Speaker: ALYS D. BEVERTON

Before 1861, Americans could confidently claim to belong to the New World’s “exceptional” republic, unlike other self-governing nations such as Mexico. The outbreak of the Civil War exploded this illusion by showing that the United States was in fact not immune to domestic political instability. Alys D. Beverton examines Mexico’s place in the US imagination during the Civil War and postbellum period. Beverton reveals how pro- and antiwar Confederates and Unionists alike used Mexico’s long history of political strife to alternately justify and oppose the Civil War and, after 1865, various policies aimed at reuniting the states. Both sides used Mexico as a cautionary tale of how easily a nation, even the so-called exceptional United States, could slip into anarchy in the tumultuous nineteenth century.

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