Civil Wars: Sovereignty in Colombia and the United States in the Mid-1800s

Civil wars proliferated in the mid-1800s from the United States to Argentina as insurgencies sought to redefine or break altogether the political and economic ties between regional and national governments. The striking similarities and connections among the conflicts caused by these insurgencies offer an opportunity for a comparative, transnational study of civil war in the Americas. This explores and compares the connections between U.S. and Colombian debates about sovereignty in the 1850s and 1860s. It examines how Colombian federalists reworked aspects of U.S. constitutional theory, turning them into a call for the decentralization of state power. The paper focuses on the way that tension between regions within each these nations provoked similar debates about the nature of sovereignty even as the civil wars that these debates helped to spawn took very different trajectories.