Rethinking the Dynamics of Post–Civil War American Politics

Covering the period from 1861 through the early decades of the twentieth century, Gregory P. Downs’ Declarations of Dependence seeks to demonstrate that “the Civil War transformed the relationship between the American people and their government” in such a way as to produce a new “politics of dependence” that he calls “patronalism” (p. 2). Studying this political transformation is important, Downs claims, because it “allows us not just to sketch a new political story” about America’s late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century past, but also to add to the already long list of ways that the Civil War profoundly affected the nation’s course (p. 4). Indeed, for Downs, examining the development of American patronalism in the postwar period casts Reconstruction itself in a much broader light, revealing that it was both a particular American moment and “part of a global transformation of state authority, a project of nationalization and legitimization concurrent with national formations elsewhere around the world” (p. 13): This is an ambitious book.

Prior to the Civil War, Downs asserts, the condition of being “dependent” in America was understood to be a private, personal matter; it was also a condition that early Americans generally believed excluded (and should exclude) individuals from active participation in the polity. “Wartime exigency,” however, he writes, “sparked a revolution not just in what the American state could do but in what people believed it could do” (p. 1). On the one hand, the wartime state intruded more deeply into people’s lives and communities than it had done in the past; on the other hand, the war increasingly caused Americans to understand the condition of being “dependent” in political terms, as a problem that government—rather than kin or neighbors—could and should alleviate, and as a condition that should no longer prevent individuals from engaging in political action. Post–Civil War politicians, in turn, took advantage of this two-pronged revamping of the concept of dependence—increasingly seen as the very crux of Americans’ relationship with government and its agents—in order to enhance their own careers and to expand government power at every level. Expanding “claims of dependence” by individuals on the government and its agents, Downs writes, “both narrowed the state into an accessible human figure and expanded its potential reach into every conceivable aspect of life” (p. 7). Subsequently, this redefined “politics of dependence”—patronalism—“flourished through the 1880s and 1890s.” Only in the early decades of the twentieth century was it “seemingly, if not completely, buried by progressive rationalization and disenfranchisement at the turn of the century” (p. 2).

Downs’ theoretical scope is sweeping, but in geographical terms he focuses on North Carolina. There, he explains, patronalism arose from a complex wartime combination of the extension of the Confederate state into people’s lives in the form of the conscription of white men for military duty (as well as their exemption from it), the impressment of slaves, the appropriation of supplies and stock, and so forth, and, as conditions declined, the growing demands on the state of hungry and anxious civilians (many of them women) for food and other necessities, as well as protection from Federal invaders and uncontrolled and often violent Confederate deserters. Ironically, Downs explains, it was the state’s unprecedented intrusion into North Carolinians’ lives that led them to believe that it could (and would) also assume responsibility for solving their problems. At the same time, when the state bureaucracy as a whole proved unable to fulfill the responsibilities its intrusions had caused people to project onto it, those in need began to seek out individual agents of the state for personalized assistance. This in turn handed individual politicians both a challenge and an opportunity. Speaking of wartime governor Zebulon Vance, Downs writes: “Although he could not meet all of the requests, Vance recognized that he could use” his constituents’ earnest cries for...