and Reconstruction era. He is professor emeritus of history at the University of South Carolina and has had visiting appointments at universities in Britain, Italy, France, and Brazil.
Doyle applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Age of Reconstruction: How Lincoln's New Birth of Freedom Remade the World, and reported the following:
Page 99 of The Age of Reconstruction is an excellent illustration of Ford Madox Ford’s axiom. It is the opening of chapter four and the place to tell readers where we have been, where we are going, and what I am trying to make of it all. Chapter Three, “The Mexican Lesson,” tells the little-known story of the United States’ role in forcing France to withdraw the armed forces they sent to protect the throne of Maximilian, the ill-fated Austrian archduke Napoleon III had installed as Emperor of Mexico. Chapter Four, “Russia Exits,” takes up the evacuation of North America by another European empire when, at the end of March 1867, a few days after the French left Mexico, Secretary of State William Seward concluded a treaty between the United States and Russia to purchase what became Alaska. Historians have routinely treated the Alaska Purchase as a lark, which skeptical members of Congress ridiculed as “Seward’s Folly” or, my favorite, “Walrussia.” The treaty did meet stiff opposition in Congress, partly because many Republicans were at odds with Seward due to his loyalty to President Andrew Johnson and because taking over non-contiguous territory, never mind the colony of a European empire, seemed to contradict republican principles. Charles Sumner, a Radical Republican leader in the Senate, turned the tide with a magnificent speech that portrayed the Alaska Purchase, just as I interpret it in the following chapter, as part of a massive geopolitical shift in which European empires retreated from the Western Hemisphere. Out of this came a new Monroe Doctrine whose slogan, “America for Americans,” expressed a Pan-American vision of the Americas as a haven for independent republics free of European imperialism and slavery.Learn more about The Age of Reconstruction at the Princeton University Press website.
The epigraph for Chapter Four has Sumner telling Congress that by this treaty, “we dismiss one more monarch from this continent. One by one they have retired; first France; then Spain; then France again; and now Russia; all giving way to that absorbing Unity which is declared in the national motto, E pluribus unum.” Unlike France, Spain, and Britain, Russia had befriended the Union during the Civil War. On the contrary, the Alaska treaty stimulated a popular idea that Russia and America, despite their vast differences, were forging a bond based on their common enmity toward European powers and commitment to the abolition of unfree labor. Though the friendship between Russia and America may have been exaggerated, it served to justify the Alaska Purchase and ennoble America’s post-Civil War vision for the hemisphere.
The Page 99 Test: The Cause of All Nations.
--Marshal Zeringue
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