Daniel Feller

Libertarians in the Attic, or A Tale of Two Narratives

In the stacks of my university library, three books stand side by side, each catalogued by the Library of Congress at E468.9. In the middle is David W. Blights Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Published by Harvard in 2001, Blights work won a bevy of prizes and was placed immediately on innumerable graduate reading lists. Flanking Blight on one side is Tony Horwitzs riveting expos6 of contemporary Lost Cause culture, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War. On the other is a book that many readers of Blight and Horwitz have never heard of, Charles Adamss When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession. Though Adams and Blight sit adjacent on the shelves, the gulf between them, both in viewpoint and in audience, is nearly bottomless. Contemplating that gulf provokes some disturbing thoughts. Race and Reunion told readers like you and me what a generation of scholarship had primed us to hear. Slavery brought on the Civil War. Once war started, the futility of fighting slaveholders without fighting slavery, added to genuine antislavery conviction and the self-liberating action of the slaves, brought Abraham Lincoln and the Union to an emancipationist policy by 1863. Lincolns Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural, speaking of a new birth of freedom and of the nations penance for slavery, captured the essential meaning of the contest.

Lee Benson and the Concept of Jacksonian Democracy@@@The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case.

Historian Lee Benson was a key figure in the “new political history”—the attempt to apply social-science methods, concepts, and theories to American political history—and The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy, his pioneering study of nineteenth-century New York State political culture, was a major breakthrough in the field. One reviewer demanded that “every American political historian take cognizance of Benson’s challenges,” while another said the book “merited the attention of all political historians.” Benson challenged the very notion of a “Jacksonian” democracy, calling the concept “sterile and deceptive.” Previous work, including that of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., argued that voters cast their ballots according to economic status—rich for one party and poor for another. Benson’s work turned this interpretation on its head. Using extensive quantitative research, he argued that ethnic and religious affiliations—not simply economic status—were the crucial determinants of political affiliation. Ethnocultural groups, as he called them, were often hostile to one another on the basis of prejudice or, more exactly, different lifestyle. Roman Catholics distrusted Protestants and vice versa, and each group tried to use its voting power to block the other’s and enhance its own position. Calling previous interpretations “untenable,” Benson argued that it was incorrect to understand voter behavior along strictly socioeconomic lines; the poor were no more likely to be Jacksonian Democrats than were the rich. In short, Benson suggested a new theory of American voting behavior.