Relying primarily on speeches given by Republican congressmen, he argues that most Unionists fought not to end slavery but to destroy oligarchy. In Nabors’s telling, the clash between the Union and the Confederacy was linked with, yet distinct from, the abolitionists’ moral crusade against slavery. Anti-monopolists fixed their sights not only on financial institutions such as the Bank of the United States and corporate combines such as Western Union, but also on the concentrated ownership of land, including the gigantic slave-labor agribusinesses that were known as plantations. By the 1850s, this agenda would be embraced by the Republican Party-the party of Abraham Lincoln.Īmong the issues Republicans popularized was the perniciousness in the pre–Civil War South of vast landed estates, which one congressman derided as a “land monopoly.” This indictment serves as a pointed reminder of how controversial the idea of monopoly was in this era of American history.
OLIGARCHICAL PLUTOCRACY FREE
Opposition to this rising oligarchy, Nabors contends, was centered in the North, where lawmakers remained committed to the republican values of the founders by championing such policies as free education, public works, and the rule of law. If the slaveholders were oligarchs, what about the industrial elite? Nabors has trouble explaining how Reconstruction, which supposedly defeated oligarchy, was followed by the rise of business moguls like Jay Gould, John Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie. Emboldened by Calhoun, for the next quarter century a cohort of proslavery oligarchs would dominate the South-and eventually the country-as an un-American “race of kings.”
Rejecting the founders’ misgivings about slavery, Calhoun defended it as a positive good for the enslaved as well as the enslaver. The mastermind of this rising oligarchy was South Carolina slaveholder John C. By the 1830s, the “core idea upon which America was founded,” Nabors writes, ceased to be relevant in a “great part of the nation where slavery had obtained.” Yet for Nabors, the essential fact is that they used their wealth to entrench themselves in power at the expense of both African Americans and the white majority. Southern oligarchs were, of course, slaveholders. By oligarchy, Nabors means not merely inequality, but, rather, a system in which a rich minority uses its control over governmental institutions to transform wealth into rank, giving them ironclad control over the levers of political power, the most lucrative economic resources (slaves and land), and even the cultural conventions that justified these special privileges. 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.Īll this would change in the 1830s, Nabors tells us, with the ascendency of oligarchy in the South.
Nabors calls this vision “republicanism,” and credits it with a positive influence on the actual pattern of property ownership in the non-slaveholding North. 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. 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. 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. Nabors’s narrative is dominated by the contest between republicanism and oligarchy. From Oligarchy to Republicanism: The Great Task of Reconstruction
0 kommentar(er)
