The Purpose of This Book
The task of Reconstruction was the greatest of tasks that every nation must face at least once, the task of constituting or reconstituting its political regime. The survival of our republican form of government and the future prospects for equality and liberty for all depended on both the American victory in 1783 and the Union victory in 1865. After the Revolutionary War, the goal of American statesmen was to establish a republic from monarchic material. After the Civil War, the goal was equally profound, to reestablish that system of government and free way of life.
Today, we do not see the similitude that we ought to see in the work of the Republicans in the Reconstruction Congress and in the work of the republican delegates to the Continental Congress and the Federal Convention in 1787. We generally understand that the American revolutionaries fought against monarchy and for republicanism. If we did not understand what they were struggling against, we could not fully appreciate their revolutionary effort to establish a republic. Studies of the aims, disputes, and deeds of the Continental Congress and the Federal Convention would make much less sense.
In that event, someone would have to write a book about how the delegates to the Continental Congress and the Federal Convention understood their long conflict with Great Britain. Because we generally know what they thought of that conflict, we take their cause for granted, and we see the Revolutionary War in light of the founding of the nation and the framing of the Constitution. We understand that when they established a new nation and a new law, that was the moment to which all events led and from which all events proceeded. The moment when the Republicans in the Reconstruction Congress remade the nation and renewed the law is in this class of rare events. Just as we see the American Revolution in light of the American founding, we ought to see the Civil War in light of Reconstruction and not the other way around.
The purpose of this book is to recover how the Republicans in the Reconstruction Congress understood the prior national struggle that decisively shaped their understanding of their task. The premise of this book is that long ago, we, the American people, ceased to be fully aware of what the Republicans believed the cause of their party was and what they resisted when dark clouds gathered above the nation and then when the storm broke. We remember slavery, the principal theme of those days, but we no longer remember how they saw the political conflict at its deepest level and in its most general sense that shook the nation for decades. Because we have lost that memory, we do not completely see or study Reconstruction for what it really was, and we miss its most valuable lessons. For that reason, most of this book is devoted to this recovery, and only part of one chapter addresses Reconstruction itself.
As they passed through their national crisis, the Republicans looked far backward in time and southward in direction in order to understand it and to know how to solve it. This book attempts to follow their lead, looking backward in time and into the antebellum South, where the cause of the national crisis is found. The panorama that opens to our view, through their eyes, is partially represented here. The South that they see is not one that we have understood well enough or that we can easily understand, because the further development of that South was stopped at Appomattox. To contemporary Americans from every part of the nation, schooled from birth as they are in the general idea of equality, the real political character of the antebellum South probably would seem too incredible to be true, more at home on another continent in a far-distant age than within our present borders not long ago, if they could travel through time and see for themselves. At their first encounter with the ruling class of the antebellum South, the same Americans who proudly wave the Confederate flag today would likely feel their American blood boil, hoist the Stars and Stripes, and reach for their guns. They know not what they do.
The division of the United States into two independent nations logically followed the division of the American political regime into two inherently hostile political regimes, one republican in form, the other oligarchic. In suturing this dangerous wound, congressional Republicans not only had to recombine the sections but, most important, also had to address the profound difference in the two political regimes that caused the division. That difference explained decades of prior national history and defined their problem.
When the Republicans in the Reconstruction Congress addressed the national crisis and used the terms republic and oligarchy, they were using the terms of classical political science for types of political regimes. For the sake of precision, a brief review of these terms is in order.
In modern social science–speak, a political regime could be termed a primary independent variable; the dependent variable is human life, everything. Therefore, when serious claims rise from the pages of primary historical documents wherein leading statesmen are repeatedly pointing to a fundamental difference in types of political regimes, future generations should sit up and take notice and then collect and seriously evaluate those claims. Because forms of political regimes are so fundamental to shaping human life in different ways, understanding them is the first order of business in understanding the past.
In Aristotle’s Politics, a political regime is a system of government and a way of living, broadly understood, encompassing both law and custom, both formal government and culture. A regime is defined by the sovereign ruler or ruling body as well as by a specific way of life of political society that is causally related to the type of sovereign who rules.1
The ruler or rulers are the one or the number of persons who control the offices and institutions of government, and they are not always equivalent to the officers of government. Ruling through those offices and institutions, the sovereign ruler orders, arranges, and shapes the parts of political society, just as craftsmen work with materials to produce a finished product.2 The conduct of all activity, most notably the ruling activity of the sovereign, presupposes a superintending aim, that is, a generally discernible principle expressing the best or most choice-worthy way of life and a standard of justice.3 All parts of political society, people and institutions, tend to assimilate the character of the ruling principle, which constrains and channels conduct and influences law and the interpretation of law. The ruling principle articulates the parts of political society and produces a way of life common to the political society but distinct from others. Only a regime, a common “way of life,” maintains a multitude of people as one political society.4
By oligarchy Republicans referred to a form of political regime defined by Aristotle as one in which a rich minority rules for the advantage of the rich minority and in which the people composing that political society are ranked.5 They are ranked because the ruling principle of that regime is the principle of natural inequality that justifies minority rule.6 In their view, white did not rule over black in the South; a few rich whites ruled over the many, both white and black. Sometimes the Republicans used the less pejorative label aristocracy, which differs from oligarchy by the character of rule but still means rule of the few. For a long time, scholars of Southern history have recognized something different about the South, especially in the antebellum South, and have coined the terms southern distinctiveness, southern exceptionalism, and southern nationalism to give a name to this difference.7 All the peculiar attributes that distinguished the antebellum slave South, and what remained of the antebellum South after the war, are the result of the development of this revolutionary political regime.
The regime was revolutionary within the American Republic, because, in contrast, the American Republic was established on the opposite ruling principle of natural equality, succinctly stated in the Declaration of Independence. A republic in which the sovereign rulers are the coequal people and the majority gives the law is logically deduced from the moral axiom of natural equality.8 In Query XIII of the Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson wrote that majority government, the Lex majoris partis, is “the natural law of every assembly of men, whose numbers are not fixed by any other law.”9 Both Jefferson and James Madison used variations of the Latin phrase to demonstrate that natural right justified only majority government.10 The assertion of the equal, inalienable, natural rights of the people determined that the people are sovereign, that the powers of government derive from them, and that majorities should govern.
The American version of republicanism differed from prior models by its moral basis in natural right. Whereas the commonplace phrase vox populi vox Dei (the voice of the people is the voice of God) means that whatever majorities decide is rightful, the American doctrine of natural right both confers legitimacy on republican majorities and limits majority rule. Jefferson wrote, “Though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.” If majorities oppress others, they attack the moral basis of their own rightful authority. John Adams wrote that the American governments framed in the founding period were “the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature” and “were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses.”11 A better motto for the unique character of the American political regime would be vox naturae vox Dei, or the voice of nature is the voice of God, because both the authority of the people and the limitations on that authority derived from moral axioms discoverable in the nature of mankind.
But later generations of antebellum Southern rulers after the American founding disputed what the voice of God speaks through nature, embraced the principle of natural inequality, and abandoned natural equality; they justified their rule by the new principle and abandoned the continuing project of reforming their aristocratic political societies into republican states; they embraced slavery and abandoned antislavery sentiments and acts. This was unexpected and shifted political development in the South in a revolutionary direction.
In 1785 Jefferson looked confidently into the future. Believing that the generations following his would secure emancipation and a more republican constitution in Virginia, he wrote, “It is to them I look, the rising generation, and not to the one now in power, for these great reformations.” By 1800 he noticed a surprising change among Virginia leaders, and the change did not bode well for republicanism in Virginia. “The times are certainly such as to justify anxiety on the subject of political principles, & particularly those of the public servants,” he worried. Rather than calling for more republican reforms, as Jefferson previously expected, the rising generation was instead insisting upon “restraining the elective franchise to property,” that is, to the owners of land and slaves. He confessed, “I have . . . wondered at the change of political principles which has taken place in many in this state.” When he looked outside Virginia, he paid particular attention to recreant educators: “I am still more alarmed to see, in the other states, the general political dispositions of those to whom is confided the education of the rising generation.”12 Eventually, those educators raised a generation that none of the founders anticipated.
In the Virginia constitutional convention of 1829–30, delegates openly supported rule by the rich and denounced natural equality. One ridiculed majority rule, avowing, “I would not live under King Numbers,” which became a new rallying cry for the revolutionary generation of antebellum Southern leaders.13 These attacks on the foundational principles of American republicanism were launched again in the Virginia House of Delegates when they debated emancipation one last time in 1831–32.14 In the U.S. House of Representatives in 1832, George McDuffie of South Carolina also attacked majority rule as “King Numbers,” which astounded Andrew Stewart of Pennsylvania. Stewart replied, “Such a philippic against the will of the majority I have never before heard.”15 They would hear these philippics repeatedly for the next thirty years.
A new generation of rulers reshaped the South around their new ruling principle. Increasingly as the years wore on, the antebellum South was oddly and uncomfortably yoked to the antebellum North. As the political development of the South veered away from the national path laid down by the American founders, both sides increasingly differed, tenuously framed by the American Union. Eventually, the Southern statesmen attempted to convert the entire nation to their system, and when the rest of the nation repelled this enterprise through normal politics, they seceded. By the time the cannons in Charleston Harbor fired upon Fort Sumter, Southern oligarchy had been maturing for many years.
The development of Southern oligarchy portended the rupture of the Union, regardless of the ties that bound them together, because no ties, physical, legal, or otherwise, can overcome the difference between fundamentally opposed types of political regimes. As Aristotle taught, even if walls were built enclosing the proximate cities of Megara and Corinth, the walls would not hold these two together as one political society if their political regimes differed in form. Walls do not unify a city. What does unify a city is shared affection of the rulers for the regime. This is the preeminent condition for sustaining union. If a different type of political regime emerges in a different geographic section of a nation, making two competing regimes, the nation will inevitably divide into two nations because affections are divided.16
The profundity of the differences among political regimes runs as deep as the deepest human convictions. Aristotle observed that mankind even assimilates the gods to their own political regime.17 So did each of the dividing regimes in America, North and South. In 1858 a Southern Presbyterian minister commented on the split in religious opinion that accompanied growing intersectional enmity. Division was caused by “a complete revolution in sentiment,” which had quietly taken hold in the South.18 Oligarchy remade God into its own image, a god who smiled upon the organization of his flock into rulers and ruled, slaves and masters. The interregime conflict between North and South was a spiritual war as well. This is why division and Civil War were inevitable, why it was an “irrepressible conflict,” following the unchecked rise of the revolutionary regime in the antebellum South.
Federalist 43 also recognized the mortal threat of different political regimes developing within the same nation and explains, “Governments of dissimilar principles and forms have been found less adapted to a federal coalition of any sort, than those of a kindred nature.”19 The more intimate the Union, the more dangerous this dissimilarity would be, because revolution could more easily spread and cause dissension, division, or civil war within the whole. Greater intimacy requires greater similarity. Therefore, the more intimate the Union, “the greater the right” of each member of the Union “to insist that the forms of government under which the compact was entered into should be substantially maintained.” The form of government entailed by the constitutional compact was republican, and all parties to the compact had the right to demand that all others in the Union faithfully maintain republican forms. To enforce this right, the Federalist continues, “the superintending government ought clearly to possess authority to defend the system against aristocratic or monarchial innovations,” that is, revolutionary changes in a state that wrest the sovereignty from the people and invest a few or one with the sovereignty. This argument explained the inclusion of the first clause in Article IV, Section 4, of the Constitution: “The United States shall guarantee to every state in this union, a republican form of government.”20
The potential power of the national government warranted by the guarantee clause was equivalent to the potential power of the dictator in Roman law. Both legal provisions were designed to unleash extraordinary power to protect the life of the nation in domestic emergencies. The Constitution alludes to the emergency, the revolutionary establishment of aberrant, antirepublican regimes in any state.21 In that case, by using the rarely invoked word shall, the Constitution orders the suspension of normal state-federal relations and orders the national government to stretch its arm into the offending state or states and restore republicanism, returning the government to the rightful sovereign, the people. Counterrevolutionary regime change is built into the Constitution by that clause.
The soul of revolutionary Southern oligarchy quickened, and its leaders moved against national republicanism, just as the political theory of the Federalist and of Aristotle predicted. The issue that the revolutionary leaders selected to be the test of their designs was the tariff law, which was enacted by the majority in Congress but defied by the state of South Carolina, culminating in the standoff of 1832–33. At that point, preservation of the Union was the most urgent priority. The Union could have let its erring sister state depart the Union in peace then, and later, in 1860–61, could have peacefully bid farewell to the other sister states also. But this could not have been a cost-free, amicable divorce. Disunion at either time surely would have destroyed the American Republic and also the American model of republican government, which was designed to secure liberty. To understand that, we must briefly review what the American experiment was in 1787.
When the Constitution was framed, the Americans understood that the history of republics was ridden with disasters. Madison’s “great desideratum” was to rescue republicanism “from the opprobrium under which it has so long labored.” In a republic, defined by Madison as government “which derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people,” the people are sovereign, but sometimes people can be unjust and organize into groups for the purpose of assaulting the natural rights of others. When such an unjust group achieves a majority, the violent reign or end of the republic is inevitable. Other types of political regimes are not so susceptible to this problem because the rulers are capable of greater impartiality in judging conflicts among the people, since the sovereign rulers are separate from the people. But in republics, the same people who are parties to conflict are judges of the conflict. If an unjust group achieves a majority and controls the government, the despotism of the republic could be even worse than the despotism of a king. This problem explains why “popular governments have everywhere perished” and why they had a bad reputation.22
The solution, most fully explained in Federalist 10, builds upon an insight into the contrasting natures of justice and injustice. The principles of justice are self-evident truths, visible to anyone with common sense, and disinterested people will generally favor justice in their judgments. Injustice takes many forms, and each commonly held form of injustice tends to arise from a parochial interest and tends, therefore, to be parochial in scope. In a small republic, a larger share of the people are tied to the parochial interest, fewer people are disinterested, and therefore fewer people are neutral in political affairs. Injustice is capable of achieving a popular majority in a small republic. Madison reasoned that due to the inherent difficulty of popular injustice in spreading beyond parochial interests, a solution to the problem could be to enlarge the republic and subject the whole to majority rule. By doing this, popular injustice is isolated in proportion to the size of the republic due to its parochial character and is less likely to achieve a popular majority within the whole. Each instantiation of a new form of injustice arising in any part of the extended republic would run up against a large disinterested majority of frowning voters whose judgment is not corrupted by parochial interest. By a round-robin process of checking the successive incarnations of emerging local injustice, the people would improve each other and the whole people would more closely align to the self-evident principles of natural justice.23 Therefore, a large republic can counter the problem. The dominant belief since time immemorial was that republics should be small, but, Madison wrote, this was an “error.”24 The Americans boldly intended to stake all the fruits of their revolution on this hypothesized and untried solution.
They could foresee that their new solution to an old problem would create a new problem. The new problem was how to preserve self-government in a republic as large as the one that they were building. A key test of republicanism is whether the people for whom the law is made are the makers of the law.25 A large republic changed conditions such that it was difficult to meet this test. In a large republic with a single government, the participation of the people in every decision by the government would be proportionately smaller than their share of participation in a smaller nation. This presented no difficulty at all if the political question concerned a national object, such as whether to go to war, because the decision equally applied to all who participated in deciding that political question. But if the question was whether to build an eleven-mile road in a faraway corner of the nation, the decision applied to only a very small number of local people, yet their share of participation in the government that made the decision would be very slight, so slight that it would be a mockery of republicanism to say that they were living under laws of their own making. That would not be fair and failed the republican test. In effect, the people for whom the law would be made would not be the makers of the law, due to the large size of the republic. The law would not apply to the large majority of the people who would be deciding the question for the local people affected. When an outside power makes the law for others who must live by the law, this meets the definition of imperial rule. In a large republic, all are subject to imperial rule if government is singular. As a result, the people would lose their liberty to govern themselves in republican fashion if a remedy were not found.
The remedy was federalism, or “a division and organization of power” between the national and state governments, as Madison explained. Powers appropriate to national objects were enumerated and given to the national government in the Constitution. All others remained with the states. History would put this leading feature of the American model to the test, and the fate of republicanism in America and the world hung in the balance. It remained to be seen whether the state governments and national government would subsequently respect the line separating their powers. If the states breached that line, general government and union in an extended republic would be impossible. If the national government breached that line, self-government and republican liberty would be lost. In 1830 Madison warned that “the friends of liberty and of man, cannot be too often earnestly exhorted to be watchful in marking and controlling encroachments by either of the Governments on the domain of the other.”26 As long as the constitutional balance of powers between the state and national governments was respected, all in the Republic would be well.
The symmetry of the machinery of the government in the entire system was ordered around the organizing principles of natural right. The purpose of federalism was to preserve liberty by preventing imperial rule of a central government in an extended republic; the purpose of extending the republic was to preserve liberty by preventing local majority tyranny; the purpose of the guarantee clause was to preserve liberty by preventing local minority rule. The finished work, Madison wrote at the end of his life in 1830, was an “innovation and an epoch in the science of Government no less honorable to the people to whom it owed its birth, than auspicious to the political welfare of all others who may imitate or adopt it.”27 Experience, he believed, had validated the innovative theory that the Federal Convention put into practice in 1787. They had solved the great riddle of establishing durable republics. As republicanism further developed and strengthened under the Constitution, the general character of the nation would gradually but surely improve, the great evil of slavery that had been inherited from the prior monarchy would become evanescent and fade away, and natural justice would become firmly lodged as the ruling principle of the American regime.
But all was not going so well. While Madison was lauding the handiwork of the framers, the rulers of the consolidating Southern oligarchy were just then beginning to test the durability of the constitutional structure. During the Nullification Crisis, John C. Calhoun, the great philosopher-statesman of oligarchy, reinterpreted the Constitution in a manner best suited to protect their revolution. His “Exposition and Protest” imitated our founding charter, cataloging the alleged crimes of popular injustice committed by the national government, and unveiled his reinterpreted constitutional order that stymied and declared independence from majority government.28 His constitutional theories that claimed a greater share of sovereignty and power on behalf of states made political sense, because revolutionary oligarchy was anathema to the republican form that the American founders established. The new theories gave them a constitutional rationale to flout federal law that they disliked and to blunt the federal arm if it ever stretched out in their direction. But their theories were hypocritical in the extreme and a sham. The purpose of federalism in the Constitution is to preserve personal liberty and the natural right of all people to govern themselves. Oligarchy is a political regime that by definition tramples upon natural right, because the sovereign ruler is a minority that steals republican self-government from the popular majority, which becomes a ruled class. At best, all Calhoun proved, if his interpretation was correct, was that the Constitution was fatally flawed and did not successfully protect the republican model of government that the founders wished to establish.
James Madison was not fooled. The new constitutional theories had crossed his desk when a few years of life were left in him. Madison wrote, “Patrons of this new heresy will attempt in vain to mask its anti-republicanism.” He numbered them among the “disciples of aristocracy, oligarchy or monarchy.” Although he deplored the “strange doctrines and misconceptions” coming out of South Carolina, he had to respect the ability of their author. The new theories were winning over “statesmen of shining talents,” and for that reason their power to convert others was “the more to be dreaded.”29 Neither was President Andrew Jackson fooled, nor was he deterred by South Carolina’s defiance, which was emboldened by those new theories. Jackson understood the danger “of permitting a State to obstruct the execution of the laws within its limits or seeing it attempt to execute a threat of withdrawing from the Union.” The state’s action was a revolutionary “usurpation of power” that was constitutionally delegated to the federal government. He acknowledged their “natural right . . . to absolve themselves from their obligations to the Government” only in the case of “intolerable oppression” and the exhaustion of “all constitutional remedies.” The natural right of revolution was “the ultima ratio” recognized by the Declaration of Independence, but the present case fell far short of meeting the test. The claimed violations of the rights of South Carolina were a ruse. Failing that test, the state was bound by “a sacred obligation” created by “compacts of all kinds freely and voluntarily entered into,” on which “the liberties and happiness of millions” depended.30 He asked Congress to enact such measures as were necessary to meet the crisis.
Calhoun and his coadjutors rightly feared that Jackson would use the extraordinary powers conferred upon him by the Constitution. Jackson publicly warned them, “Disunion, by armed force, is treason. . . . [O]n the heads of the instigators of the act be the dreadful consequences.”31 In the Senate, Calhoun warned his Southern colleagues that the guarantee clause could “be a pretext to interfere with our political affairs, and domestic institutions, in a manner infinitely more dangerous than any other power which has ever been exercised on the part of the General Government.” The very next day in the House of Representatives, James Blair of South Carolina invoked the guarantee clause, demanding that the national government protect his class from “the dominant party” in his home state, which sought to rule over them with “a rod of iron.” Blair was a member of the Union Party, opposed to Calhoun and the nullifiers, and he warned the House that if they did not enact a bill that would authorize the Jackson administration to bring the federal power down on the South Carolina government, he and his party would be left alone to defend “their personal liberty, their lives and fortunes.” Future friends of the national government in other states would consider “the fate of the ‘Union party’ of South Carolina” and would remain quiet, while new parties like the South Carolina nullifiers challenged the “dignity of this Government, and the execution of its laws.”32
With the thundering words from General Jackson ringing in their ears, made good by his active preparations to march on South Carolina, state leaders reached compromise.33 The national government was satisfied to secure the Union rather than prolong the crisis. The American experiment in government had been successful for forty years, Jackson noted in his message to Congress, and “the hopes of the friends of civil liberty throughout the world” depended upon preserving the integrity of that government and preventing disunion.34 But, acceding to compromise, the national government exposed the liberty of South Carolinians to danger by leaving the local oligarchy intact, unmolested, and unreconstructed, as required by the guarantee clause.
The spirit of compromise reached the national judiciary. Chief Justice John Marshall of Virginia had read and endorsed Madison’s rebuttal of Calhoun’s doctrines in the North American Review, and he lamented to his friend on the Court Joseph Story of Massachusetts that Americans like Madison and himself, who shared Story’s opinions, were becoming extinct in his section of the nation. “Our young men, generally speaking, grow up in the firm belief that liberty depends on construing our Constitution into a league instead of a government; that it has nothing to fear from breaking these United States into numerous petty republics. Nothing in their view is to be feared but that bugbear, consolidation; and every exercise of legitimate power is construed into a breach of the Constitution.” Marshall knew that the nullifiers agreed to the tariff compromise to stay Jackson’s arm, but still aimed for a Southern confederacy, awaiting “the decisive moment till the other states of the South will unite with them.” After the tariff settlement, he asked, “What is to become of us and our constitution? . . . Those in the South perceive no difficulty. Allow a full range to state rights and state sovereignty, and in their opinion, all will go well.”35 He gave them what they wanted, throwing them an inducement to remain in the Union.
In 1833 Marshall wrote the opinion for the Supreme Court in Barron v. City of Baltimore, which bowed to Calhounism, ruling that the Bill of Rights in the Constitution limited only the federal government, not state governments.36 Just two years before, Madison wrote that the Federal Convention had considered the “obvious necessity of a control on the laws of the States, so far as they might violate the Constn & laws of the U.S.” and had chosen a “Judicial annulment of them.” The need might arise, he had explained in 1787, “to prevent instability and injustice in the legislation of the States.”37 But by ruling that state action against personal liberty guaranteed by the Constitution was not justiciable, the Court removed its aegis around popular rights against state encroachment. The decision permitted the oligarchy to crush local liberty and purge men like Blair through the ordinary operations of their state government. Beyond South Carolina, the decision opened the South to similar local revolutions, instigated by the new oligarchic men. The Southern majorities in the states where oligarchy was ascendant were sacrificed to preserve union. The rich irony of the nullifiers’ fight for states’ rights is that they would be remembered and celebrated by many as champions for local liberty against alleged federal encroachment, when in fact the oligarchs had won the legal right from the federal government to suppress local liberty. Such was the consequence of Calhoun’s intellectual alchemy practiced upon republican words and meanings in the Constitution.
Although it is difficult to question its decision between gloomy and gloomier alternatives, the national government’s choice to preserve the Union over checking ascendant oligarchy ensured a pernicious result, that the guarantee clause would become impotent by disuse. Thereafter, the oligarchs who had successfully prevented the vigorous application of the guarantee clause could plausibly question the constitutionality of its appropriate exercise by the national government in future instances, because republicans could not point to any precedents of its application in like circumstances.
While the United States was developing in the direction of republicanism in the earlier era, the extraordinary measure of reaching for the guarantee clause to correct antirepublican abuses had not been urgent. Under such conditions, it was prudent to avoid establishing the precedent of deploying the overawing power of the national government and to leave self-reforming states to continue to reform themselves toward republicanism without federal coercion. But paradoxically, when the guarantee clause was most urgently needed to restore republicanism in the slaveholding states, the same states that most needed correction had sent swarms of bold oligarchic men into the nation’s republican offices, precluding any attempt by the national government to apply it.
The impotency of the guarantee clause opened the need for a new, explicit grant of power to the national government that victory in war later secured. The Fourteenth Amendment was not a revolution in the idea of republicanism or republican citizenship. The American founders already devised a system of government informed by the same principles that later informed the framing of the amendment. However, the Fourteenth Amendment for the first time specified the conditions that needed to be met in order to satisfy the definition of republican in the guarantee clause and was intended to be a revolution in federal enforcement of republicanism and republican citizenship in the states. There never need be nor should there ever have been any conflict between the Fourteenth Amendment, properly applied, and federalism. All states could continue to be self-governing, exercising any powers not explicitly delegated to the national government, and free from national government interference, as long as they continued to be genuinely republican in form.
But just as the national government was not able to apply the guarantee clause to antirepublican abuses in the states controlled by the ascendant oligarchs in the antebellum period because they were part of the national government, their reentry into the national government after the “redemption” of Southern states at the end of Reconstruction similarly prevented the national government from enforcing the Fourteenth Amendment against antirepublican abuses. The long arm of Calhoun’s oligarchic constitutionalism intermeddled with the future, and new generations in the new century continued to use his old arguments against its application.38
Having forestalled national government intervention during the Nullification Crisis, the oligarchic rulers succeeded in creating space for themselves within the Union to consolidate, to build interstate unity, and to develop a new revolutionary program for the nation. Calhoun resumed his attempts to reshape American government according to his reinterpreted constitutional order, evangelized young Southerners in public service, and even persuaded many intelligent Northern statesmen of his constitutional views.39 The national government was demoralized and enervated by Calhoun’s genius and never exercised the guarantee clause until disaster came in 1861, when it was almost too late to save republicanism in America.40
Secession of eleven Southern states in 1860–61 was the ultimate test. If sustained, it meant that the Americans had not solved the riddle of establishing durable republics, as Madison believed they had. Successful secession would prove that an extended republic cannot hold together, and aspiring tyrants in America and in the world would learn how to defeat the new republican model pioneered by the Americans. Federalism, the device that the Americans had invented to protect liberty, could be exploited by any local band of tyrants to set up their own local or regional despotism and flout remediation by the central government. After the secession of the South, other ambitious characters could exploit the exposed weakness of American government, and probably the United States would permanently dissolve into pieces. The American continent would become like every other, a patchwork of nation-states, some better, some worse, and among the republics none so powerful as to protect liberty from external enemies.
Successful secession would mean that mankind would have to choose, as they always had to choose before, between a weak republic or a powerful monarchy or aristocracy. Liberty and self-government could be had in a weak republic, but it would be vulnerable to outside attack and internal dissolution, or civil liberty could be granted by a generous monarch or aristocracy, but in those regimes, the privilege could easily be taken back. Republicans the world over would have to discard the failed American model and return to the drawing board to find a new way to build republics that could endure.
In his first message to Congress, on July 4, 1861, President Abraham Lincoln showed that he had thought hard about this problem and asked aloud, “‘Is there, in all republics, this inherent and fatal weakness?’ ‘Must a government, of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?’”41 Lest Lincoln leave these questions for the friends of liberty sadly to ponder amid the ruins of the American Republic, he directed the national government to preserve the Union and show that a rebellious oligarchy could not destroy the integrity of their republican system. The stakes could not have been higher.
The supreme cause of this recurring conflict was the rise of the oligarchy in the South, the independent variable that is underrated or missed by many studies of the period. It relates to many other intermediate causes that antebellum, Civil War, Reconstruction, and civil rights studies have identified. The Southern political regime and the clash of that regime with republicanism is the background of the long drama, or context, in which to study all of these episodes and the questions they raise. The rise of Southern oligarchy hangs over events in American political, constitutional, and social history like a colossus.
All Southern statesmen representing seceding states had resigned from the Senate and House of Representatives prior to the first meeting of the Thirty-Eighth Congress in 1863. Beginning with the meeting of that Congress, the duty of forming war and Reconstruction policy devolved upon the Republican majority that remained. This duty burdened them with a prerequisite responsibility. They could not beat a path toward national harmony and justice, as they saw it, without demonstrating to their constituents at home, to each other, and to posterity that they had developed a defensible understanding of the nature of the political forces that opposed them. They are a rich and informed source on the political character of the antebellum South.
Certainly, the Republicans differed about how to accomplish their task, but they substantially agreed about what it was. To be precise, the great task of Reconstruction was not to establish equal citizenship for the emancipated slaves; rather, their task subsumed the ultimate establishment of equal citizenship, whether latterly or immediately accomplished, as prudence and opportunity dictated. Similarly, the task of the Civil War was never intended to be the abolition of slavery; rather, the task subsumed the ultimate abolition of slavery, whether latterly or immediately accomplished, again, as prudence and opportunity dictated. The ultimate goal of the Republican Party, the war, and Reconstruction was the same, to preserve and advance republicanism as the American founders understood it and wished it to be advanced, against its natural, existential enemy, oligarchy. That goal was inseparable from the goal of abolition and was inseparable from the goal of equal citizenship, because the principle of natural equality justified American republicanism and required the ultimate extinction of slavery and required equal citizenship. Likewise, slavery and discrimination on the basis of color stand on the competing moral foundation of oligarchy, the principle of natural inequality, which requires ranks. Only during Reconstruction could the Republicans carry out the mission for which they had formed their political party and for which they had fought the Civil War. The spilled blood and spent treasure in the war had purchased them the opportunity to destroy the oligarchy politically. Reconstruction meant regime change in the South, the reunion of the nation, and the refounding of the Republic on the restored principles of the American Revolution. Only by accomplishing this could the Republicans complete the great task, the unfinished work to which Lincoln alluded at Gettysburg.
The Question of Southern Oligarchy
The American people and the friends of free government around the world do not remember our past in the way that the foregoing summary explains, which is a great loss. They have heard other stories that shape their sense of the American past and its principles, which they do not know were so seriously embattled and nearly wiped out, with the result that their understanding and judgment of our founding principles and their authors and defenders are mixed, even jaded. The ultimate cause of this is persisting uncertainty among scholars about the great internal challenger of American republicanism that arose from one section of the nation.
Scholars of the antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction periods have not been blind to the terms aristocracy and oligarchy in the historical record, but they have mostly underappreciated what they see or have denied the applicability of the terms altogether. Many have used the label aristocracy and less so oligarchy when referring to the slaveholding class, but they have tended to regard the slaveholders as a social class—something more powerful than an exclusive country club set, but less than an interstate ruling class that commanded and shaped the character of its political order in its geographic domain and certainly much less than an ambitious set of rulers who were determined to destroy republicanism and establish oligarchy as the dominant political regime on the American continent, as a model for the modern age.
In the early twentieth century, some historians who deplored Reconstruction and black American citizenship nevertheless conceded, “The political system of the South was an oligarchy under the republican form.”42 Others acknowledged the existence of “aristocracy,” while downplaying the power of the members of that class.43 Early Marxist or Marxian scholars did pay relatively more serious attention to the references to Southern oligarchy in the historical record. To Charles Beard and Mary Beard, Reconstruction constituted a “Second American Revolution,” but they meant “revolution” according to the Marxist theory of historical development, the victory of the Northern industrial bourgeoisie over the semifeudal barons of the South.44 Because the Marxists tend to conflate superior wealth with rule, their analysis did not isolate and politically distinguish the wealthy Southern planters from wealthy Northern industrialists. Both industrialists and planters were oligarchs in their view. This obscured the different character of the South.
The treatment of aristocracy or oligarchy by John Hope Franklin and Eric Foner is representative of how most Civil War and Reconstruction scholars in the twentieth century encountered and dealt with the terms. In Reconstruction after the Civil War, Franklin mentioned the “plantation aristocracy” in passing once and then in one other instance discusses the successful efforts of the old “ruling clique,” the “oligarchy,” in preserving its power after the war. This latter discussion begins and ends in barely more than a paragraph—eight pages before the end of the book. Foner did devote some attention to the planter class’s disproportionate political influence over the antebellum slave states, toward the beginning of Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. Further on the oligarchy drops out of his analysis of the question of black freedom and citizenship.45
The scholarly literature on the antebellum South is vast and growing still. Some have insisted and continue to insist that the South was democratic for whites.46 Others have tended to support the view that an oligarchic class politically dominated the antebellum South.47
Generally, the reason for this division is that few have selected the right point of departure in their investigations. In classical political science, the first questions asked to determine the fundamental nature of a political society are as follows: Who ruled? And by what ruling principle did they rule?48 These kinds of questions have been asked too infrequently.49
Over many decades, the judgments of scholars have haphazardly shifted. The high-minded character and landed rule of the planters seemed reminiscent of feudal aristocracy or of ruling classes in non-Western societies. The planters seemed out of step with modernity, capitalism, and democracy, so the terms prebourgeois, premodern, and feudal were affixed to them.50
But then economic historians discovered that the planter class utilized markets, managed to achieve profitability, and was more modern and richer than previously thought, and a new view of the planters emerged as “plantation capitalists.”51 The planters were then seen to be at home with modernity, “liberalism,” capitalism, and democracy. Take away the slaves, they argue, and there is not much difference between the entrepreneurs Jefferson Davis and John D. Rockefeller. Like the dreams of an aspiring Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates, dreams of becoming a planter galvanized all members of Southern society to seek to own slaves and prosper, and like our modern entrepreneurs, they came from diverse origins. This convinced some that capitalism and democracy were alive and well in the slave South. Some have maintained the position of the early Marxists, that because similar inequality of wealth prevailed in both North and South, both societies were modern, capitalistic, and oligarchical.
These debates held up evidence that did not speak to these decisive questions: Who ruled? And how did they rule? We would not say that the members of a ruling royal family of a Middle Eastern nation are democrats and “oil capitalists,” simply because they have developed sophisticated methods of managing large industrial enterprises for profit, utilizing international markets. Realized dreams of owning slaves and the diverse ethnic and economic origins of slaveholders are not qualifying attributes of democracy, either. William the Conqueror, the son of a tanner’s daughter, aspired to make himself king of England and won the throne. His half-common parentage does not mean that England under William was a democracy. The fact that Agathocles aspired to rise from poverty and succeeded in ruling ancient Syracuse does not justify our calling his brutal tyranny a democracy, either. Rather, we must ask: Who held the sovereign power? What were the key institutions that supported the sovereign? What was the principle of justice by which they ruled and by which the organization of their society was ordered? How did they formally arrange power to maintain their rule? Answers to such questions help us identify and understand a political regime. King Louis XIV was a monarch because sovereign rule was vested in his person, not because he wore ermine and purple. Stalin was a monarch.
The idea that the effect of slavery warps republican societies into oligarchic political societies is as old as the American founding. For this reason, and to protect the republican regime that they were trying establish, the founders spoke and acted against slavery.52 During the 1840s and 1850s, supporters of the abolition movement, Liberty Party, Free Soil Party, and then the Republican Party picked up that idea and, with increasing alarm, warned Americans that slavery was achieving exactly that. They leveled the charge that the planters in the slave states composed an interstate oligarchy that threatened the nation. In many cases, they substantiated those charges with sophisticated political analysis, and on that basis they launched great political movements to counter the “slave power” threat.
Scholars have seen their arguments and the movements they initiated, but often dismiss the substance of the charge that was at the root of those movements. The “slave-power thesis,” in their view, was produced by the ambition of Northern politicians, who took advantage of the alleged paranoia of the American public and of a party vacuum.53 But the scholars arrive at these judgments without turning their analyses on the fundamental political character of the South and assessing whether the charges had merit.
In the past twenty-five years, more studies have substantiated the old charges about the political character and ambitions of Southern leaders. In summary, some of their key findings are as follows: the planter class of South Carolina ruled over that state consistent with an aristocratic political creed, rejected genuine republicanism, and led a rebellion against the principles and system of government advanced by the American Revolution.54 The widely observed debate on emancipation in the Virginia House of Delegates marked a turning point in Virginia and in the South, when the slaveholders renounced the republicanism of their fathers.55 An aristocratic elite worked for decades to seize control of the direction of Southern politics and finally to achieve secession.56 Proslavery interpretations of the Constitution repurposed political institutions and even directed the conduct of government officials who were personally opposed to slavery, in service to the interests of slaveholders. By the 1850s, American government appeared completely proslavery to the outside world.57 Southerners did control Northern votes in Congress, just as the Republicans claimed.58 Northerners believed that they were fighting for Union and democracy against oligarchy.59 The fear of a regenerate slave power shaped the development of the Fourteenth Amendment and Reconstruction policy generally.60
These scholars identify fear of the slave power as a rallying point for the antebellum North. However, the slave power was epiphenomenonal, evidence of something fundamentally different about the inner character of the slave South from which the slave power emanated, and scholarship has yet to lay a direct finger on its source, study it, and explain it.
The cause of the antebellum slave power falls into the category of master causes of the greatest of political events, which are struggles over fundamental forms of political regimes. Contemporary recognition of the slave-power thesis begs deeper political questions that scholarship does not ask but are questions that the antebellum argument answered. The most important features of their argument are what modern scholarship has left out—the cause of the slaveholders’ quest for domination over all, which is grounded in oligarchic principle manifest in their oligarchic regime, and that slavery was a means to achieving the end of their quest as well as an expression of the end state they sought. The partisans of slavery were oligarchic men who were not simply attempting to win a policy aim, the advancement of slavery. They sought that and more; they were genuinely attempting to transform the American political regime into oligarchy, just as their states had already been similarly transformed.
This book certainly owes a debt and bears a connection to scholarship that has strengthened the so-called slave-power thesis. However, to assimilate this book into slave-power literature would be like assimilating a book that attempts to identify the fundamental character of communism in the Soviet Union into a preexisting literature on “collectivization power.” Rather than force-fit this work into inherited categories, we must question those categories, think anew, and reframe our understanding of the nineteenth century, and perhaps even American political development in total. We must recognize the profound regime difference between North and South and reframe scholarly literature, textbooks, and popular histories about the long period in terms of interregime conflict that, during one of its phases, took the famous form of our bloody interregime war.
Strong analysis of political regimes depends upon prior engagement with classical political science, that is, political philosophy, which sheds an indispensable light on the patterns of human character and on patterns in the broad sweep of human affairs. Two scholars who combined serious studies of political philosophy and the American political regime especially helped prepare the way for reviving political analysis of the antebellum South. In Republics Ancient and Modern, Paul Rahe traced the development of ancient to modern to American republicanism. While passing through America, his sharp eye caught sight of the recrudescence of classical tyranny in the antebellum South: “If one were to analyze the Confederacy in Aristotelian terms as a political regime (politeia), one would have to say that slavery was largely determinative of the ‘disposition of offices and honors (taxis ton archon)’ within the South and that this constituted the most important part of the paideia that had gradually transformed the great multitude (plethos) of southerners into a separate and distinct political unit capable of secession and of cooperative action (praxis) in war and in peace.”61 Rahe defined and left behind a lacuna. He recognized that the antebellum South had developed its own political regime, differing from the republican regime established by the American founders, and he identified slavery as the potent institution that created it. This is the case that the Republicans made.
The works of Harry Jaffa are valuable less for presenting new historical evidence than for their theoretical and interpretive strength. Bringing his command of political philosophy to the study of Abraham Lincoln, he showed that Lincoln had grown into the peerless philosopher-statesman of American natural right, and he established Lincoln’s reputation as the savior of the American Revolution.62 Jaffa pulled back the curtain, revealing the war behind the Civil War, that is, the war of principles between American natural right and its challenger, the principle of slavery, or the old principle that justice is the right of the stronger, advanced by Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic.
Through teaching the inner nature of Lincoln’s statesmanship, Jaffa recovered the deep, inner struggle of the American political regime for future generations to study. He stopped short of narrating the lives of these contending principles, Northern and Southern, as they articulated and organized the parts of the opposed political societies. He understood the principle of natural inequality but never traced its influence over the origin, maturation, and character of the Southern political regime. This book is intended to fill the lacunae that he and Paul Rahe have left unfilled and to complement their work.
The Plan of This Book
This book is divided into two parts. Part 1 consumes the bulk of the text and presents a shared analysis of the slave South, synthesized from the writings and speeches of the Republicans who served in the Thirty-Eighth, Thirty-Ninth, or Fortieth Congress from 1863 to 1869. The account draws solely from their writings and speeches dated before, during, and after their service in the Congress and, by intention, includes no other sources. Part 1 allows the Republicans to speak for themselves without mediation or interference. The point is to show how the Republican majority charged with the responsibility of reconstructing the South understood the South. The value of representing them in this way is to place their claims in a clear light before the bar of opinion.
Here it is important to forewarn readers that this presentation is one-sided in favor of the Republicans, and it is acknowledged that both sides deserve the opportunity to make their respective cases at the bar. The author is familiar with the omitted case made by the other side and generally divides its principled supporters into two groups, the deceived and those who sincerely favor rule of the few. Although the arguments by the latter are more compelling than modern prejudices allow, readers deserve to know that the reason for presenting only the Republican case here is that for many decades their full case has been advanced weakly and deserves a place at the bar also, for the benefit of the whole jury, the people, who have the largest stake in their case.
Chapters 1 and 2 are organized according to the basic theoretical treatment of political regimes in Aristotle’s Politics. Chapter 1 begins with a founding moment, when Reconstruction began, when the Republicans expressed their common duty to refound the American political regime. They explained what opposed them, the oligarchic political regime, and identified its constituent parts. In chapter 2 the Republicans explain the connection between oligarchy and the one potent institution, slavery, that created and preserved the oligarchy. In their view, genuine republicanism and domestic slavery could not coexist in the same local domain for long. The growth of the one was fatal to the other. If domestic slavery was not checked, it perverted republican government in its domain, producing oligarchy. If slavery could be suppressed, republicanism thrived. The growth or extinction of slavery determined whether republicanism or oligarchy would prevail in a state or territorial jurisdiction. This was slavery’s political effect, as they understood it.
Two anticipated, contemporary objections ought to be addressed regarding the ineluctable effect of slavery, as they saw it. First, an objector could point out that many other republics prior to the American Republic had slaves. That was a favorite point made by Southern defenders of slavery after the oligarchic revolution in the South and famously appeared as a popular view in Congress during the Missouri crisis of 1819–20, to the shock and dismay of many who sensed the coming corruption of Southern republicanism.63 Those were malinterpretations of the founders’ conception of republicanism that served the political interest of inchoate oligarchy and broke from the founders’ definition, with profound consequences. Southern oligarchs’ success at confounding the original definition still convinces many today that the meaning of the founders’ idea of republicanism was and is indeterminate.
But those familiar with Federalist 39 and the writings of John Adams and James Madison might recall that they were picky and definite about which governments deserved “the denomination of a republic.”64 With respect to those ancient republics, Madison wrote, “In proportion as slavery prevails in a State, the Government, however democratic in name, must be aristocratic in fact. The power lies in a part instead of the whole; in the hands of property, not of numbers. All the ancient popular governments were for this reason aristocracies.”65 Although the founders did often refer to these ancient popular governments as republics in passing, they knew that when seriously evaluated against their own definition of republicanism, these republics were found sorely deficient, and Madison flatly states the reason, slavery. At best, we can say that these governments had some genuine republican features, but Madison is unequivocal when he says that they did not meet his definition. Those who argue that it is possible for republicanism and slavery to coexist put themselves in the camp of Thomas Dew and John C. Calhoun and are opposed by Madison and other American founders.66
Second, an objector could point out that slavery was present during the founding of the American Republic and was especially prevalent in the Southern states. Were these states aristocracies, too? Continuing his reflections in the same private note, Madison answers in the affirmative, writing, “The Southern States of America, are, on the same principle, aristocracies. . . . The slavery of the Southern States throws the power much more into the hands of property, than in the Northern States.”67 But it would be a mistake to say that because the Southern aristocracy during both the founding era and the antebellum era maintained widespread chattel slavery, there was no difference between them. Their leaders decisively differed, which was decisive to the direction of political development in the South during those two eras. Many, probably a majority, of those of the founding generation born into the Southern aristocracy north of South Carolina were republican revolutionaries who attempted to transform their states and the new nation in a republican direction, away from monarchy and aristocracy. Their sons and grandsons, the principled, antebellum aristocrats, or oligarchs, covered the slave states and sought to deepen and extend their rule, which was most easily accomplished by deepening and extending slavery. History uncovers this shift.
Therefore, chapters 3–5 trace this history and its consequences, still relying solely on the Republicans’ writings and speeches for sources. These chapters generally follow the model of Aristotle’s Constitution of Athens, which examines a political regime from a perspective that differs from that seen in the Politics. In the Constitution of Athens, Aristotle studies the political regime across time, isolating key causes; the chain of effects, including unintended consequents; and the resulting shifts in the fundamental character of the regime. These chapters recount the political history of the development and rise of Southern oligarchy before the war, showing how oligarchy contended against republicanism and altered national political development.
The Republicans believed that the founders’ principled model of republicanism did not admit slavery, despite their failure to arrange its final demise in their lifetimes. Later, Southern statesmen revolutionized; they discarded the founders’ republicanism and embraced slavery, oligarchic rule, and the core regime principle, natural inequality. After the Missouri crisis and after the remarkable career of John C. Calhoun took flight, the heightening political contest over slavery became an interregime conflict between two inherently hostile political regimes within the same national union. Chapter 5 concludes in 1856, on the eve of interregime war, when the political parties completed their realignment with oligarchy and republicanism, respectively, each concentrated in one opposing section of the nation, each contending for control of the destiny of the nation.
Anticipating the obvious objection that the strong continued presence of Northerners in the Democratic Party, most notably Stephen A. Douglas, might refute this thesis that the parties realigned according to different sections and different regimes, I again ask readers to consider what the Republicans say. In their view, Northern Democrats who remained in the party or who did not at least break fellowship with its Southern wing became useful tools, composing a willing or deceived fifth column for oligarchy in the North. This kind of phenomenon is not unique in world history. Within a single nation dividing along the lines of different regimes, we should predict interregime penetration, or the presence of some elements of each regime in the other.
The end of part 1 concludes the Republican argument in their own words. Part 2 tests key Republican claims and addresses the implications of their argument. Chapter 6 studies the antebellum South in three institutional dimensions. The Republicans argued that Southern oligarchy used specific institutional arrangements with respect to education, property, and the organization of government. Those arrangements, the Republicans claimed, supported oligarchic rule and undermined the republican aims of the American founders.
With minor exceptions, the movement to provide basic education in the free North stopped cold at the border with slavery, which was by design. The slaveholders sought to perpetuate popular ignorance among the people in the slave states. This was their policy but exactly the opposite policy of the Northern leaders. Both sides understood that diffused intelligence supports republicanism and undermines oligarchy, but diffused ignorance supports oligarchy and undermines republicanism.
With respect to property, inequality of wealth in the South was a basis for oligarchic rule, but the unique character of property that was joined to inequality of property was an essential, even a more important, basis. The people in the free North were equal before the law despite unequal wealth, but in the South relative wealth determined rank in Southern political society. Liberty was an alienable possession, an acquisition reserved to the wealthy, not a natural right inalienable from one’s humanity.
It should be noted that this analysis chafes against the theoretical premise of Marxist or Marxian analysis that still prevails in scholarship and tends to hold that relative wealth always determines social and political rank. For that reason, it may be difficult for some to believe that a rich Northern industrialist and a rich Southern planter materially differed. But according to republican theory, in a perfectly republican society, a rich man and a poor man would be social and political equals and corulers. In a perfectly oligarchic society, the same rich man would be the social and political superior of the same poor man; the rich man would be a ruler, and the poor man would be ruled. Certainly, republican theorists concede that serious inequality of wealth endangers the stability of republican equality, but the fact of inequality of wealth is not ipso facto proof that a change in sovereign rule, from the many to the wealthy few, has been accomplished. The character of wealth matters. In oligarchic society, its acquisition secures greater personal liberty and dominion over others. In republican society its acquisition merely secures greater bodily comforts; the possession of equal liberty is constant for all citizens. Due to the radically different character of wealth in oligarchic and republican societies, each regime shapes a very different kind of human character in its respective domain.
Last, it is shown how the organization of Southern government supported the minority rule of the slaveholders. The ruling class in the antebellum South held power in their states by viva voce voting, by enumerating slaves in the apportionment of state representation, and by their monopoly on education and on the state parties. These strategies reduced popular influence in government, and the rich ruled. The national government of the Confederacy extended this system.
Chapter 7 explains why studies of Reconstruction have not sufficiently factored the Southern oligarchy in explaining what Reconstruction was and its outcome. The historians became engrossed in their contemporary battle over civil rights for black Americans, and as a result the regime context in which that battle was fought during Reconstruction faded from view. The chapter revives the Republican school, an older class of histories about the antebellum period, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. Scholars know and use those earlier writings but have forgotten what the defining attribute of those writings was, by which those writings can be recognized as a distinct school of literature. In the Republican school, the Southern oligarchy was the key to the most important American events of their age, but that key, it is argued, was lost.
The chapter closes with a brief retelling of one aspect of Reconstruction in order to show how the inclusion of Southern oligarchy in analysis changes conclusions. This retelling uses that key to explain how long-standing oligarchy magnified racism and latent popular violence against black Americans. The shock of Reconstruction broke open the oligarchy and released that latent popular violence like an army of demons into the Southern air.
Anticipating the charge that antiblack racism is underrated as a factor in this retelling, it should be said that racism is a given factor in this account. The goal is to reach behind white supremacy, at which racism aimed, and to show that oligarchy was its parent. Racism is treated as an intermediate variable, not as an uncaused cause. Oligarchy, by its very nature, required ranks and in fact deepened them and inflamed them in the structure of antebellum Southern society. White supremacy is but one species of supremacy that all antirepublican regimes incorporate in one form or the other, and all species of supremacy are abhorrent to the idea of American republicanism, grounded in natural right.
Regime change was incomplete in the South. Reconstruction partially reordered or flattened oligarchic ranks, leaving black Americans subordinate. The fact that the modern civil rights movement of the twentieth century was still necessary one hundred years after Appomattox, in order to continue the work of regime change and further flatten oligarchic ranks, testifies to the once great power and influence of the oligarchy.
Finally, in response to early comments about this manuscript, I state, perhaps with some vehemence, that this is not at all a book against the South, but quite the opposite. If this is a book for or against anything, it is above all in favor of seeing politics and rendering political history from the perspective of philosophy, whatever the shortcomings of this work might be in that respect. Guided by that primary allegiance, the position of this book, it could also be said, is decidedly for republicanism as it was reconceived in America from 1776 to 1789, because it was there and then when the strongest objections that aristocracy perennially could make against rule of the many since time immemorial were answered convincingly, and it is against oligarchy, which robbed our fellow Americans, the white and black majority in the South, of their birthright, their liberty.