Steven Hahn, author of Illiberal America: A History, and Manisha Sinha, author of The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860–1920, explored America’s historical encounters with illiberalism and its relevance to contemporary challenges confronting American democracy today. Thomas Donnelly, chief content officer at the National Constitution Center, moderated the conversation.
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Steven Hahn is a professor of history at NYU and a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who studies American political and social movements. His acclaimed works include A Nation Under Our Feet and A Nation Without Borders. His most recent book Illiberal America: A History, was published in March of this year.
Manisha Sinha is the Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut and the 2024 president-elect of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. She is a leading authority on the history of slavery and abolition and the Civil War and Reconstruction and has written numerous books on these topics. Her most recent book, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860–1920, was also published in March of this year.
Additional Resources
- Steven Hahn, Illiberal America: A History (2024)
- Manisha Sinha, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920 (2024)
- Abraham Lincoln, “ "Speech to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield” (1838), Founders’ Library
- 13th Amendment, Interactive Constitution
- Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, Founders’ Library
- Steven Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850-1890 (1985)
- Marcia Coyle, “The U.S. Supreme Court Cases Built on a ‘Rotten Foundation’,” Constitution Daily (May 2022)
Excerpt from Interview: Steven Hahn discusses how anti-Catholicism, local power hierarchies, and violence were deeply embedded in American political culture, linking them to concerns about democracy and the rule of law.
Steven Hahn: Well, let me just mention a number of things. One of the things I think we overlook in terms of American political cultures anti-Catholicism, which was very, very powerful and was very much part of the kind of republicanism, that was embraced. Along with that is not only an attachment to monarchy and other forms of hierarchical authority. I was very interested in reading, not only the federalists, but the anti-federalists. Who were oftentimes seen as advocates of local democracy, which in part they were, and they rejected the Constitution because of their fears about the centralization of power. But in fact, in many cases, they were interested in maintaining local power and the local hierarchies that that power involved.
And so in some ways these, deeply rooted ideas of cultural homogeneity and certain kind and anti-Catholicism work were. I would say one of the things about the Jacksonian period, which I think links up very well with what Manisha was talking about, is I call it Chapter Tocqueville Lincoln and the Expulsive 1830s.
And to remind, readers that Jacksonian democracy wasn't accompanied by and reinforced by the expulsions not simply of native people, which is best known and which was horrific, but expulsions of Catholics, of Mormons, of abolitionists, of black people and black communities, as kind of celebration of these expulsions, in many, many different contexts.
This was also a period where not only Lincoln warned about the threat of mob violence overtaking the rule of law. But when Tocqueville warned about the dissent to tyranny, that he saw even in the midst of what he described as a pretty robust democratic culture, and his worries about how the associational, components of democratic life could easily veer. He said he'd never been in a country where there was less independence of mind than there was in the United States of this period. And politics in general was marked by especially in cities, but not only was marked by election day violence, by military cadences and the campaigns leading up to it.
We know that state legislatures and Congress, often saw weapons being brandished, duals being challenges. So the kind of violence that erupts even, especially horrifically during Reconstruction is embedded, in American politics and political culture quite deeply.
Manisha Sinha argues that the history of Reconstruction must include the brutal, colonial-style warfare and dispossession of Native Americans in the West, which extended well into the late 19th century and laid the groundwork for American imperialism abroad.
Manisha Sinha: Yes. Just as I say that reconstruction history is women's history. We can't afford to ignore Native American and western history while talking about the history of Reconstruction. And Western historians have come up with this notion of the greater Reconstruction where they talk about the expansion of the nation state, the Reconstruction of the South, and the Reconstruction of the West as similar processes, a consolidation of the nation state. And they want to go right back to the Mexican war and end in 1877 in this sort of greater Reconstruction of the West. I disagree a little bit with that thesis. I think it's important to look at that, but I argue in my book that if you look at dispossession, then you would have to begin with the founding of the First American Republic, which is pretty much founded on the dispossession of Native Americans.
That can't be the criteria. What I was really interested in is looking at the Indian wars in the West, and what struck me, especially with my own education growing up in India, is how much they smacked of colonial warfare. This was no Lincoln's code, no inquiries into massacres, etcetera, that happened during the Civil War. This is brutal warfare against even the civilian population, very much like colonial warfare. So there are historians who see the Indian wars as merely an extension of the Civil War. I say these are very different political projects and I look at the conquest of the West more in the sense of the unwinding of southern Reconstruction. Because it is true that the very same Union Army regiments, the 7th Cavalry, for instance, being used to re-enforce black rights in the South, are precisely the ones that are being sent first to fire at strikers, but also to fight these Indian wars. And that it's really in the late 19th century, not just with the Dawes Act which subdivides Indian land into homesteads and results in a massive dispossession, but also just in terms of the violence against these Indian nations, the warfare against Indians.
That dispossession actually, increases rapidly, well after 1877, it's really in the 1890s, or even if you look at something as iconic as the Wounded Knee Massacre, I talk of many other massacres. And what struck me was this kind of colonial project of not just conquering these lands, and dispossessing Native Americans, but also a forcible assimilation, which was very common by European colonial paths in Asia and Africa at the same time, this is the height of European imperialism, the scramble for Africa. So I saw it more through those lands. And I also saw it as a sort of stepping off point for American warfare, in the Pacific, with the 1898 Spanish Cuban American War with the acquisition or the annexation of Hawaii and Puerto Rico, the colonization of the Philippines. What struck me were not the Civil War generals who are not there much.
Though Sherman does go to England to learn rules of colonial warfare before he comes back to head the Department of Missouri. But Sherman and Sheridan interested me less. There are others like Nelson Miles, etcetera, who see warfare in the West and who earn their spurs there. Then they're the ones who end up in Puerto Rico, in Philippines, in Cuba, because they're adept at this kind of colonial warfare. And the fact that the United States Supreme Court then actually issues these insular decisions that says, "These conquered territories are outside the purview of the 14th Amendment, outside the citizenship rights of the 14th Amendment" was important for me too. Because suddenly you have this colonial relationship where the plenary powers of the federal government unrestrained by the US Constitution are then being exercised in these areas.
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