Revolutions
The Problem of Order, 1825-1890 The Threat of Regionalism
The Threat of Regionalism ●After independence, the relatively weak central governments of the new nations were often unable to prevent regional elites from leading secessionist movements. ●In Spanish America, all of the post independence efforts to create large multi-state federations failed. Central America split off from Mexico in 1823 and then broke up into five separate nations; Gran Colombia broke up into Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador; and Uruguay, Paraguay, and Bolivia declared their independence from Argentina. ●Regionalism threatened the United States when the issue of slavery divided the nation, leading to the establishment of the Confederacy and the U.S. Civil War. ●The Confederacy failed because of poor timing; the new states of the Western Hemisphere were most vulnerable during the first decades after independence. ●The Confederacy's attempt to secede from the United States came when the national government was well-established and strengthened by experience, economic growth, and population growth.
The Problem of Order, 1825-1890 Personalist Leaders
● Successful military leaders in both the United States and Latin America were able to use their military reputations as the foundations of political power. ●Latin America's slow development of stable political institutions made personalist politics much more influential than it was in the United States. ●The first constitutions of nearly all the American republics excluded large numbers of poor citizens from full political participation. ●This led to the rise of populist leaders who articulated the desires of the excluded poor and who at times used populist politics to undermine constitutional order and move toward dictatorship. ●Andrew Jackson in the United States and José Antonio Páez in Venezuela are two examples of populist politicians who challenged the constitutional limits of their authority. ●Páez declared Venezuela's independence from Bolívar's Gran Colombia in 1829 and ruled as president or dictator for the next eighteen years. ●Jackson, born in humble circumstances, was a successful general who, as president, increased the powers of the presidency at the expense of the Congress and the Supreme Court. ●Personalist leaders like Páez and Jackson dominated national politics by identifying with the common people, but in practice, they promoted the interests of powerful property owners. ●Personalist leaders were common in both the United States and Latin America, but in Latin America, the weaker constitutional tradition, less protection of property rights, lower literacy levels, and less developed communications systems allowed personalist leaders to become dictators.
Independence in Latin America, 1800-1830 Roots of Revolution, to 1810
● Wealthy colonial residents of Latin America were frustrated by the political and economic power of colonial officials and angered by high taxes and imperial monopolies. ●They were inspired by the Enlightenment thinkers and by the examples of the American and French Revolutions. ●The Portuguese royal family fled to Brazil, where King John VI maintained his court for over a decade. ●Napoleon's invasion of Portugal and Spain in 1807 and 1808 led dissenters in Venezuela, Mexico, and Bolivia to overthrow Spanish colonial officials in 1808-1809. ●The Spanish authorities quickly reasserted control, but a new round of revolutions began in 1810.
Independence in Latin America, 1800-1830 Spanish South America, 1810-1825
●A Creole-led revolutionary junta declared independence in Venezuela in 1811. ●Spanish authorities were able to rally free blacks and slaves to defend the Spanish Empire because the junta's leaders were interested primarily in pursuing the interests of Creole landholders. ●Simón Bolívar emerged as the leader of the Venezuelan revolutionaries. ●Bolívar used the force of his personality to attract new allies (including slaves and free blacks) to his cause and to command the loyalty of his troops. ●Bolívar defeated the Spanish armies in 1824 and tried to forge Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador into a single nation. ●This project was a failure, as were Bolívar's other attempts to create a confederation of the former Spanish colonies. ●Buenos Aires was another important center of revolutionary activity in Spanish South America. ●In 1816, after Ferdinand regained the Spanish throne, local junta leaders declared independence as the United Provinces of Rio de la Plata. ●The new government was weak, and the region quickly descended into political chaos.
The American Revolution, 1775-1800 Frontiers and Taxes
●After 1763, the British government faced two problems in its North American colonies: the danger of war with the Amerindians as colonists pushed west across the Appalachians, and the need to raise more taxes from the colonists to pay the increasing costs of colonial administration and defense. ●British attempts to impose new taxes or to prevent further westward settlement provoked protests in the colonies. ●In the Great Lakes region, British policies undermined the Amerindian economy and provoked a series of Amerindian raids on the settled areas of Pennsylvania and Virginia. ●The Amerindian alliance that carried out these raids was defeated within a year. ●Fear of more violence led the British to establish a western limit for settlement in the Proclamation of 1763 and to slow down settlement of the regions north of the Ohio and east of the Mississippi in the Quebec Act of 1774. ●The British government tried to raise new revenue from the American colonies through a series of fiscal reforms and new taxes, including a number of new commercial regulations, including the Stamp Act of 1765 and other taxes and duties. ●In response to these actions, the colonists organized boycotts of British goods, staged violent protests, and attacked British officials. ●Relations between the American colonists and the British authorities were further exacerbated by the killing of five civilians in the Boston Massacre (1770) and by the action of the British government in granting the East India Company a monopoly on the import of tea to the colonies. ●When colonists in Boston responded to the monopoly by dumping tea into Boston harbor, the British closed the port of Boston.
The French Revolution, 1789-1815 Reaction and the Rise of Napoleon, 1795-1815
●After Robespierre's execution, the Convention worked to undo the radical reforms of the Robespierre years, ratified a more conservative constitution, and created a new executive authority, the Directory. ●The Directory's suspension of the election results of 1797 signaled the end of the republican phase of the revolution, while Napoleon's seizure of power in 1799 marked the beginning of another form of government: popular authoritarianism. ●Napoleon provided greater internal stability and protection of personal and property rights by negotiating an agreement with the Catholic Church (the Concordat of 1801), promulgating the Civil Code of 1804, and declaring himself emperor (also in 1804). ●At the same time, the Napoleonic system denied basic political and property rights to women and restricted speech and expression. ●The stability of the Napoleonic system depended upon the success of the military and upon French diplomacy. ●No single European state could defeat Napoleon, but his occupation of the Iberian Peninsula turned into a costly war of attrition with Spanish and Portuguese resistance forces, while his 1812 attack on Russia ended in disaster. ●An alliance of Russia, Austria, Prussia, and England defeated Napoleon in 1814.
The American Revolution, 1775-1800 The Construction of Republican Institutions, to 1800
●After independence, each of the former colonies drafted written constitutions that were submitted to the voters for approval. ●The Articles of Confederation served as a constitution for the United States during and after the Revolutionary War. ●In May 1787, a Constitutional Convention began to write a new constitution that established a system of government that was democratic but gave the vote only to a minority of the adult male population and protected slavery.
The Challenge of Social and Economic Change Immigration
●As the slave trade ended, immigration from Europe and Asia increased. ●During the nineteenth century, Europe provided the majority of immigrants to the Western Hemisphere, while Asian immigration increased after 1850. ●Immigration brought economic benefits, but hostility to immigration mounted in many nations. ●Asian immigrants faced discrimination and violence in the United States, Canada, Peru, Mexico, and Cuba; immigrants from European countries also faced prejudice and discrimination. ●The desire to sustain a common citizenship inspired a number of policies that aimed to compel immigrants to assimilate. ●Schools in particular were used to inculcate language, cultural values, and patriotism
The American Revolution, 1775-1800 The Course of Revolution, 1775-1783
●Colonial governing bodies deposed British governors and established a Continental Congress that printed currency and organized an army. ●Ideological support for independence was given by the rhetoric of thousands of street-corner speakers, by Thomas Paine's pamphlet Common Sense, and in the Declaration of Independence. ●The British sent a military force to pacify the colonies. The British force won most of its battles, but it was unable to control the countryside. ●The British were also unable to achieve a compromise political solution to the problems of the colonies. ●Amerindians served as allies to both sides. The Mohawk leader Joseph Brant led one of the most effective Amerindian forces in support of the British; when the war was over, he and his followers fled to Canada. ●France entered the war as an ally of the United States in 1778 and gave crucial assistance to the American forces, including naval support that enabled Washington to defeat Cornwallis at Yorktown, Virginia. ●Following this defeat, the British negotiators signed the Treaty of Paris (1783), giving unconditional independence to the former colonies.
The Challenge of Social and Economic Change American Cultures
●Despite discrimination, immigrants altered the politics of many of the hemisphere's nations as they sought to influence government policies. ●Immigrants, undergoing acculturation, were changed by their experiences in their adopted nations. ●At the same time, the languages, arts, music, and political cultures of the Western Hemisphere nations were influenced by the cultures of the immigrants.
The Problem of Order, 1825-1890 Foreign Interventions and Regional Wars
●During the nineteenth century, wars between Western Hemisphere nations and invasions from the European powers often determined national borders, access to natural resources, and control of markets. ●By the end of the nineteenth century, the United States, Brazil, Argentina, and Chile had successfully waged wars against their neighbors and established themselves as regional powers. ●European military intervention included the British attack on the United States in the War of 1812, the United States' war with Spain in 1898-1899, French and English naval blockades of Argentina, an English naval blockade of Brazil, and Spanish and French invasions of Mexico. ●When the French invaded Mexico in 1862, they ousted President Benito Juárez and established Maximilian Habsburg as emperor. ●Juárez drove the French out in 1867; Maximilian was captured and executed. ●The United States defeated Mexico and forced the Mexican government to give up Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado in 1848. ●Chile defeated the combined forces of Peru and Bolivia in two wars (1836-1839 and 1879-1881). ●Chile gained nitrate mines and forced Bolivia to give up its only outlet to the sea. ●Argentina and Brazil fought over control of Uruguay in the 1820s but finally recognized Uruguayan independence. ●Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay then cooperated in a five-year war against Paraguay in which Paraguay was defeated, occupied, lost territory, and was forced to open its markets to foreign trade.
The French Revolution, 1789-1815 French Society and Fiscal Crisis
●French society was divided into three groups: the First Estate (clergy), the Second Estate (hereditary nobility), and the Third Estate (everyone else). ●The clergy and the nobility controlled vast amounts of wealth, and the clergy was exempt from nearly all taxes. ●The Third Estate included the rapidly growing, wealthy middle class (bourgeoisie). ●While the bourgeoisie prospered, France's peasants (80 percent of the population), its artisans, workers, and small shopkeepers, were suffering in the 1780s from economic depression caused by poor harvests. ●Urban poverty and rural suffering often led to violent protests, but these protests were not revolutionary. ●During the 1700s, the expense of wars drove France into debt and inspired the French kings to try to introduce new taxes and fiscal reforms to increase revenue. ●These attempts met with resistance in the Parlaments and on the part of the high nobility.
Revolution Spreads, Conservatives Respond, 1789-1850 The Congress of Vienna and Conservative Retrenchment, 1815-1820
●From 1814 to 1815, representatives of Britain, Russia, Prussia, and Austria met in Vienna to create a comprehensive peace settlement that would reestablish and safeguard the conservative order in Europe. ●The Congress of Vienna restored the French monarchy; redrew the borders of France and other European states; and established a Holy Alliance of Austria, Russia, and Prussia. ●The Holy Alliance defeated liberal revolutions in Spain and Italy in 1820 and tried, without success, to repress liberal and nationalist ideas.
Independence in Latin America, 1800-1830 Mexico, 1810-1823
●In 1810, Mexico was Spain's richest and most populous colony, but the Amerindian population of central Mexico had suffered from dislocation due to mining and commercial enterprises and from a cycle of crop failures and epidemics. ●On September 16, 1810, a parish priest, Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, urged the people to rise up against the Spanish authorities. ●The resulting violent rebellion took place under the leadership of Hidalgo and then, after Hidalgo's capture and execution, under José María Morelos. ●Loyalist forces defeated the insurrection and executed Morelos in 1815. ●In 1821, news of a military revolt in Spain inspired Colonel Agustín de Iturbide to declare Mexico's independence, with himself as emperor. ●In early 1823, the army overthrew Iturbide, and Mexico became a republic.
The Challenge of Social and Economic Change The Abolition of Slavery
●In most of the new nations, rhetorical assertion of the universal ideals of freedom and citizenship contrasted sharply with the reality of slavery. ●Slavery survived in much of the Western Hemisphere until the 1850s—it was strongest in those areas where the export of plantation products was most important. ●In the early nineteenth century, slavery was weakened by abolition in some of the northern states of the United States; by the termination of the African slave trade to the United States (1808); and by the freeing of tens of thousands of slaves, who joined the revolutionary armies in the Spanish American republics. ●But at the same time, increased international demand for plantation products in the first half of the nineteenth century led to increased imports of slaves to Brazil and Cuba. ●In the United States, abolitionists made moral and religious arguments against slavery. ●Two groups denied full citizenship rights under the Constitution, women and free African Americans, played important roles in the abolition movement. ●The Emancipation Proclamation ended slavery in the rebel states not occupied by the Union army, while final abolition was accomplished with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1865. ●In Brazil, progress toward the abolition of slavery was slower and depended on pressure from the British. The heroism of former slaves who joined the Brazilian army in the war against Paraguay helped to feed abolitionist sentiment that led to abolition in 1888. ●In the Caribbean colonies, there was little support for abolition among whites or among free blacks. ●Abolition in the British Caribbean colonies was the result of government decisions made in the context of the declining profitability of the sugar plantations of the British West Indies, while abolition in the French colonies followed the overthrow of the government of Louis Philippe. Slavery was abolished in Puerto Rico in 1873 and in Cuba in 1886.
The Challenge of Social and Economic Change Women's Rights and the Struggle for Social Justice
●In the second half of the nineteenth century, women's rights movements made slow progress toward the achievement of economic, legal, political, and educational equality in the United States, Canada, and Latin America. ●Most working-class women played no role in the women's rights movements; nonetheless, economic circumstances forced working-class women to take jobs outside the home and thus to contribute to the transformation of gender relations. ●Despite the abolition of slavery, various forms of discrimination against persons of African descent remained in place throughout the Western Hemisphere at the end of the century. ●Attempts to overturn racist stereotypes and to celebrate black cultural achievements in political and literary magazines failed to end racial discrimination.
Independence in Latin America, 1800-1830 Brazil, to 1831
●King John VI of Portugal ruled his kingdom from Brazil until 1821, when unrest in Spain and Portugal led him to return to Lisbon. ●King John's son Pedro remained in Brazil, where he ruled as regent until 1822, when he declared Brazil to be an independent constitutional monarchy, with himself as king. ●Pedro's liberal policies (including opposition to slavery) alienated the political slaveholding elite, and he incurred heavy losses of men and money as he attempted to control Uruguay by military force. ●Street demonstrations and violence led Pedro I to abdicate in favor of his son, Pedro II, who reigned until republicans overthrew him in 1889.
The Problem of Order, 1825-1890 Constitutional Experiments
●Leaders in both the United States and in Latin America espoused constitutionalism. ●In the United States, the colonists' prior experience with representative government contributed to the success of constitutionalism; in Latin America, inexperience with popular politics contributed to the failure of constitutions. ●In Canada, Britain responded to demands for political reform by establishing limited self-rule in each of the provinces in the 1840s. ●In 1867, the provincial governments of Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia entered into a confederation to form the Dominion of Canada with a central government in Ottawa. ●In Latin America, lack of experience with elected legislatures and municipal governments led the drafters of constitutions to experiment with untested and impractical political institutions. ●Latin American nations also found it difficult to define the political role of the church and to subordinate the army and its prestigious leaders to civilian government.
Prelude to Revolution: The Eighteenth-Century Crisis Folk Cultures and Popular Protest
●Most people in Western society did not share in the ideas of the Enlightenment; common people remained loyal to cultural values grounded in the preindustrial past. ●These cultural values prescribed a set of traditionally accepted mutual rights and obligations that connected the people to their rulers. ●When eighteenth-century monarchs tried to increase their authority and to centralize power by introducing more efficient systems of tax collection and public administration, the people regarded these changes as violations of sacred customs and sometimes expressed their outrage in violent protests. ●Such protests aimed to restore custom and precedent, not to achieve revolutionary change. ●Rationalist Enlightenment reformers also sparked popular opposition when they sought to replace popular festivals with rational civic rituals. ●Spontaneous popular uprisings had revolutionary potential only when they coincided with conflicts within the elite.
The Challenge of Social and Economic Change Development and Underdevelopment
●Nearly all the nations of the Western Hemisphere experienced economic growth during the nineteenth century, but the United States was the only one to industrialize. ●Only the United States, Canada, and Argentina attained living standards similar to those in Western Europe. ●Rising demand for mine products led to mining booms in the western United States, Mexico, and Chile. ●Heavily capitalized European and North American corporations played a significant role in developing mining enterprises in Latin America. ●The expense of transportation and communications technology also increased dependence on foreign capital. ●Latin America, the United States, and Canada all participated in the increasingly integrated world market, but interdependence and competition produced deep structural differences among Western Hemisphere economies. ●Those nations that industrialized achieved prosperity and development, while those nations that depended on the export of raw materials and low-wage industries experienced underdevelopment. ●Cyclical swings in international markets partially explain why Canada and the United States achieved development while Latin America remained underdeveloped. ●Both the United States and Canada gained independence during periods of global economic expansion. ●Latin American countries gained independence during the 1820s, when the global economy was contracting. ●Weak governments, political instability, and (in some cases) civil war also slowed Latin American development. Latin America became dependent on Britain and, later, on the United States for technology and capital.
Revolution Spreads, Conservatives Respond, 1789-1850 Nationalism, Reform, and Revolution, 1821-1850
●Popular support for national self-determination and democratic reform grew throughout Europe. ●Greece gained its independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1830, while in France, the people of Paris forced the monarchy to accept constitutional rule and to extend voting privileges. ●Democratic reform movements emerged in both Britain and in the United States. ●In the United States, the franchise was extended after the War of 1812, while in Britain, response to the unpopular Corn Laws resulted in a nearly 50 percent increase in the number of voters. ●In Europe, the desire for national self-determination and democratic reform led to a series of revolutions in 1848. ●In France, the monarchy was overthrown and replaced by an elected president (Louis Napoleon); elsewhere in Europe, the revolutions of 1848 failed to gain either their nationalist or republican objectives.
The Challenge of Social and Economic Change Altered Environments
●Population growth, economic expansion, and the introduction of new plants and animals brought about deforestation, soil exhaustion, and erosion. ●Rapid urbanization put strain on water delivery systems and sewage and garbage disposal systems and led to the spread of the timber industry. ●The expansion of the mining industry led to erosion and pollution in the western United States, Chile, and Brazil. ●Efforts to meet increasing demand for food and housing and to satisfy foreign demands for exports led to environmental degradation but also contributed to economic growth. ●Faced with a choice between protecting the environment or achieving economic growth, all of the hemisphere's nations chose economic growth.
Prelude to Revolution: The Eighteenth-Century Crisis Colonial Wars and Fiscal Crises
●Rivalry among the European powers intensified in the early 1600s when the Dutch attacked Spanish and Portuguese possessions in the Americas and in Asia. ●In the 1600s and 1700s, the British then checked Dutch commercial and colonial ambitions and went on to defeat France in the Seven Years War (1756-1763) and take over French colonial possessions in the Americas and in India. ●The unprecedented costs of the wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries drove European governments to seek new sources of revenue at a time when the intellectual environment of the Enlightenment inspired people to question and to protest the state's attempts to introduce new ways of collecting revenue.
Prelude to Revolution: The Eighteenth-Century Crisis The Enlightenment and the Old Order
●The Enlightenment thinkers sought to apply the methods and questions of the Scientific Revolution to the study of human society. ●One way of doing so was to classify and systematize knowledge; another way was to search for natural laws that were thought to underlie human affairs and to devise scientific techniques of government and social regulation. ●John Locke argued that governments were created to protect the people; he emphasized the importance of individual rights. Jean Jacques Rousseau asserted that the will of the people was sacred; ●he believed that people would act collectively on the basis of their shared historical experience. ●Not all Enlightenment thinkers were radicals or atheists. Many, like Voltaire, believed that monarchs could be agents of change. ●Some members of the European nobility (e.g., Catherine the Great of Russia, Frederick the Great of Prussia) patronized Enlightenment thinkers and used Enlightenment ideas as they reformed their bureaucracies, legal systems, tax systems, and economies. ●At the same time, these monarchs suppressed or banned radical ideas that promoted republicanism or attacked religion. ●Many of the major intellectuals of the Enlightenment communicated with each other and with political leaders. ●Women were instrumental in the dissemination of their ideas; purchasing and discussing the writings of the Enlightenment thinkers; and, in the case of wealthy Parisian women, making their homes available for salons at which Enlightenment thinkers gathered. ●The new ideas of the Enlightenment were particularly attractive to the expanding middle class in Europe and in the Western Hemisphere. ●Many European intellectuals saw the Americas as a new, uncorrupted place in which material and social progress would come more quickly than in Europe. ●Benjamin Franklin came to symbolize the natural genius and the vast potential of America. ●Franklin's success in business, his intellectual and scientific accomplishments, and his political career offered proof that in America, where society was free of the chains of inherited privilege, genius could thrive.
Revolution Spreads, Conservatives Respond, 1789-1850 The Haitian Revolution, 1789-1804
●The French colony of Saint Domingue was one of the richest European colonies in the Americas, but its economic success was based on one of the most brutal slave regimes in the Caribbean. ●The political turmoil in France weakened the ability of colonial administrators to maintain order and led to conflict between slaves and gens de couleur on the one hand and whites on the other. ● A slave rebellion under the leadership of François Dominique Toussaint L'Ouverture took over the colony in 1794. ●Napoleon's 1802 attempt to reestablish French authority led to the capture of L'Ouverture but failed to retake the colony, which became the independent republic of Haiti in 1804. ●Tens of thousands of people died in the Haitian revolution, the economy was destroyed, and public administration was corrupted by more than a decade of violence.
The French Revolution, 1789-1815 Protest Turns to Revolution, 1789-1792
●The king called a meeting of the Estates General to get approval of new taxes. ●The representatives of the Third Estate and some members of the First Estate declared themselves to be a National Assembly and pledged to write a constitution that would incorporate the idea of popular sovereignty. ●As the king prepared to send troops to arrest the members of the National Assembly, the common people of Paris rose up in arms against the government, and peasant uprisings broke out in the countryside. ●The National Assembly was emboldened to set forth its position in the Declaration of the Rights of Man. ●As the economic crisis grew worse, Parisian market women marched on Versailles and captured the king and his family. ●The National Assembly passed a new constitution that limited the power of the monarchy and restructured French politics and society. ●When Austria and Prussia threatened to intervene, the National Assembly declared war in 1791.
The French Revolution, 1789-1815 The Terror, 1793-1794
●The king's attempt to flee in 1792 led to his execution and to the formation of a new government, the National Convention, which was dominated by the radical Mountain faction of the Jacobins and by their leader, Robespierre. ●Under Robespierre, executive power was placed in the hands of the Committee of Public Safety, militant feminist forces were repressed, new actions against the clergy were approved, and suspected enemies of the revolution were imprisoned and guillotined in the Reign of Terror (1793-1794). ●In July 1794, conservatives in the National Convention voted for the arrest and execution of Robespierre.
The Problem of Order, 1825-1890 Native Peoples and the Nation-State
●When the former colonies of the Western Hemisphere became independent, the colonial powers ceased to play a role as mediator for and protector of the native peoples. ●Independent Amerindian peoples posed a significant challenge to the new nations of the Western Hemisphere, but Amerindian military resistance was overcome in both North and South America by the end of the 1880s. ●In the United States, rapid expansion of white settlements between 1790 and 1810 led to conflict between the forces of the American government and Amerindian confederations like that led by Tecumseh and Prophet in 1811-1812. ●Further white settlement led to the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which forced the resettlement of eastern Amerindian peoples to land west of the Mississippi River. ●Amerindians living on the Great Plains had become skilled users of horses and firearms, and thus offered more formidable resistance to the expansion of white settlement. ●Horses and firearms had also made the Plains peoples less reliant on agriculture and more reliant on buffalo hunting. ●The near extinction of the buffalo, loss of land to ranchers, and nearly four decades of armed conflict with the United States Army forced the Plains Amerindians to give up their land and accept reservation life. ●In Argentina and Chile, native people were able to check the expansion of white settlement until the 1860s, when population increase, political stability, and military modernization gave the Chilean and Argentinean governments the upper hand. ●In the 1870s, the governments of both Argentina and Chile crushed native resistance and drove surviving Amerindians onto marginal land. ● In Mexico, plantation owners in the Yucatán Peninsula had forced Maya communities off their land and into poverty. ●In 1847, when the Mexican government was busy with its war against the United States, Maya communities in the Yucatán rose in a revolt (the Caste War) that nearly returned the Yucatán to Maya rule.