Zimmermann, Domingo F. Sarmiento, Édouard Laboulaye, and Atlantic Constitutional Entanglements Eduardo Zimmermann

https://www.academia.edu/171935655/Zimmermann_Domingo_F_Sarmiento_%C3%89douard_Laboulaye_and_Atlantic_Constitutional_Entanglements?email_work_card=title In the winter of 1864, Argentine statesman and diplomatic envoy Domingo Faustino Sarmiento wrote from Valparaíso, Chile, to tell his government about the Spanish occupation of the Chinchas Islands in Peru, reaffirming the need to oppose the presence of European empires in the Americas. Both the coronation of Emperor Maximillian in Mexico with the backing of France's Napoleon III two years before and now the Spanish moves in the Pacific pointed in the same alarming direction: a systematic policy aiming at the reestablishment of European control in Latin America. At this geopolitical historical conjuncture in Latin America, Sarmiento anticipated the close connection of developments in the US Civil War and the fate of republicanism in the hemisphere. He said so in the same communication to the Argentine government: "America and republicanism face such a crisis! The fate of the whole continent for a decade to come may depend on the result of a battle fought on the banks of the Potomac!" 1 Two years later, his conversations with Matías Romero, Mexican minister to the United States, reflected similar concerns. Sarmiento expressed a profound desire for the success of the common cause of both countries, "facing the same challenges: ending civil war and finding new ways to extinguish revolutionary embers." 2 These exchanges illustrate the significance for Latin American republicanism of the "Atlantic crisis" of the 1860s, a topic that a growing body of scholarship has explored in recent years. This complex process of global political transformations included "multiple civil wars, European invasions, separatist rebellions, independence and unification struggles, slave uprisings, and slave emancipations" that would put experiments in republicanism in the New World to the test. The US Civil War was likely the greatest milestone. As historian Greg P. Downs notes: "If it was not a world war, it was a war, in