fears means looking

66 John M. Tobin to McClellan, December 15, 1876, January 8, 1877, ibid.67 William F. Smith to McClellan, December 30, 1876, ibid.68 Entry, April 1, 1877, vol. 50, Bigelow Papers, NYPL.69 Irving Katz, August Belmont: A Political Biography (New York, 1968), 225, 228, 231.70 Drafts and original of telegram to William Pelton, January 17, 1877, Box 1, Folder 8, Tilden

Papers, NYPL.71 Henry Watterson, The Hayes-Tilden Contest for the Presidency: Inside History of a Great Po-

litical Crisis, The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, May 1913, 1420; Joseph Medill to WilliamHenry Smith, January 3, 1877, Box 12, Folder WAP Letters (Signed by Medill), Joseph Medill Papers,Series III-9, Tribune Company Archives, Colonel Robert R. McCormick Research Center, First Division

Museum at Cantigny, Wheaton, Ill.72 Bigelow, The Life of Samuel J. Tilden, 2: 7980.



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past hermetically sealed histories of the important but not fully determinative efforts

of railroad lobbyists and southern Democrats in fashioning the compromise. Con-

gressmen were motivated not just by horse-trading but by a climate of fear. Although

both Hayes and Tilden lobbied for brinksmanship, congressmen were not so sure,

especially as their actions were tied publicly to Mexicanization. Halstead again led

the charge, denouncing Democratic talk of a House declaration as Mexican states-manship, a claim repeated by Republican newspapers across the country.73 Some

Democrats, in turn, advanced the discourse by using Mexicanization to scare stalwart

Republicans from naming Hayes through the Senate. At January indignation meet-

ings, Democratic orators compared Grant and Hayes to the military chieftains of

Mexico, and asked, Who is Mexicanized? Who is sending armies into the South?74

The process of stabilization turned in the United States, as it had in England, on

the exclusion of some conflicts from politics. All our papers and public men declare

there must be no war, Democrats complained, and were therefore creating the

illusion that compromise was the only alternative to civil war.75 The charges, they

said, narrowed their choices to violence and submission to a wrong.76 Demo-cratic congressmen acknowledged that they believed in Tildens case but turned to

compromise because they were not prepared to heighten the existing debasement

of political sentiment by risking armed power.77 Civil war would have probably

been the result, a New York congressman wrote.78 Party leader Abram Hewitt,

whom Tilden blamed for his defeat, lobbied for acquiescence during the crisis be-

cause four years of civil war would, in my opinion, utterly destroy constitutional

government for this generation at least.79 Mexicanization had at once raised and

then foreclosed the possibility of dissolution. The question was whether the Amer-

ican Republic should be Mexicanized; and the establishment of the Commission

answered the question in the negative, Halstead celebrated.80 After an unexpectedswitch in personnel, the electoral commission, by a one-vote margin, granted every

contested electoral vote to Hayes, thus giving him the White House. This raised a

second potential crisis, as some House Democrats threatened to filibuster beyond

Inauguration Day to force a new election, but Hewitt, other leaders, and lobbyists

urged Democrats to surrender.81 The management of the crisis proved not the im-

possibility of violence but the institutional capacity to lessen tension by delay. With

stabilization at the top came the end of the two governments problem in the South,

as Republican state governments in Louisiana and South Carolina soon dissolved,

leaving Democratic challengers in office.

The successful resolution of the crisis led U.S. editors and politicians to both

73 Cincinnati Commercial, December 4, 1876, 4.74 Cincinnati Commercial, January 9, 1877, 12, 4, 8.75 William P. Chambliss to McClellan, January 15, 1877, Reel 38, McClellan Papers, LoC; Bigelow,

The Life of Samuel J. Tilden, 2: 77.76 Cincinnati Commercial, December 21, 1876, 12.77 Hiester Clymer to McClellan, January 23, 1877, Reel 56, McClellan Papers, LoC.78 Francis Kernan to Tilden, March 12, 1877, Box 15, Folder 53, Tilden Papers, NYPL.79 Bigelow, Letters and Literary Memorials of Samuel J. Tilden , 550552, 562565.80 Cincinnati Commercial, February 6, 1877, 4.81 Alphonso Taft to Hayes, February 14, 1877, Hayes Papers, RBHPC; Carter Harrison III to Carter

Harrison IV, February 24, 1877, Carter H. Harrison III, Outgoing Correspondence, Box 21, Folder 1068,

Series 17, Carter H. Harrison IV Papers, Midwest Manuscript Collection, The Newberry Library, Chi-cago.



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naturalize and mystify stabilization by tying it to the continuity of social norms. Likeearly modern Spanish monarchs, these stabilizers buried discontinuity in portrayalsof continuity, diminishing the impact of their institutional efforts by making open-ended claims of an inherent social stability that the government enjoyed but did notcreate. Many now saw the discourse of Mexicanization as both available and in-

conceivable, an un-American path the United States had once threatened to walk.By engaging with Mexican analogies, they created an anti-exceptionalist basis forreconstructing U.S. distinctiveness, moving from an exceptionalism of the Americasback to an American exceptionalism. Although evangelical revivalism, the consol-idation of national markets, cultural productions of Americanness, and an expansiveforeign policy also contributed, the resolution of the electoral crisis played a key rolein spurring this return of exceptionalist claims. To Hayes and many other Repub-licans, it was the first example in history of a nation that was able to peaceablyresolve conflicting claims to the Presidency through the forms of law.82 Innearly every other country, historian Rhodes wrote, the conflict must inevitably

have led to civil war.83 The self-control exhibited by the nation under the greatexcitement proved that an impassable gulf separates our methods and policiesfrom those of the Spanish States of this continent, a congressman claimed.84 Dem-ocrats, however, were less sanguine about both the outcome and U.S. exception-alism. To them, Hayes had not only Mexicanized the United States but has morethan Mexicanized it. The IndianapolisSentinelpondered and then discounted racistviews of Mexicans. Their inferiority does not appear in the matter of tolerating afraud for a rulerin this regard the United States stands considerably in advanceof any country, nation, or tribe, from hottentot to the most advanced nation onearth.85

AS MEXICAN ANALOGIES SPREAD widely through the United States, many Mexicanpoliticians seem to have turned away from the comparison. Throughout the 1860s,Mexican Liberals made use of the analogy they had fashioned. When U.S. editorsand politicians derided Juarezs suspension of elections and civil rights, Mexicanjournalists pointed toward Grants own suspension ofhabeas corpus. The two nationswere fighting common fragilities, undergoing correspondingly fraught stabilizationprocesses.86 This contested but two-sided analogizing continued into the 1870s.When New Orleans merchants attributed Mexican fragility to cultural failings, a U.S.consul responded with a thorough historical examination of the role of Europeanpowers, the Catholic Church, and landed interests in undermining the Mexican state.Diario Oficialin turn praised the consuls historical exactness.87 During the fraughtdebates in Mexicos congress about railroad concessions in January 1874, Deputy

82 Cincinnati Commercial, March 6, 1877, 4.83 Rhodes, History of the United States, 7: 243, 284.84 Monroe, The Hayes-Tilden Electoral Commission, 523, 524, 537.85 IndianapolisSentinel, March 27, 1877, 4.86 Executive Documents Printed by Order of the House of Representatives, during the Second Session

of the Thirty-Ninth Congress, 186667, 16 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1867), 1: 393400.87

Executive Documents Printed by Order of the House of Representatives, 187374, 17 vols. (Wash-ington, D.C., 1874), 1: 649653; Richard N. Sinkin, The Mexican Reform, 18551876: A Study in Liberal



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Estanislao Canedo claimed that the two nations now had common interests basedon shared liberal principles. Opponents of the United States were drawing uponoutdated analogies, which can exist only in the minds of those who do not rememberthe laborious transformation which has taken place in both nations during the pastthirty years.88 But 1877 border conflicts threatened the nations relations and the

potential for open-ended analogizing. The unfounded fear that D az might disruptrailroad concessions and Texans complaints about border insecurity promptedHayes to authorize soldiers to cross unilaterally into Mexican territory. In turn, po-litical opinion in Mexico turned sharply against the United States, as editors andintellectuals shelved the more optimistic language of the 1860s and early 1870s, com-plaining that the U.S. treated them as savages, as Kaffirs of Africa.89 As rumorsswirled about U.S. expansionism, and as the threat of external European interven-tion declined, nuanced comparisons largely gave way to suspicion, even as D azsgovernment pursued economic ties to the United States.

Historians of the United States often use another significant post-election event,

the Great Strike of the summer of 1877, to look eastward toward Europe for modelsof class conflict, but some contemporaries saw those strikes as a continuation ofdomestic fragility, not a Europeanization of the country.90 Starting in Martinsburg,West Virginia, when crowds blocked police from arresting railroad workers, thestrikes spread along rail lines to Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Chicago, San Francisco, andother cities. In Chicago, recently organized Union veterans killed thirty strikers be-fore soldiers called back from the Sioux War restored order. While some editorsexplicitly blamed European immigrants for carrying the contagion of anarchy west-ward, others, including Halstead, located the roots of the violence not in economictransformation but in the disturbing tendencies of the Civil War, which disor-

ganized and changed us more than we apprehended while about it. When the armieswere disbanded and marched home, there were senses in which the war was notover.91 Instead of treating the Great Strike as a new phenomenon demanding ex-ternal explanation, Halstead incorporated the strikes into struggles over sovereignty,governance, and the role of violence in politics. He no doubt underplayed the roleof industrial class conflict in the Great Strike, but he also anticipated recent schol-

Nation-Building(Austin, Tex., 1979); Charles A. Hale, The Transformation of Liberalism in Late Nine-teenth-Century Mexico (Princeton, N.J., 1989), 3746.

88 Executive Documents Printed by Order of the House of Representatives, 1874 75, 18 vols. (Wash-ington, D.C., 1875), 1: 724725.

89 Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United Sates, Transmitted to Congress, with the AnnualMessage of the President, December 3, 1877(Washington, D.C., 1877), xvixvii, 409413; James MortonCallahan,American Foreign Policy in Mexican Relations(1932; repr., New York, 1967), 343351; RobertD. Gregg,The Influence of Border Troubles on Relations between the United States and Mexico, 18761910(New York, 1970), 1833, 93; Daniel Cos o Villegas,The United States versus Porfirio Daz, trans. NettieLee Benson (Lincoln, Neb., 1963), 5657; John Mason Hart, Empire and Revolution: The Americans inMexico since the Civil War(Berkeley, Calif., 2002), chaps. 14; Samuel Truett, Fugitive Landscapes: TheForgotten History of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (New Haven, Conn., 2006); Rachel St. John, Line inthe Sand: A History of the Western U.S.-Mexico Border (Princeton, N.J., 2011).

90 Nell Irvin Painter, Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 18771919 (New York, 1987),1824; Sven Beckert,The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bour-geoisie, 18501896 (New York, 2001), 180; Eric Foner,Reconstruction: Americas Unfinished Revolution,

18631877(New York, 1988), 585.91 Cincinnati Commercial, July 24, 1877, 4.



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arship that places the uprising within long-term traditions of local mobbing. WhileEuropean models partly explain the strikes, the uprisings also demonstrate the on-going American challenge of restraining public violence in the postwar era, orinHalsteads termscorrecting the disturbing tendencies of the Civil War.92

If statecraft started the process of stabilization, a new set of crises in 1878 dem-

onstrated that statecraft could also reverse it. Seeking an issue for the Novembermidterms, New York Democratic congressman Clarkson Potter created a specialcommittee to investigate fraud in the 1876 presidential election. Halstead and otherfrightened Republicans immediately tried to restrain the committee of revolution-ary MEXICANS by ridiculing Don Santa Anna Pottero and denouncing hisMexican method.93 Writers located fragility in the same social realm they hadrecently celebrated. Against readers who wondered What Mexicanized Means, theChicagoDaily Tribunewarned that a single departure from this rule will throw thecountry into all the confusion, anarchy, civil war, and instability characteristic ofMexican Government. Although the editorial included an offhand sneer at greas-

ers, it explicitly discounted the idea that the United States would be saved by itsinnate racial superiority.94 The Nationagain looked for deeper causes of Mexican-ization in a state of mind, a way of looking at political affairs, which makes civil waralways possible. Too much talk of Mexicanization, it warned, could create the con-dition; only the habit of silencethe narrowing of political disputecould preventit.95 Again Democrats decried Republicans as Mexicanizers, and, more rigorously,they attacked the analogy by inverting it, making the mixed and half breed Mex-icans exemplars of bravery for hunting down Maximilian, while the cowardly UnitedStates acceded to Hayess usurpation.96 When leading figures such as Charles FrancisAdams and Alexander Stephens used the discourse to publicly discipline congres-

sional Democrats away from the Mexicanization of our Federal Republic and thepronunciamentos and chronic anarchy which have made the Mexican Republic abyword among the nations, the pressure once again worked.97 The committeeblinked, affirming the irrefragability of Hayes title. Instead the committee in-vestigated coded telegrams suggesting that Tildens nephew had clumsily tried tobribe southern politicians. Democrats had been bulldozed by the thieves howl ofRevolution and Mexicanization, what one newspaper called a cover . . . to scareweak-kneed and lukewarm Democrats.98 The following year, Mexicanizationhelped explain competing governors and militias in Maine. While the New York

92 The Insurrection among the Railway Employees of the United States, and the Losses in Pitts-burgh Resulting Therefrom, in July, 1877: Memorial of the Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce, to thePennsylvania Legislature (Pittsburgh, 1877), Pamphlet Collection, Patricia D. Klingenstein Library,New-York Historical Society, 3, 5, 9, 10, 12, 14; Richard Schneirov, Chicagos Great Upheaval of 1877:Class Polarization and Democratic Politics, in David O. Stowell, ed.,The Great Strikes of 1877(Urbana,Ill., 2008), 80, 85, 87, 90, 97; Michael Kazin, The July Days in San Francisco, 1877: Prelude to Kear-neyism, ibid., 136163.

93 CincinnatiCommercial, May 17, 1878, 4; May 20, 1878, 4; May 23, 1878, 6; Cincinnati Daily Ga-zette, May 24, 1878, 4; Chicago Inter Ocean, May 29, 1878, 1; New York Herald, April 17, 1878, 6; May18, 1878, 6.

94 ChicagoDaily Tribune, May 23, 1878, 4; May 25, 1878, 4.95 The Nation, June 13, 1878, 382385.96 IndianapolisSentinel, May 25, 1878, 4; May 27, 1878, 4.97

New York Herald, April 27, 1878, 6.98 Washington Post, June 20, 1878, 2; Georgia Weekly Telegraph, June 4, 1878, 4.



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Commercial Advertiserremained confident because the Maine people are Ameri-cans, not Mexicans, the WorcesterGazetteworried that a disruption in an old NewEngland state like Maine foreshadowed the Mexicanizing of the country and theruin of the republic.99 The 1881 assassination of President James Garfield initiallyprompted speculation that this nation is becoming Mexicanized, but the ensuing

unity quickly proved that we are not a Mexicanized people.100 By fashioning con-tinuity amid discontinuous political circumstances, these stabilizers located Amer-ican exceptionalism in the countrys stability, and its stability in its social norms.

Ironies about Mexicanization abound. The discourse flourished during what inretrospect was a period of dual stabilization. In diagnosing the potential for collapse,Mexicanization served to foreclose that possibility. The two nations followed dif-ferent, but related, paths toward stabilization. In both countries, stabilization wastied to the retraction of democracy, in Mexico through the creation of a one-partydictatorship in the Porfiriato, in the United States through violent Democratic dom-ination of southern freedpeople and, eventually, widespread disfranchisement. The

transformation of Mexico altered the terms of comparison, sometimes even prompt-ing open-ended lists of aspects in which we could stand Mexicanizing.101 U.S. jour-nalist C. Edwards Lester wrote a lengthy sociological examination,The Mexican Re-public, to promote An Universal Zollverein for the American Hemisphere.102 Bythe 1880s, Mexicanization suggested the strength and stability of every Spanish-American or Portuguese-American state to minister and soldier Thomas Went-worth Higginson.103 The bitter 1890s currency debates, however, unleashed sharpervisions of racial and cultural superiority as Republicans charged Populists and SilverDemocrats with Mexicanizing the money standard.104 By the end of the century,the Spanish-American War, fears of immigration, and hardening biological racism

prompted widespread, now-familiar racist visions of the sluggish, indolent Mexicantype.105 For one final moment, an aged Henry Watterson revitalized the old dis-course in the early 1900s by comparing Theodore Roosevelts allegedly dictatorialambitions to D azs. When he was met with mockery, Watterson in turn derided thebelief that We are an exception to all experience and all rule.106 By 1913, Mexi-canization was played for laughs in a Gridiron Club skit, in which a dictator modeledafter Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan oversaw a Mexicanized adminis-tration.107

99 Quoted in BostonGlobe, December 25, 1879, 1; Lowell, Mass.,Daily Citizen, December 20, 1879,2; Edward Nelson Dingley,The Life and Times of Nelson Dingley, Jr.(Kalamazoo, Mich., 1902), 149167.

100 WheelingRegister, July 8, 1881, 2; Washington Post, July 11, 1881, 4.101 Austin, Tex., Texas Siftings, June 2, 1883, 8.102 C. Edwards Lester, The Mexican Republic: An Historic Study (New York, 1878), 4, 6, 9097, 104.103 Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The School of Jingoes,The Chap-Book: Semi-Monthly, April 15,

1896, 505507.104 Atlanta Constitution, September 27, 1896, 2; July 18, 1897, 18; Michael OMalley, Specie and

Species: Race and the Money Question in Nineteenth-Century America, American Historical Review99, no. 2 (April 1994): 369395; Nell Irvin Painter, Thinking about the Languages of Money and Race:

A Response to Michael OMalley, Specie and Species, ibid., 396 404; OMalley, Free Silver and theConstitution of Man, Common-Place 6, no. 3 (April 2006), http://www.common-place.org/vol-06/no03/omalley/; Daniel S. Margolies,Henry Watterson and the New South: The Politics of Empire, Free Trade,and Globalization (Lexington, Ky., 2006), 75.

105 New Orleans Daily Picayune, July 21, 1891, 9.106

Quoted in Washington Post, May 27, 1902, 5.107 Atlanta Constitution, December 14, 1913, 1.



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THE TWENTIETH-CENTURYUNITEDSTATESin fact proved exceptionally stable as it nav-igated fascism, communism, and political strains such as the 2000 Bush-Gore elec-tion. This image of a mighty nation casts an enormous shadow upon the nineteenthcentury. By looking at the late nineteenth century as something other than a preludeto the twentieth, it becomes possible to see the fragility that led people to fear an-

other civil war alongside the forces that prevented such a conflict, and to observethe fluidity of views of Mexican politics, culture, religion, and history alongside themore rigid, biologically based racial ideologies of the next century. Mexicanizationdrew upon a broader, fragmentary idea of an age of republican crisis in which theAmerican republics might stand together against a monarchical Europe that seemedno longer a model but rather a warning after the failed revolutions of 1848 and 1871.Still focused upon the centrality of political institutions, not class relations, manyAmericans looked not east but south for models, guides, and analytic openings.There were limits, of course, to this hemispheric vision. It did not include manynations, especially monarchical Brazil; it could be paternalistic and arrogant; and it

did not survive the nineteenth century. Too often, however, transnationally inclinedU.S. historians look to Europe for the circulation of ideas, and to Latin America forthe movement of people and raw commodities.108 Latin Americanists practicinghemispheric history in turn overemphasize divergence between Anglo and SpanishAmerica in a nineteenth century sometimes overlooked in the rush from an inter-twined eighteenth-century Atlantic world to twentieth-century U.S. dominance. De-spite its limitations, the notion of a hemispheric circulation of republican ideas sug-gests the utility of chronologically extending Jorge Canizares-Esguerras project ofIberianizing the Atlantic to upset the most cherished national narratives of theUnited States.109

If the age of republican crisis proved transitory, the utility of Mexicanization forthe study of state fragility and stabilization is more enduring. By denaturalizing theUnited States path to stability, scholars can build more useful analyses of how