The Atlantic revolutions shared many common traits. They had common origins in imperial competition, war debt, social conflict, and Enlightenment ideals. Over the course of revolution, armed struggle often took on the form of civil war, in which the participation of ordinary people — sans-culottes, slaves, free people of color, mestizos, and Indians — played a decisive role. Perhaps their most important similarity was in the democratic limitations of the regimes these revolutions created and the frustrated aspirations they bequeathed to subsequent generations.

For the most part, the elite liberals who led the revolutions were not democrats and had no intention of creating regimes of economic or social equality. The constitutions they wrote generally restricted voting rights and the capacity to be elected to government to landowners and middle-class men. Indigenous people may have gained formal equality as citizens, yet they found that the actual result was the removal of the privileged status they had negotiated with their original conquerors. Thus they suffered the loss of rights over their land and other resources. Moreover, none of the postrevolutionary constitutions gave women a role in political life.

The issue of slavery, by contrast, divided the revolutions. The American Revolution was led in part by slaveholding landowners, who were determined to retain slavery in its aftermath, while the more radical French republic abolished it throughout the French empire (a measure soon reversed by Napoleon). The independent nation of Haiti was built on the only successful slave revolt in history, but the need for revenue from plantation agriculture soon led to the return of coercive labor requirements, if not outright slavery. In Latin America, independence speeded the abolition of slavery, bringing an immediate ban on the slave trade and gradual emancipation from the 1820s to the 1850s. Still, Cuba and Brazil, which had enormous slave populations, did not end slavery until 1886 and 1888, respectively.

The aftermaths of the Atlantic revolutions brought extremely different fortunes to the new nations that emerged from them. France returned to royal rule with the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1815. A series of revolutionary crises ensued in the nineteenth century as succeeding generations struggled over the legacies of monarchicalism, republicanism, and Bonapartism. It was not until 1871 that republicanism finally prevailed (see Chapter 24). The transition to an independent republic was permanent and relatively smooth in the United States, where war was brief and limited, colonial assemblies had long practiced self-governance, and manufacturing and trade recovered quickly with renewed ties with Britain. Nevertheless, the unresolved conflict over slavery would lead to catastrophic civil war in 1860.

The newly independent nations of Latin America had difficulty achieving political stability when the wars of independence ended. The economic lives of most Latin American countries were disrupted during the years of war. Mexico and Venezuela in particular suffered great destruction of farmland and animals. Between 1836 and 1848 Mexico lost half its territory to the United States, and other countries, too, had difficulty defending themselves from their neighbors. (See “Viewpoints 27.1: Mexican and American Perspectives on the U.S.-Mexican War.”) The Creole leaders of the revolutions had little experience in government, and the wars left a legacy of military, not civilian, leadership.