The Mexicanization of American Politics: The United States' Transnational Path from Civil War to Stabilization

Downs treats post-bellum history not as a time of reconciliation and stability but rather as a period haunted by fears that the end of the Civil War might lead only to more civil conflict. This concern was expressed in a now-forgotten but then-common discourse evoking the historical example of Mexico as a harbinger of permanent instability as the result of civil war. Recasting the contested 1876 US presidential election as a process of stabilization, Downs recovers the prevalence of the Mexican example, which served both to give voice to popular anxiety and to coax politicians toward a peaceful resolution of the crisis. By evoking contemporary fears of the possibility of state collapse, he provides an image of a strangely vulnerable nineteenth-century US.