Gold and freedom: the political economy of Reconstruction

It is common for historians of the antebellum, civil war, and reconstruction-era United States to talk of ‘the Northeast’, ‘the South’, or ‘the West’ as offhand for a wide range of interests, like the Confederacy, slaveholders, or industrial capitalism. Nicolas Barreyre’s well-written and largely persuasive account of Reconstruction-era political economy suggests that historians may have to be more careful when using these terms in their own work. Contemporaries, he suggests, conceptualised the American economy in geographic terms, believing it self-evident that the Northeast, South, and Midwest were separate competing economic interest groups with different needs. And no issue was more divisive that the conflict between the North’s supposed need for a stable currency and the Midwest’s professed need for soft money. This leads to Barreyre's more provocative argument: that the ongoing rivalry between North and Midwest, far from taking place separately from the issues of readmission, black suffrage, and land redistribution, in fact guided the course of Reconstruction policy towards the South. Therefore, far from seeing Reconstruction as a contest taking place in Southern state legislatures, union leagues, and plantations, Gold and Freedom reinterprets it as part of the national reconstruction of American economic geography.