Declarations of Dependence: The Long Reconstruction of Popular Politics in the South, 1861-1908

Introduction: Friends Unseen: The Ballad of Political Dependency

Introduction Friends Unseen The Ballad of Political Dependency the civil war transformed the relationship between the American people and their government . As war shifted the boundaries between the political and the personal, women and men pressed previously private, intimate needs onto states they embodied into patrons they could beg for favors. In the process, democracy and wartime exigency turned dependence from a personal condition into a political style. In strange and seemingly un-American ways, the war sparked a revolution not just in what the American state could do but in what people believed it could do. In the decades following the attack on Fort Sumter, people spoke of politics not just through classic American languages of independence and autonomy but also through a vernacular vocabulary of dependence. The popular politics that flowered from the dialogue between crowd and politician was a calculated, often selfish, frequently extravagant set of appeals . This politics emerged from the particular circumstances of the Civil War and Reconstruction, flourished through the 1880s and 1890s, and was seemingly, if not completely, buried by progressive rationalization and disenfranchisement at the turn of the century. The development of a politics of dependence—what I call an American patronalism—undermines several basic American myths: that political history can be told largely through the centrality and contested expansion of citizenship rights, that Americans deeply resist relationships of dependence, that the United States possessed a weak government, and that its people, by and large, expected nothing more, at least not before the New Deal. Much of American political history might be summed up in the observation of South [2] Introduction Carolinian David Ramsay more than two centuries ago. Because of the Revolution , some Americans had been transformed from ‘‘subjects to citizens,’’ and ‘‘the difference is immense.’’ In praise and in critique, scholars affirm the importance of citizenship rights and narrate much of the nation’s history through struggles over the extension of those rights to previously excluded groups. These guiding assumptions lead even the best historians to miss the importance of other types of claims that have been central to politics, including those rooted in a fantastic, temporary reconstruction of subjecthood.∞ This book explores the sometimes grand, sometimes delusional expectations of government that the Civil War created, and that postbellum politicians tried simultaneously to manage and to exploit. It is a story about the dynamic, often surprising way that American people interact with their government , and it is also a story therefore about democracy and public opinion. The letters and pleas in this book demonstrate that many, many people acted as if they had a right to depend on government for food, shelter, even love in the allegedly laissez-faire nineteenth century. As scholars have long recognized , the expansion of American democracy in the nineteenth century did not create a government that perfectly reflected the popular will; it did, however , open up a permeable politics where eccentric popular ideas could influence candidates’ self-presentation. Brisk campaigns made politicians keen listeners not from choice but necessity. They learned to respond not just to party platforms or organized pressure or discursive shifts, but also to a lessstudied , less easily identified but nonetheless real foundation of popular politics, the mad swirl of ideas circulating among political consumers in the proverbial crowd. Thinking about rights claims, state development, and American political languages in these ways reminds us of now-familiar but still easy to forget lessons that liberal ideology is a complex grab bag of aspirations, that rights are defined not absolutely but contextually, that citizenship and state-building occur in fits and starts and reverses, and that teleological assumptions about an exceptional American politics of independence or autonomy can obscure as much as they reveal. Although historians have long examined dependence as an epithet or a structural condition in American politics, few have asked whether, when, why, and how Americans treated dependence not as an insult but a strategy, a tool to mediate politics for their own benefit. While historians frequently, if often in critique, define American political aspirations through the ‘‘ideal of independence,’’ ‘‘individual freedom,’’ or ‘‘autonomy’’—views that have, in the words of one scholar, a ‘‘conceptual lock on the historiography’’—those aspirations were also expressed through voluntary claims of dependence. Introduction [3] This political development has largely eluded historical notice because of its erratic, irrational nature. Unlike the movements that fill...