Southwestern Historical Quarterly

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Covering an array of seemingly disparate topics—Southern secessionism in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands, transnational capitalism in the lower Rio Grande Valley, the politics of slavery and freedom on both sides of the border, and a clandestine post–Civil War raid into northern Mexico—the articles that compose this special volume of the Southwestern Historical Quarterly convey the analytical potential of a "Greater Reconstruction" framework for the Civil War era. Taken collectively, these four pieces demonstrate an important scholarly consideration: the concept of Greater Reconstruction, which Elliott West originally posited in his seminal 2003 Western Historical Quarterly article, "Reconstructing Race," can and should be applied broadly to better understand the interrelatedness of events spanning the latter half of the nineteenth century.¹ Indeed, historians have only recently begun to incorporate the Greater Reconstruction framework into analyses of U.S. westward expansion, frontier conflicts with Indigenous groups, emancipation of Indian slaves and Hispanic peons, American foreign relations, and the dynamic expansion of industrial capitalism into the West.² With this in mind, I'll use this short [End Page 109] concluding space to ponder some ideas on Greater Reconstruction and to propose future directions for scholars who study this time period.

While traditional accounts of Reconstruction as a distinctly Civil War phenomenon begin with the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and end with the inauguration of Rutherford B. Hayes and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the South in 1877, the concept of a Greater Reconstruction allows for a much broader temporal and topical breadth.³ I tend to think of Greater Reconstruction as beginning with the U.S.–Mexico War in 1846 and ending with the Spanish-American War in 1898, both imperial wars initiated for purposes of geographic expansion and American nation-building. Regardless of the beginning and ending dates one chooses, Greater Reconstruction's most important unifying theme across time and place involves dramatically increasing federal power and the projection of that power in all directions, in ways that fundamentally transformed the role of the United States in the world. The political, economic, legal, cultural, and social transformations that typically began with federal policy initiatives would in turn impact the lives of nearly everybody in the United States and the Western Hemisphere. In a sense, Greater Reconstruction is a way of thinking broadly about the nineteenth-century origins of modern America.

So far, much of the work revolving around the Greater Reconstruction theme pertains to events or processes within the continental United States of the mid-to-late nineteenth century. When Elliott West coined the term and explained its possible meanings nearly twenty years ago, he focused primarily on issues of race in the American West, pointing out that the emancipation of four million Black slaves in the South and their integration into the nation as citizens and (for some) as voters marked just one part of a broader racial transformation that swept the country. Scholars of American slavery have increasingly recognized the existence of multiple forms of involuntary servitude that existed across the United States, including not just chattel slavery but also debt peonage, Indian slavery, and Chinese coolieism. The political and legal mechanisms that enabled slave emancipation after the Civil War were expanded in specific ways—including executive orders and congressional acts—to extend freedom to bondspeople across the American West and the U.S.–Mexico borderlands, and this broadened process of liberation should also be considered within a framework of Greater Reconstruction.⁴ Moreover, after the Civil War, [End Page 110] politicians and government agents spearheaded a sweeping attempt to...