Greater Reconstruction

The Greater Reconstruction was a period in the history of the United States during the nineteenth century characterized by racial tensions, westward settler colonialism, ideas about republican citizenship, and expanding federal power. After America claimed substantial western lands in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo after winning the Mexican–American War, the federal government of the United States clashed over questions of political sovereignty and citizenship with several demographic groups who lived in or migrated to the newly claimed territory, such as American Indians, Chinese Americans, Mexican Americans, and Mormons. In the aftermath of the American Civil War, there was similar debate about citizenship and sovereignty for ex-Confederates and recently emancipated African Americans in the southern United States. Americans and their governments debated who could belong in a country that was increasingly diverse. White Americans and government leaders often believed conforming to Euro-American cultural norms was a prerequisite to citizenship in the United States and were willing to empower the government to enforce such, even with force and violence.

Greater Reconstruction
Mid 19th century – late 19th century
Antebellum Era – Age of Jackson Gilded Age – Progressive Era
Clockwise from top: John Gast's American Progress (1872) Freedmen's Bureau school (1866) Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce (1877) Chinese emigrants aboard S. S. Alaska (1876) Winfield Scott at the Siege of Veracruz (1847)
Location	United States
Including	Civil War era Reconstruction era
Key events	Mexican–American War American Civil War Fourteenth Amendment American Indian Wars Chinese Exclusion Act Edmunds Act Dawes Act Spanish–American War

Historiography

Elliott West coined and introduced the concept of the Greater Reconstruction in 2002 as part of a speech he delivered to the Western History Association as its president that year.^[1] He argued that the history of the western United States was connected to questions that the American Civil War and Reconstruction era raised about citizenship and that the region lay at the center of the nation's history of race relations and state power.^[2] A series editor's introduction to West's 2023 Continental Reckoning called the Greater Reconstruction concept "the most notable historiographical idea advanced about the American West in the twenty-first century".^[3] In 2024, a Western Historical Quarterly article described a "Greater Reconstruction historiographical turn".^[4]

Periodizations focused on the Civil War generally held that Reconstruction began in 1863, when Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, and ended in 1877, when federal troops stopped occupying the southern United States.^[5] West has called that Reconstruction "the lesser one".^[6] The Greater Reconstruction began with the Mexican–American War, when the United States' western territorial acquisitions "triggered an American racial crisis", in West's words, from the perspective of racist Euro-Americans.^[7] Historians have proposed a variety of endings for the Greater Reconstruction, including the Nez Perce War in 1877, the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882,^[8] the passage of the Dawes Act in 1887,^[9] and the Spanish–American War in 1898.^[10]

History

In 1848, the United States won the Mexican–American War, and as part of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo Mexico a vast territory stretching from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Coast. This brought numerous eighty thousand Mexicans and numerous American Indians under the purview of American governance.^[11] White Americans who held government power reconstructed the newly acquired territory through policies meant to assimilate both Mexicans and American Indians, eliminating what whites considered inferior cultural and racial differences. This included repeatedly rejecting the statehood petitions of Arizona Territory and New Mexico Territory because of their Hispanic populations and displacing Indigenous peoples from historic homelands to reservations and American Indian boarding schools.^[12]

A racist political cartoon lampooning the idea of citizenship for all people of color^[13]

As the federal government's power increased as part of the Greater Reconstruction, it used this power to extend rights of citizenship to more people, in particular the formerly enslaved, through the Fourteenth Amendment and Civil Rights Act of 1866, but these new federal protections overtly excluded American Indians from citizenship.^[14]

After the American Civil War, Republicans and Democrats clashed over political control of California and debated the place of people of color in the reunified United States, whom white Americans often dismissively called "heathen" in a dual reference to religion and race. California Democrats argued that Republican support for Black citizenship necessarily went hand in hand with support for enfranchising American Indians and Chinese immigrants, whom white Californians hated. Republicans, hoping to brush off such accusations while vying for the votes of a deeply racist white Californian electorate, countered that Protestant Christianity should instead be the litmus test for inclusion in citizenship. Black Americans—the majority of whom had long been Christian—and Chinese immigrant converts, therefore, deserved citizenship in the California Republican worldview. This framework, however, excluded, whether implicitly or explicitly, Jews, Irish Catholics, and atheists. California Democrats disagreed, holding that citizenship should be limited to people racialized as white without regard for religion, thereby including Jews, Irish Catholics, and atheists but excluding Black Americans, American Indians, and Chinese immigrants.^[15]

"Sherman's dashing Yankee boys will never make the coast!"
So the saucy rebels said and 'twas a handsome boast,
Had they not forgot, alas! to reckon with the Host,
While we were marching through Georgia
– "Marching Through Georgia", a Union marching song

"Orland's boys with carpet bags will never take Salt Lake!"
So the royal families said, but that was their mistake,
We’ll show them at the ballot boxes who will "take the cake,"
While we go marching through Zion.
– "Marching Through Zion," a Liberal Party political song^[16]

Northern Republicans after the Civil War often thought Utah Territory and the Intermountain West—politically dominated by members and leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (also called "Mormonism")—also needed to be reconstructed in a manner similar to the southern United States.^[17] The Republican platform of 1856 called southern slavery and Mormon polygamy the "twin relics of barbarism," and Republican politicians believed the Mormon West was a place of despotic tyranny in the same way the slavocratic South had been.^[18] Historian Sarah Barringer Gordon called the United States' efforts to legislatively and judicially eliminate Mormon polygamy "a second reconstruction in the West" in which the federal government exercised governmental power in a manner similar to the Reconstruction of the South.^[19]