Gold and Freedom: The Political Economy of Reconstruction

"This wonderful book looks at the post-Civil War period in the United States, and tries to explain the emergence of a new political conflict between Democrats and Republicans in the thirty years that followed the abolition of slavery. What I found most fascinating in this book is that it helps you understand how the Democratic party, which was the party of slavery , became a century later the party of the New Deal, of civil rights, and of Barack Obama . This transformation looks like an incredible paradox to many, one that can seem completely unbelievable retrospectively, but Barreyre’s analysis of the Reconstruction shows why this evolution actually made sense. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Both before and after the Civil War , the Democratic Party developed an ideology that you could call social-nativist, in the sense that they were deeply segregationist against black Americans, but at the same time they were quite egalitarian when it came to white people. And actually, one of their arguments against abolition was that what the Republican elites in Boston and New York really wanted by freeing the slaves was to make more cheap labour available on the street and thus increase profits. In their rationale—sincere or not—this type of domination would be even more violent and detrimental than slavery. The Republican elites of the northwest were really worried about immigrants coming from Italy, Ireland, et cetera. They refused any measure to facilitate their integration, including giving them the right to vote (which is also why, incidentally, Republicans never pushed too hard to give freed slaves the right to vote in the South). On the other hand, the Democrats advocated for the use of taxes and redistribution to help these immigrant populations. “This weird trajectory of a social-nativist party that now attracts the clear majority of African American and Latino votes, is fascinating” Just like Blaufarb with the French Revolution, Barreyre doesn’t take sides on these issues. He tries to understand how ideologies and discourses on a fair society worked together by looking at many different socio-economic dimensions; a sort of historical and political economy of late 19th-century American society. He studies many other specific debates of the time, including the gold standard, the public debt of the Civil War, protectionism and tariffs… These issues, which can seem technical at first, are very interesting because the social groups that make up the American political landscape wanted to deal with them in very different ways. For a European researcher like myself, it’s almost refreshing, in a way. This weird trajectory of a social-nativist party that has become, 150 years later, the one that attracts the clear majority of African-American and Latino votes, is fascinating. But the similarities with modern European parties are still there: these days the Democratic Party is also the party of many highly-educated affluent Americans, and one that has lost its appeal in the eyes of the white working class. It also gives us important historical material to think about modern political transformations, in Europe or India for example, with issues that involve both questions of identity and economics."