LAUSR

reading of the Revolutionary era. Two counter-examples will suffice. Tidewater Virginia featured the same social structure in the eighteenth century that Nabors lays out for the oligarchy of the 1850s. Yet Virginia was the home of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Henry – in short, the most prominent of the Founders. Why were they less oligarchic than Jefferson Davis and Alexander Hamilton Stephens? South Carolina’s history exhibits the opposite refutation. Dominated by rice planters from its inception, South Carolina hardly required an oligarchic makeover. While antebellum Carolina fits Nabors’ model, its colonial past contradicts his reading of the Revolution. Far better might be our grasp of the capaciousness of eighteenth-century America, with its extensive notion of republican government and consequential centrality of compromise in the making of the U.S. Constitution (with the moral concessions entailed). The result would be a less filiopietistic but more accurate reading of the American founding. Rather than view the central story of early national America as the oligarchic makeover of the South, I suggest that the source of Nabors’ great divergence, such as it was, rested above the Mason-Dixon line. Not a southern reversal but the Yankee miracle of commercial, manufacturing, and financial expansion marks the departure from an agrarian eighteenth century that tied North, South, and West together in a Jeffersonian regime of farmer and planter. In this reading, one is better off portraying antebellum poor whites and the planter oligarchy less as naturally at odds with one another (in some reductive class conflict reading), than as instinctive allies defensively fighting against the inevitable encroachment of the juggernaut of American industrial capitalism. Such a reading has the added advantage of offering a simpler explanation for the failure of Reconstruction, a failure rooted in southern whites’ essential and tragic alignment of commercial development and an activist state with outside northern interference. Perhaps the real sorrow of the South was how readily racist whites made common cause simultaneously against the equal citizenship of ex-slaves and a nascent capitalist system that in the end would lift the great majority of southern Americans out of the poverty and misery of rural isolation.