Forrest A. Nabors’s From Oligarchy to Republicanism provides an interesting and engaging perspective on how Republican politicians framed the meaning of the American Civil War. It makes a compelling case that scholars of American political development should pay more attention to the oligarchical character of the antebellum South.
Nabors advances two core claims: first, that Republicans saw the cause of the conflict as the rise of a Southern oligarchy, and second, that their interpretation was essentially correct. Republicans’ purpose, he argues, should accordingly not be reduced to a moral crusade against slavery, nor to restricting the conquered territories to white men, nor even to the claim that “free labor” was economically superior. These themes, more common in the literature, are instead treated as tangential or properly subsumed under what Nabors argues was Republicans’ paramount concern: the preservation of a republican regime against the revolutionary efforts of an enslaving oligarchy. “The rise of the oligarchy in the South,” he writes, is “the independent variable that is underrated or missed by many studies of the period” (p. 17), and the joining of two antithetical political regimes—rather than economic systems—was the real cause of the house divided (pp. 104, 150).
The introduction outlines the argument, as well as the Aristotelian regime categories used by Nabors and, to a lesser extent, by Republicans in crafting their respective cases. Chapter 1 documents the core themes of the Republican interpretation: the Southern states had become oligarchical, and so the task of reconstruction would be not just abolition but also regime change. Chapter 2 details how Republicans understood the relationship between oligarchy and slavery and the mechanisms by which the latter inevitably produced the former. Chapter 3 presents the provocative case that Southern oligarchy was a recent development, and chapters 4 and 5 narrate Republicans’ account of its emergence and of the organization of their party in response. Chapter 6 presents evidence about patterns of education, political institutions, and inequality to substantiate the claim that the South was oligarchical, and chapter 7 provides an interpretation of the antiblack violence of the Reconstruction era and of postwar efforts to reinterpret the conflict.
From Oligarchy to Republicanism is a valuable exercise in historical excavation. Nabors recovers and effectively synthesizes a complex interpretation of the sectional conflict out of a wide diversity of congressional speeches. His relentless emphasis on the political character of the argument, rather than its moral, economic, or at times frankly racist character, is especially valuable, as is his encouragement to more closely examine changes in the antebellum Southern regimes.
The book’s defense of this interpretation as an historical matter—in particular, his insistence that the Southern oligarchy was a revolutionary departure from the founders’ republicanism—is considerably less persuasive. Although Nabors’s reliance on Republican speeches is an appropriate methodological choice for reconstructing their argument, readers are left with no sense of Republicans as practical politicians engaged in a work of artful propaganda. The Aristotelian regime categories are useful for understanding how Republicans interpreted and framed the conflict; Nabors at times draws on these to generate interesting hypotheses worthy of closer empirical examination, such as the claim that the intrinsic logic of oligarchy required the slaveholding class to attempt to control national politics (chap. 4). More generally, however, the effort to shoehorn nineteenth-century political institutions and controversies into the categories of antiquity results in confusion, with assertions about the intrinsic logic of different regimes standing in place of persuasive evidence (pp. 26, 105, 295).
Nabors does not shy away from provocative claims. Some are tangential, such as his description of the early Ku Klux Klan, whose aim apparently “did not seem to have been to murder and terrorize the emancipated, but to control and rule them along with everyone else” and whose members, we are supposed to believe, were shocked to find terrorizing acts going on (pp. 308–10); his claim that prevailing Civil War scholarship is rooted in Marxist frameworks, which he grossly mischaracterizes as treating all forms of wealth as equivalent and thus as blind to the material conditions differentiating a “rich Northern industrialist and a rich Southern planter” (p. 28); or his non sequitur swipe at certain academic opponents of the Iraq War (p. 305).
Other provocations are at the core of the text’s argument, most centrally Nabors’s endorsement of Republican claims that the founders were “abolitionists” (pp. 95, 113) and that the constitutional order they established was intrinsically opposed to slavery. Why electorally oriented politicians might opt against censuring the founders or the Constitution—as William Lloyd Garrison had done, to no little controversy—should be obvious. Why we should accept their rhetoric as historical fact is not. Indeed, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that one reason Republicans emphasized oligarchy was precisely to avoid criticizing the founders. If the evil were slavery, then it was there at the founding. If the evil could be redefined as a later political tendency (pp. 22–23, 102), then the founders were off the hook. Damn Calhoun, redeem Jefferson.
As a political tactic, this had its advantages, making the founders available for Republicans’ own uses and giving a racist white public a reason to care: it was now their own liberties, after all, that were supposedly under threat. Republican speeches repeatedly claim such an equivalence between the enslavement of African Americans and, for example, the reduced political standing of non-slave-owning whites caused by the malapportionment of Southern legislatures (pp. 59, see also pp. xvii, 6, 29, 41, 42, 44, 47, 52, 82, 181, 269). Both, we are told, were “robbed… of their birthright, their liberty” (p. 29). Such a chain of equivalency, however false, was no doubt politically sagacious in building an antislavery base among the white public.
But as a historical or moral account, it is obviously unsatisfying. Nabors leaves us with no doubt that Republicans, as well as many of the founders, recognized slavery as an evil in its own right, and he convincingly demonstrates that many of them recognized political oligarchy as endogenous to slavery. Writing about the 1850s, Nabors argues that those who “understood that [oligarchy] was the political effect of domestic slavery, could not easily compromise on slavery policy” (p. 76). But he also shows that the founders had recognized this connection just as clearly. Still, they had bargained and prevaricated quite extensively on slavery.
Many Southern founders do indeed seem to have regretted slavery, although generally not enough to divest from it. The Constitution—despite its fugitive slave clause, its three-fifths clause, its takings clause, its prohibition on limiting the slave trade for a generation, and its encouragement of bisectional coalitions that would ensure the continued accommodation of slaveholders’ interests—was not an exclusively proslavery document, even if the main resource given antislavery was what was left out of the text.
But an even-handed defense of the Republicans’ argument would have to engage much more deliberately with the relevant historical literatures. It would have to grapple with the reality that many of the supposedly republican regimes of the founding era, including the national one, maintained both slavery and racist distinctions against free persons of color, elaborating new ones from the very beginning of the regime. Here is one example: although Nabors claims that during debates over the Naturalization Act of 1795 “nobody expressed a need to preserve ‘whiteness’ as some sort of national goal” (p. 314), he neglects to note that the 1790 Act had already established whiteness as a necessary qualification.
Because of oligarchy’s endogeneity to slavery and slavery’s intrinsic evil, it was not enough as a political matter to cast the founders as having harbored misgivings but nonetheless preserving slavery for future generations. They instead had to be recast as “slaveholding abolitionist fathers” (pp. 95, 166). This task required Republicans to engage in inevitable contortions of logic and falsifications of fact. Wanting to claim the founders for their own, they had to insist that they had done that which they did not do. It is a testament to Nabors’s careful and extensive recovery of their argument that the inherent impossibility of their efforts emerges so clearly.
