How many Republics has America had?

[The Minsky Moment]

The problem with viewing the Civil War as a major break in political form is that the Civil War amendments intended to effect that change were quickly neutered and rendered nearly dormant by 1876.  The American republic has changed significantly over its lifetime, but not in clear sharp movements rather in fits and starts, in episodes of two steps forward one step back.  That makes it hard if not impossible to demarcate clear ordinal republics.

[ulmont]

I think the Civil War should definitely warrant an increment.  The South was (rightly) coerced to ratify amendments that it would have never ratified voluntarily (probably not even today).  While in theory it may have been a change done within the system, in reality it was a change imposed by the victor of a civil war.

You could also argue a post Voting Rights Act republic, but since that was even more change inside the system I hesitate to do so.

[DGuller]

I think the Civil War should definitely warrant an increment.  The South was (rightly) coerced to ratify amendments that it would have never ratified voluntarily (probably not even today).  While in theory it may have been a change done within the system, in reality it was a change imposed by the victor of a civil war.

You could also argue a post Voting Rights Act republic, but since that was even more change inside the system I hesitate to do so.

I think a new republic starts when a critical mass of people go "fuck, this system isn't working, let's blow it up".  I think that happened during the Civil War, as the southern states decided that they were no longer able to protect slavery to their satisfaction within the existing constitutional framework (which ironically led to politically impossible changes imposed on them after they lost the war).  This would've also happened if the January 6 insurrection succeeded in their goals (assuming that what followed would still be classified as a republic rather than a monarchy). 

Did anything of the kind happen with the Voting Rights Act?  Was it accomplished with extralegal pressure on the system?

[The Minsky Moment]

Again, the problem with seeing the Civil War as creating a new republic is that if you compare the US c. 1858 with the US c. 1878, it doesn't look that different.  The emerging Republican party has solidified its position in the 2 party system.  Slavery as an institution is officially abolished but the freed men are still subordinated in a brutal system of racial hierarchy and labor control.  All other state institutions operate essentially identically.  The federal budget is essentially the same size, when one adjusts for the continuing interest burden from the wartime debt.  Revenue is still raised primarily from customs duties, with the minor addition of some excise taxation (liquor) with spending mostly directed to the military and post office as before.  It just looks and operates very much like the same state according the to same rules.

[DGuller]

Again, the problem with seeing the Civil War as creating a new republic is that if you compare the US c. 1858 with the US c. 1878, it doesn't look that different.  The emerging Republican party has solidified its position in the 2 party system.  Slavery as an institution is officially abolished but the freed men are still subordinated in a brutal system of racial hierarchy and labor control.  All other state institutions operate essentially identically.  The federal budget is essentially the same size, when one adjusts for the continuing interest burden from the wartime debt.  Revenue is still raised primarily from customs duties, with the minor addition of some excise taxation (liquor) with spending mostly directed to the military and post office as before.  It just looks and operates very much like the same state according the to same rules.

There was definitely a regression in rights from the end of the Civil War to the Jim Crow era.  However, I don't think it would've been possible to eventually dismantle Jim Crow within the system if it weren't for the amendments forced through a hundred years earlier.  I agree that it's highly regrettable that these amendments weren't enforced for so long, but there would've been nothing to enforce without the Civil War.

[Sheilbh]

I think the Civil War should definitely warrant an increment.  The South was (rightly) coerced to ratify amendments that it would have never ratified voluntarily (probably not even today).  While in theory it may have been a change done within the system, in reality it was a change imposed by the victor of a civil war.

That is the one that seems like a natural break - I'd agree on the post-civil rights era as well as that's basically when the US becomes a democracy in a full sense.

If we're looking at it using the French model it's constitutionals but it's the 4th to 5th Republic that complicates the pictures because the first three republics end in relatively clear ways, while 4th to 5th is something a little different and more blurred.

Edit: But I think this also possibly speaks to how societies/systems want to present themselves and how they source their legitimacy. So It seems that for the US in general it is by emphasising continuity with the founding fathers and the American revolution - though this is perhaps coming under challenge particularly from the left who rightly point out the problem of slavery and race in that narrative. For the French it seems that legitimacy in part comes from discontinuity and breaks/transitions in their history - the system is not a single Republic occasionally interrupted by monarchy but dating back to the revolution, but instead in some ways the French re-enacting that revolution by re-founding their system again and again (see Melenchon's campaign - a big part of which is the call for a VI Republic).

[The Minsky Moment]

There simply aren't natural singular breaking points for the US as for example there was for Germany in 1870-71, 1918-19, 1933, 1945-47, 1989-90 or for France in the Revolution, Restoration, 1830, the Second Republic, Second Empire, Third Republic - i.e. immediate changes in fundamental aspects of the character of the state.  The civil War is a critical event in American history and plants the seeds for future transformation but the post-bellum republic is not transformationally different for the ante-bellum republic, at least once the reconstruction experiment is discarded.

Trying to fit the US into the historical schematic of successive "Republics" misses an important aspect of the American political experience - that the American republic is always in flux, changing and evolving, often and fits and starts, sometimes with false dawns or wrong turns, but nearly always in some sort of evolutionary motion, and without the sudden transformational and revolutionary episodes more commonly experienced in 19th and 20th century European history.  Something it tends to share with its British parent (at lease post 1688)

[ulmont]

Did anything of the kind happen with the Voting Rights Act?  Was it accomplished with extralegal pressure on the system?

No, but I reject your definition.  The pre-VRA electorate is simply not the same as the post-VRA electorate, in a significant enough fashion to in my opinion warrant a break.  But absent agreed definitions on when you increment a republic, it's a pointless endeavour.

[Admiral Yi]

I like Shelf's answer.  The French do serial republics and we don't.