How Southern Plutocrats Betrayed America.

AuthorJohn, Richard R.
PositionFrom Oligarchy to Republicanism: The Great Task of Reconstruction - Book review

From Oligarchy to Republicanism: The Great Task of Reconstruction

by Forrest A. Nabors

University of Missouri Press, 420 pp.

The slaveholding oligarchy was defeated in the Civil War. But concentrations of wealth and power continue to threaten our democracy.

We have been talking more and more in recent years about the power of the superrich, and also about statues of Confederate generals. Is that just a coincidence? Maybe not. In From Oligarchy to Republicanism, a stimulating, if often cantankerous, history of the Civil War and Reconstruction, political scientist Forrest Nabors argues that the problem of plutocracy and the fate of the Confederacy were always deeply intertwined. Beginning in the 1830s, the United States had become not one country, but two: a northern republican regime that remained true to the vision of the founders, and a southern oligarchic regime that rejected the country's original core values. In Nabors's telling, the fundamental clash between North and South was not over slavery or states' rights, but over which of these two political ideals would prevail. He gets a lot wrong, but what he gets right is deeply relevant today.

Nabors's narrative is dominated by the contest between republicanism and oligarchy. The first, in his account, found expression in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." Just who is the "We" in that sentence, and who counts among "all men," has, of course, been contested throughout American history. But Nabors is right that many of the founders did embrace what was, at the time, a radical commitment to equality, rooted in a faith in the natural rights of all humanity. Even slaveholders like Thomas Jefferson subscribed to a quasi-theological political philosophy that asserted, as a matter of principle, the equality of all human beings, the dignity of the individual, and the sacredness of liberty.

Nabors calls this vision "republicanism," and credits it with a positive influence on the actual pattern of property ownership in the non-slaveholding North. Here, too, he is on solid ground: for millions of white men, the early republic was a country of yeoman farmers and small-scale producers who enjoyed an impressive degree of economic independence and civic autonomy.

All this would change in the 1830s, Nabors tells us, with the ascendency of oligarchy in the South. By oligarchy, Nabors means not merely inequality, but...

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