From Oligarchy to Republicanism: The Great Task of Reconstruction by Forrest A. Nabors (review)

"Forty years after the birth of American liberty," writes Forrest A. Nabors, the republican experiment ran off the tracks (p. xvi). "[A] race of kings arose from American soil" and divided the nation into "two inherently hostile political regimes, one republican in form, the other oligarchic" (pp. xvi, 4). Most Founding Fathers had hoped "to transform their states and the new nation in a republican direction, away from monarchy and aristocracy" (p. 26). But slaveholding southern oligarchs during the antebellum era spurned republican values. They instead imposed a system in which "the rich ruled" and only the privileged few enjoyed equal rights (p. 28).

Nabors contends that the "moral problem" of racial injustice obscures "the problem of Southern oligarchy" (p. 294). Historians today are so fixated on race, he suggests, that they ignore the wider dimensions of inequality, of which race was only a subsidiary part. By contrast, he maintains, leaders of the early Republican Party knew what they were up against. They frequently condemned the oligarchy that ruled despotically in the South and that threatened to extinguish "republican liberty" in "free states and territories" (p. 193). After the oligarchs dragged the country into a bloody war, Republicans saw "regime change" as the only basis for postwar Reconstruction (p. 9). But wily oligarchs sabotaged the drive to change the South and ultimately retained power.

Nabors finds certainty where other historians find complexity. Was the Old South an oligarchy? Nabors notes its unequal distribution of wealth, its property qualifications for voting and officeholding, and its neglect of public education. To show that ordinary white folk were treated unfairly, he enlists testimony from Andrew Johnson, Hinton Rowan Helper, and Francis P. Blair Jr. But Nabors elides the robust history of popular involvement in the Old South's public sphere. Would-be oligarchs always knew the plain folk could vote them out of office. By the late antebellum era, all white southern men voted without restriction, and they did so at rates far higher than do their counterparts today. They enjoyed more potential political leverage than subordinate classes elsewhere ever dreamed of obtaining. If oligarchy means the few can stack the rules of the game to exclude the many, then the Old South's oligarchs played their cards strangely.

Fast forward to wartime. Nabors believes many of "the Southern soldiering class" hated the war and that large numbers of southern Unionists eagerly awaited liberation from their oligarchic oppressors (p. xiv). Some did, yes, especially in northwestern Virginia and East Tennessee. But he forgets that Union leaders—most prominently, Abraham Lincoln—initially clung to the same delusion and only gradually came to realize that the Confederate cause enjoyed broad popular support. Nabors then executes an intellectual somersault. Although ordinary white southerners were divided during wartime, he explains, they tenaciously resisted Yankee rule during Reconstruction. They defied the "old oligarchy" and spearheaded Ku Klux Klan terrorism (p. 307). Former slaves thereupon sought protection from "[u]pper-class whites," who used black votes "to overcome the Southern white majority" (p. 310). Historians who may welcome Nabors's emphasis on class divisions among white southerners during wartime would not likely second his view of the Reconstruction sequel.

Nabors's book is a venture into "political philosophy" (p. 23). He styles himself as able to spot the undergirding structures on which more transitory events played out. He exudes confidence that close readings of texts will reveal structures. His evidentiary base appears formidable—the speeches and writings of one hundred Republicans who served in Congress between 1863 and 1869. They indeed denounced the southern oligarchy and hoped to supplant it. But for this reviewer, at least, questions remain. A book that purports to expose the core realities of southern society depends on the authority of those who saw it from a distance and assumed they could change it but ultimately found to their sorrow...