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WORK TITLE: Gold and Freedom
WORK NOTES: trans by Arthur Goldhammer
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Paris
STATE:
COUNTRY: France
NATIONALITY: French
Associate Professor, École des hautes études en sciences sociales * http://pastispresent.org/2011/news/featured-fellow-nicolas-barreyre-of-gold-and-freedman/ * http://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/4734
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1975.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France, associate professor of American history.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Nicolas Barreyre is a French writer and educator. He serves as an associate professor of American history at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, France. Barreyre is the coeditor, with Michael Heale, Stephen Tuck, and Cecile Vidal, of the 2014 volume Historians across Borders: Writing American History in a Global Age.
Gold and Freedom: The Political Economy of Reconstruction, the English translation of Barreyer’s monograph L’or et la liberté, was published in 2015. In this volume, he argues that economics was of highest concern to Americans during the period following the Civil War. Taxes and tariffs were high, there were issues with paper currency, and the national debt had soared. Meanwhile, some citizens had to learn to deal with a new type of economic model in which slavery did not exist. Barreyre also highlights the cultural changes during the era and issues related to race in various regions of the country. He devotes a portion in the book to the battle surrounding the nation’s currency, which was at its height during the latter part of the 1800s.
Reviewing the book in Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, K.M. Gannon commented: “Readers might disagree with Barreyre’s definition of Reconstruction. … But that quibble doesn’t obscure the impressive nature of this important treatment.” Michael Brem Bonner, a contributor to the Journal of Southern History, remarked: “Gold and Freedom … is a detailed account of Reconstruction politics with an overlay of contested economic policy. Barreyre’s foray into an economic analysis of Reconstruction is very useful. A major contribution of this book is that it forces readers to consider more than the typical interpretive lenses.” In a lengthy assessment of the volume on the Reviews in History Web site, Charles Thompson described the book as “a well-structured, interesting, and well written book that will be of interest to scholars for its methodology as much as its argument.” Thompson added: “Obviously it is to be recommended to historians looking for a new way to think about the narrative of Reconstruction, but its interest will go well beyond this. Political historians in both the antebellum and Gilded Age eras will want to interrogate the consequences of sectionalism within the United States for national party politics in their own eras.” Thompson continued: “They may well also want to rethink the role of the party in the antebellum period, for while they seemed weak in the face of sectional identities and tensions, both Republicans and Democrats were more than strong enough to overcome them and remain powerful organizations capable of perpetuating their power and embracing their own interests. Southern historians, too, may have to consider why Northern sectionalism did embrace disunion, unlike its Southern colleagues.”
Thompson concluded: “Historians of the economic geography of the United States will find this book intriguing, especially as scholars of ‘urban imperialism’ and ‘city boosterism’ so often assume that Americans mentally divided their country into city-hinterlands rather than larger sectional blocs. In this volume, Barreyre cleverly uses a growing and interesting area of historical research to richly contextualise and shed new light on the high politics of Reconstruction. Combining economic geography and political history in this way really can be more than the sum of its parts.” Gavin Wright, a contributor to the Civil War Book Review Web site, asserted: “Gold and Freedom reflects an intimate knowledge of American party politics during a turbulent historical period.” Wright also stated: “This reviewer remains skeptical with respect to the value added by the spatial framework favored by the author. The centrifugal forces splintering the postwar Republican Party were multidimensional, sectionalism being undoubtedly important but only one factor among many. But these methodological doubts do not undermine the quality of Barreyre’s contribution to Reconstruction history. His account is nuanced and well-informed, drawing attention to intricate connections all too easily overlooked.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, July, 2016, K.M. Gannon, review of Gold and Freedom: The Political Economy of Reconstruction, p. 1660.
Journal of Southern History, February, 2017, Michael Brem Bonner, review of Gold and Freedom, p. 190.
ONLINE
Civil War Book Review, http://www.cwbr.com/ (June 22, 2016), Gavin Wright, review of Gold and Freedom.
Reviews in History, http://www.history.ac.uk/ (August 1, 2016), Charles Thompson, review of Gold and Freedom.*
Nicolas Barreyre, Associate Professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris, is coeditor of Historians across Borders: Writing American History in a Global Age. Arthur Goldhammer, affiliated with the Center for European Studies at Harvard University, is translator of Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont in America (Virginia), among numerous other works.
QUOTED: "Readers might disagree with Barreyre's definition of Reconstruction. ... But that quibble doesn't obscure the impressive nature of this important treatment."
Barreyre, Nicolas. Gold and freedom: the political economy of Re-construction
K.M. Gannon
53.11 (July 2016): p1660.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Barreyre, Nicolas. Gold and freedom: the political economy of Re-construction, tr. by Arthur Goldhammer. Virginia, 2015. 319p bibl index afp ISBN 9780813937496 cloth, $39.50; ISBN 9780813937755 ebook, $39.50
53-4922
E668
2015-19358 CIP
Barreyre (EHESS, Paris) has written a thorough and intriguing analysis of the national political (re)alignment that occurred in the decade or so after the US Civil War. Through exacting statistical analysis of congressional roll-call votes, as well as careful attention to the political materials of the era, Barreyre traces the interaction of party (Democrats, Republicans, and various factions thereof) and section (South, Northeast, West [Midwest]) to produce what he calls a spatial analysis of US political culture. Crucial to his analysis is the "money question"--the complex and compelling debate over currency that shaped the political economy of the US during the last third of the 19th century. In this regard, Barreyre provides a remarkably lucid treatment of the issue, one that integrates the money question firmly into its larger political and economic contexts--a rare historiographic feat. Readers might disagree with Barreyre's definition of Reconstruction, more circumscribed than much of the era's recent scholarship; even Americans of that time recognized the elasticity of the term. But that quibble doesn't obscure the impressive nature of this important treatment of Reconstruction. A must read. Summing Up: **** Essential. Upper-division undergraduates and above.--K. M. Gannon, Grand View University
Gannon, K.M.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Gannon, K.M. "Barreyre, Nicolas. Gold and freedom: the political economy of Re-construction." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, July 2016, p. 1660. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA457393502&it=r&asid=5eee050f76616ab6719cf2b32e8fb1f6. Accessed 22 June 2017.
QUOTED: "Gold and Freedom ... is a detailed account of Reconstruction politics with an overlay of contested economic policy. Barreyre's foray into an economic analysis of Reconstruction is very useful. A major contribution of this book is that it forces readers to consider more than the typical interpretive lenses."
Gale Document Number: GALE|A457393502
Gold and Freedom: The Political Economy of Reconstruction
Michael Brem Bonner
83.1 (Feb. 2017): p190.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
Gold and Freedom: The Political Economy of Reconstruction. By Nicolas Barreyre. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. A Nation Divided: Studies in the Civil War Era. (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2015. Pp. xii, 319. $39.50, ISBN 978-0-8139-3749-6.)
The economic consequences of the Civil War cast a long shadow not only in the South but also in the Northeast and the Midwest, according to author Nicolas Barreyre, as sectionalism shifted from a North/South to an East/West axis in the postbellum era. The Northeast and the Midwest struggled to implement competing national visions of political economy during Reconstruction. Sectional disagreement about hard versus soft money developed in response to wartime debt and evolved into a larger battle about the Republican Party's economic philosophy. The author does an excellent job of explaining the myriad positions on the "money question" that crystallized an array of interests into the basic sectional economic conflict (p. 2).
Graphs that show fluctuations in federal revenue and expenses are particularly useful, and sectional voting maps and statistics also enhance the reader's understanding. Barreyre's discussion of how the wartime Republican coalition transitioned to antagonistic sectional stances is insightful. For example, increased wartime tariffs were kept in place after 1865 as the motive of patriotic revenue was supplanted by full-fledged protectionism. Several overarching themes converge in the book, including sectionalism, economic theory, and regional/spatial identity, but the author wisely maintains that each of these was shaped by Reconstruction politics. At times this superstructure of themes is overdone, particularly in the epilogue, but it can be forgiven as an admirable attempt to look at Reconstruction from different perspectives.
The author's explanation of how the Pendleton Plan, or use of the money question in a local Ohio election, grew into a divisive sectional and national issue is outstanding. At each chronological milepost, Barreyre attempts to show the importance of sectional economic priorities amid the tangle of Reconstruction politics--some analyses are more convincing than others. For example, the author wonderfully describes the series of monetary compromises in 1869 and 1870, like the Public Credit Act, the Funding Act, the Currency Act, and the tariff acts, which postponed full-blown sectional economic conflict. The Panic of 1873 finally shattered the Republican compromise over the "money question" and actually spurred cross-party midwestem and southern votes against northeastern hard money policies. This analytical framework adds to the historiography of why the Republican coalition's dedication to Reconstruction faltered from 1873 to 1876.
Gold and Freedom : The Political Economy of Reconstruction is a detailed account of Reconstruction politics with an overlay of contested economic policy. Barreyre's foray into an economic analysis of Reconstruction is very useful. A major contribution of this book is that it forces readers to consider more than the typical interpretive lenses of race and party affiliation when confronting Reconstruction's complexity.
There is much to admire in Gold and Freedom, including the depth of research, the writing style, and an apparently wonderful translation by Arthur Goldhammer. This book meticulously discusses Reconstruction events through an economic lens, but it also frames the origins of Midwest/Northeast economic rivalry that had far-reaching political implications that stretched well into the 1880s and the 1890s. Gold and Freedom is a must-read for historians of Reconstruction, and it is highly recommended for all late-nineteenth-century U.S. historians as well.
Michael Brem Bonner
University of South Carolina Lancaster
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Bonner, Michael Brem. "Gold and Freedom: The Political Economy of Reconstruction." Journal of Southern History, vol. 83, no. 1, 2017, p. 190+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA481354168&it=r&asid=261a87f91fc198baf102332c475ae715. Accessed 22 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A481354168
QUOTED: "a well-structured, interesting, and well written book that will be of interest to scholars for its methodology as much as its argument."
"Obviously it is to be recommended to historians looking for a new way to think about the narrative of Reconstruction, but its interest will go well beyond this. Political historians in both the antebellum and Gilded Age eras will want to interrogate the consequences of sectionalism within the United States for national party politics in their own eras."
"They may well also want to rethink the role of the party in the antebellum period, for while they seemed weak in the face of sectional identities and tensions, both Republicans and Democrats were more than strong enough to overcome them and remain powerful organizations capable of perpetuating their power and embracing their own interests. Southern historians, too, may have to consider why Northern sectionalism did embrace disunion, unlike its Southern colleagues."
"Historians of the economic geography of the United States will find this book intriguing, especially as scholars of ‘urban imperialism’ and ‘city boosterism’ so often assume that Americans mentally divided their country into city-hinterlands rather than larger sectional blocs. In this volume, Barreyre cleverly uses a growing and interesting area of historical research to richly contextualise and shed new light on the high politics of Reconstruction. Combining economic geography and political history in this way really can be more than the sum of its parts."
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Gold and Freedom: The Political Economy of Reconstruction
Nicolas Barreyre
Charlottesville, VA, University of Virginia Press, 2016, ISBN: 9780813937496; 320pp.; Price: £36.50
Reviewer:
Mr Charles Thompson
University of Sheffield
Citation:
Mr Charles Thompson, review of Gold and Freedom: The Political Economy of Reconstruction, (review no. 1965)
DOI: 10.14296/RiH/2014/1965
Date accessed: 22 June, 2017
See Author's Response
It is common for historians of the antebellum, civil war, and reconstruction-era United States to talk of ‘the Northeast’, ‘the South’, or ‘the West’ as offhand for a wide range of interests, like the Confederacy, slaveholders, or industrial capitalism. Nicolas Barreyre’s well-written and largely persuasive account of Reconstruction-era political economy suggests that historians may have to be more careful when using these terms in their own work. Contemporaries, he suggests, conceptualised the American economy in geographic terms, believing it self-evident that the Northeast, South, and Midwest were separate competing economic interest groups with different needs. And no issue was more divisive that the conflict between the North’s supposed need for a stable currency and the Midwest’s professed need for soft money. This leads to Barreyre's more provocative argument: that the ongoing rivalry between North and Midwest, far from taking place separately from the issues of readmission, black suffrage, and land redistribution, in fact guided the course of Reconstruction policy towards the South. Therefore, far from seeing Reconstruction as a contest taking place in Southern state legislatures, union leagues, and plantations, Gold and Freedom reinterprets it as part of the national reconstruction of American economic geography.
Perhaps we should not be surprised that a European historian – Barreyre being based at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris – has come to take seriously the American tendency to describe the multiple class, racial, and political tensions within Reconstruction in broader geographic terms. For many years, the Eurozone too has been grappling with how to reconcile a South demanding a generous money supply to relieve regional imbalances in wealth and a North insisting on hard money and fiscal retrenchment to ward off inflation and preserve the value of capital. And in Europe too we have a contest between politicians and financial interests who cast this as a dispute over geography between Southern fecklessness and Northern prudence, and activists who conceptualise it as a conflict between classes rather than places. The parallels between our European Union and the Gilded Age United States – emerging from depression, divided over currency, with dysfunctional central government – make the political economy of Reconstruction a timely topic for historical enquiry.
Gold and Freedom is above all else a study of Reconstruction grounded in antebellum political economy. Barreyre begins his introduction acknowledging the historiography of Reconstruction, and this makes clear how provocative his account is. Most historians of this period, despite describing Reconstruction as a continuation of the Civil War between a ‘North’ and a ‘South’ do not see Reconstruction as a product of conflict between places but instead as a product of conflict between races and classes on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. As historians like Eric Foner, Sven Beckert, and Heather Cox Richardson have shown, the Northern middle class began to see freed people as a labouring class equivalent to the permanent proletariat class that appeared in Northern cities and laid claim to capital in the 1870s. This led them to oppose turn away from Reconstruction and economic reform in the North and embrace the classical liberal economics of the gold standard, free trade (in some states), and low taxes.(1)
What makes Barreyre’s contribution so original is that he reads the narrative of Reconstruction against the background of a growing body of literature on the geography of capital in the 19th-century United States. In other words, he considers the relationship between two areas of historical research – party politics and economic geography – that are often only considered separately. Barrryere himself cites Charles and Mary Beard’s economic interpretation of Reconstruction – that it was a policy that the industrial Northeast used to impose capitalism on a pre-capitalist South and West – as inspiration for his observation that contemporaries saw Reconstruction-era political economy simply in terms of antagonistic geographic economic interests.(2) However, more recent scholarship by Walter Johnson, Heather Cox Richardson, and more controversially Marc Egnal has begun to take this issue of sectional economic identities seriously, and used it to explore the course of the sectional crisis in the 1850s and the progress of Reconstruction.(3)
Barreyre divides his argument into two parts. Gold and Freedom begins with the mid-century sectional divide in economic identity between the North and the Midwest. Americans believed the North was divided between these two economic sections, just as the Union itself was divided between free and slave states. Indeed, they had for so long imagined the Midwest as a land of agricultural plenty that they had come to believe that agriculture and farming defined the region itself. And this, of course, led them to define the Northeast as a commercial and manufacturing section. Economic interests therefore became sectional identities based on crude stereotypes about regional economies. And when it came to votes in Congress on tariffs, internal improvements, and currency, these sectional identities helped marshal votes in the same way that parties did on other issues. When Americans encountered the problem of paying war debts and reconciling its two competing gold and paper currencies in 1866, they assumed that the two sections within the free states stood for different financial interests and that section was a useful category to analyse policy.
The second and third chapters show how the ‘money question’ and tariffs transformed from ideological to sectional issues within the North itself in the early 1870s. The idea of an urban mercantile and manufacturing Northeast and a rural agrarian Northwest had a long pedigree in America’s imagined economic geography. It might seem to us that these questions of political economy might have affected national interest groups found in the North, South, and Midwest, like bankers, merchants, or farmers. But because Americans linked competing interest groups to specific regions, they framed these economic questions in sectional terms of the Northwest against the Northeast. Sectional stereotypes helped Americans discuss these issues in terms of competing places rather than competing interest groups. There were also political imperatives to discuss these issues in sectional terms. The reality of majority rule meant that dissenting voices within each region, like Western manufacturers or free traders in New York, were often crowded out on a national stage, giving a false impression of sectional unity. Division between Boston and New York merchants and Philadelphian manufacturers might look like unity on a national scale. Moreover, since few congressmen, editors, and observers understood the minutiae of the economic policy they were debating, they instead resorted to discussing it in the kinds of simplistic moral terms that easily translated into an East-West sectional divide. Parties, Barreyre concludes, were too weak to organise this debate over political economy on partisan lines, given this sectional outlook.
After setting out this sectional mindset, Barreyre moves to show in the second part how this sectional competition within the North impacted Congress’s ability to formulate Reconstruction policy. In 1865–6, Republican leaders recognised the need to separate Reconstruction policy, on which they were more united, from fiscal policy, which divided Northeastern from Northwestern congressmen. Barreyre takes the Democratic decision in 1867 to put fiscal policy at the heart of their election campaign – endorsing repayment of the national debt in depreciated paper currency – as the unravelling of this Republican stratagem. Despite campaigning on Reconstruction during election campaigns, sectional divides on fiscal policy within the North resurfaced between elections within the Republican caucus in particular. Events like the impeachment of Andrew Johnson in 1868, Jay Gould’s attempt to manipulate the gold market in 1869, and even the 1870 census kept the issue firmly on the table. The compromise – returning to hard money once Reconstruction had been imposed upon the South – deferred these hard choices to the future, but fundamentally linked Reconstruction to debt and the money question. Republicans’ attempts to heal the divide between their Northeast-Northwest divide by focusing on Reconstruction was therefore unsustainable. Using Reconstruction and the ‘Bloody Shirt’ to impose party unity on the tariff and money question, Barreyre argues, created a tension that worked in the short run but backfired spectacularly in 1872.
In chapters five and six, Barreyre shows how this contradiction between party logic and sectional discontent undermined federal implementation of Reconstruction. The readmission of the South in the late 1860s disrupted the Republicans’ attempts to keep the party system focused on a North-South Reconstruction divide rather than an East-West economic divide. The fact that Reconstruction applied to the North through the Enforcement Acts meant that Reconstruction legislation became more vulnerable to sectional tensions, as Northern sections wondered whether it set a precedent for intervention on fiscal matters. And the very success of Reconstruction legislation in imposing party discipline in Congress convinced free traders that they needed to break away from the Republican Party and the bloody shirt, leading to the Liberal bolt in 1872. While they were unable to achieve electoral success, their criticism of the Grant administration and the success of the Democrats in the South fatally weakened the Republican Party. Realising they could not win in the South on Reconstruction and they were divided in the North over currency, the Republicans decided to drop using Reconstruction as a rallying post, abandon the South to the Democrats, and reconcile their Northeastern and Northwestern wings.
The end of the second part and in the epilogue of Gold and Freedom left America with the unstable late 19th-century American party system, with its fierce partisanship, indecisive elections, and sectional divides. The economic and social changes of the early 1870s helped spur the rise of liberalism in the North and the weakness of the Republican administrations of the South left American partisan politics polarised on a North-South axis, as the South became a one-party state with Democrats opposing the legacy of Reconstruction. Political exigency made this divide necessary, but prevailing assumptions about American economic geography made an East-West axis more sensible, as Northeastern and Northwestern politicians believed their constituents had opposing economic interests. Democrats were therefore free to govern the South based on white supremacy, while Northeastern and Northwestern Republicans were left trying to build a Northern party across a deep economic sectional divide.
Put simply, Barreyre’s central argument in Gold and Freedom is that the American party system could not simultaneously organise around a North-South divide on Reconstruction and a perceived East-West divide on tariffs and money. This contradiction guided the course of Reconstruction and led to its ultimate failure. At first glance, this might seem like an extremely provocative argument, challenging the long-held assumption that class and race, not party logic, killed Reconstruction. Some may well legitimately question whether this interpretation relegates the conflicts within each section – between freed slaves and planters, workers and employers, and farmers and merchants – to a sideshow. However, Barreyre’s argument can complement the work of the many historians who have studied Reconstruction through the lens of class and race. These conflicts might explain the violent end of Reconstruction on Southern plantation and in the minds of the Northern bourgeoisie, but Gold and Freedom provides an interesting take on how the partisan infrastructure of federal intervention evaporated in Congress too. After all, he argues that politicians were not responding to the reality of a sectional conflict between the Northeast and the Northwest. Rather, they responded to a perception of one, even when it made little sense to do so. Perhaps one of the greatest insights of Gold and Freedom might not be that greenbacks killed Reconstruction, but that the extent that the American party system and decision-makers in Congress completely misread and oversimplified the conflicts taking place in cities, plantations, and farms, that many other historians have accurately described.
Gold and Freedom therefore cleverly integrates the political history of the emerging Third Party System and changing economic landscape as it existed in the minds of America's political establishment. Of course, there are areas where Barreyre's argument might be stronger. His contention that Americans saw the tariff in sectional terms between Northeast and Northwest in part one is less convincing than the chapters on currency and broader sectional identities. However, since his argument in part two relies more on the money question than the tariff as a sectional thorn in the side of Reconstruction, this hardly detracts from his thesis. Moreover, since Gold and Freedom seeks to explain the paradoxes within the emerging Third Party System, it would further his case to describe them in a little more detail once this party system reached maturity in the years after Reconstruction.
These are minor queries in a well-structured, interesting, and well written book that will be of interest to scholars for its methodology as much as its argument. Obviously it is to be recommended to historians looking for a new way to think about the narrative of Reconstruction, but its interest will go well beyond this. Political historians in both the antebellum and Gilded Age eras will want to interrogate the consequences of sectionalism within the United States for national party politics in their own eras. They may well also want to rethink the role of the party in the antebellum period, for while they seemed weak in the face of sectional identities and tensions, both Republicans and Democrats were more than strong enough to overcome them and remain powerful organizations capable of perpetuating their power and embracing their own interests. Southern historians, too, may have to consider why Northern sectionalism did embrace disunion, unlike its Southern colleagues. Historians of the economic geography of the United States will find this book intriguing, especially as scholars of ‘urban imperialism’ and ‘city boosterism’ so often assume that Americans mentally divided their country into city-hinterlands rather than larger sectional blocs.
In this volume, Barreyre cleverly uses a growing and interesting area of historical research to richly contextualise and shed new light on the high politics of Reconstruction. Combining economic geography and political history in this way really can be more than the sum of its parts.
Notes
S. Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (Cambridge, 2002); E. Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (London, 1990); H. C. Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865–1901 (London, 2001).Back to (1)
See C. A. Beard and M. R. Beard, History of the United States (New York, NY, 1921), pp. 295–506.Back to (2)
M. Egnal, Clash of Extremes: The Economic Origins of the Civil War (New York, NY, 2009); W. Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA, 2013); H. C. Richardson, West from Appomattox: the Reconstruction of America After the Civil War (London, 2008).Back to (3)
August 2016
QUOTED: "Gold and Freedom reflects an intimate knowledge of American party politics during a turbulent historical period."
"This reviewer remains skeptical with respect to the value added by the spatial framework favored by the author. The centrifugal forces splintering the postwar Republican Party were multidimensional, sectionalism being undoubtedly important but only one factor among many. But these methodological doubts do not undermine the quality of Barreyre’s contribution to Reconstruction history. His account is nuanced and well-informed, drawing attention to intricate connections all too easily overlooked."
Gold and Freedom: The Political Economy of Reconstruction
by Barreyre, Nicolas
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Retail Price: $39.50
Issue: Summer 2016
ISBN: 9780813937496
Rethinking the Politics of Reconstruction: The Republican Party Finds Unity in the Politics of Sectionalism
Nicolas Barreyre, who teaches American history at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris, has published a new interpretation of the politics of Reconstruction, emphasizing the role of intersectional conflict over economic issues within the Republican Party. Although the English version of the book appears in translation, Barreyre has studied at the University of Virginia and is clearly comfortable working in American archives. Gold and Freedom reflects an intimate knowledge of American party politics during a turbulent historical period.
Part I presents the book’s distinctive theme, the emergence of political-economic antagonism between the Northeast and Midwest in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. The terminology poses something of a problem, in that the designation “Midwest” did not come into common usage until the end of the century, most speakers referring instead to The West as a somewhat open-ended geographical category. But Barreyre uses Midwest throughout, meaning what today is called the North Central census region: the old Northwest territory plus the newly-settled farm states of Minnesota, Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska (Colorado became a state only in 1876, and Missouri occupied an ambiguous position straddling Midwest and South.) Setting aside Reconstruction itself, the two great economic issues of the day were gold – whether and at what pace the country should return to a metallic monetary standard – and the tariff – whether high wartime import duties should be reduced, and if so, with what consequences for revenue and government spending. The Northeast and Midwest were by no means internally unified on these issues, but Barreyre argues that positions tended to settle into binary geographic camps: the Midwest, being agricultural and indebted, favored “soft” money and free trade; the Northeast, being the nation’s financial center and highly industrial, favored “hard” money and high tariffs.
To an economic historian, this framework is not entirely satisfactory. There were many indebted northeastern farmers even in 1870, and a number of emerging Midwestern industries were eager to retain protection. Barreyre fully acknowledges this intra-sectional heterogeneity, but he argues that both popular perceptions and roll-call voting clustered into regional blocs. Displaying on p. 98 a map of roll-call voting on tariff votes from 1865 to 1877, the author points to the “almost perfect” dividing line between Ohio and Pennsylvania. The sectional separation in that particular map is indeed visually striking, but the next two maps on individual tariff bills are much less clear-cut, and the summary table on p. 97 shows considerable dispersion within both regions and parties. It would be interesting to know the extent to which “special interests” were able to buck regional and partisan pressures to achieve their goals by lobbying Congressional committees as well as through electoral activity.
But that would be a very different book. Barreyre’s interests are not directed primarily towards specific policy outcomes, but at the implications of Northeast-Midwest conflict for Reconstruction policies. Here, the geopolitical approach yields surprising insights. In briefest summary, the argument is that the Republican Party, beset by intersectional economic differences on which it was unable to achieve a durable compromise, was driven to emphasize the one issue that could unify the Party: completing the postwar project of ending slavery and protecting the rights of the freedmen. The party unity imperative helps to explain the resurgence of Reconstruction energy during the Grant administration, most notably passage of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1870 and a series of Enforcement Acts to protect black voters in the South. The new priority for enfranchisement – which the party had not previously been willing to support -- also reflected the hope that a coalition of black voters and southern Unionists would invigorate the Republican Party in the South.
These partisan calculations were undone, however, by backlash from Liberal Republicans in 1872, by Democratic tactics to foment division with Republican ranks, by the financial crash of 1873 and subsequent depression, and by a barrage of scandals within the Grant administration. As Barreyre writes on p. 197: “Each new scandal lent plausibility to Democratic charges against Republican governments in the South.” Well before the official demise of Reconstruction in 1877, the weakened party was in no position to enforce anyone’s rights effectively. The Republican retreat to the North was well displayed in the lame-duck session after the midterm elections of 1874, when the House of Representatives passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875 but declined to approve a sixth enforcement act that might have given the new law a fighting chance for success.
This reviewer remains skeptical with respect to the value added by the spatial framework favored by the author. The centrifugal forces splintering the postwar Republican Party were multidimensional, sectionalism being undoubtedly important but only one factor among many. But these methodological doubts do not undermine the quality of Barreyre’s contribution to Reconstruction history. His account is nuanced and well-informed, drawing attention to intricate connections all too easily overlooked. As he argues: “…the study of Reconstruction, when viewed in a national context, must take into account political dynamics that might seem irrelevant to it if one were to focus solely on the racial question.” Gold and Freedom amply confirms the truth of this statement.
Gavin Wright is the William Robertson Coe Professor of American Economic History emeritus, Stanford University. Professor Wright is the author of Sharing the Prize: The Economics of the Civil Rights Revolution in the American South.