A fundamental argument of A Nation Under Our Feet is that the American Civil War constituted a social, political, and economic revolution. Though this proposition sounds odd to the many who disagree, I believe there are serious benefits to taking such a view of the transformation of American society wrought by the war. In a previous course, Allen Matusow’s “Industrializing America,” my paper considered the view that the victory of the Union amounted to America’s bourgeois revolution, through which a new social class (the owners of capital) defeated their rivals (the owners of slaves), captured effective control of the state and began to reshape society along “legal-rational” lines in accordance with their interests in industrialized capital accumulation. While the idea of the Civil War as “the Second American Revolution” appears to be first sketched out by American historians in Charles and Mary Beard’s The Rise of American Civilization,[1] the triumph of the Northern bourgeoisie is thoroughly explored in Sven Beckert’s more recent The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896. My view was also significantly influenced by similar arguments made in David Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness and Barrington Moore, Jr.’s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. A limitation of these histories (with the exception of Roediger) is that they have conceived of this political-economic revolution as primarily a top-down affair carried out in the interests of the powerful. While I see histories of the elite as enormously important given their disproportionate influence over society relative to their numbers, it is no less important to consider how those at the very bottom of society experienced events, and how their actions contributed to the making of the social order. Researchers in all fields too regularly ignore such a perspective, an omission that reflects and reinforces the current balance of power.
In this context, Steven Hahn’s exploration of the revolutionary experience of slaves and freedpeople from the bottom-up helps to fill an important gap in the literature. Hahn’s framing was influenced by the “history from below” movement in Western social history (pioneered by such works as E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class) and the Subaltern Studies group that revitalized South Asian (and wider postcolonial) historiography in the 1980s. While works focusing on political-economic elites, such as Beckert’s Monied Metropolis, are absolutely essential for understanding the development of American history, subalternists argue that “elite nationalism rewrote history and…its rewriting was directed at both contesting colonial rule and protecting its flanks from the subalterns.”[2] In revealing a largely ignored realm of action by subaltern actors, Hahn has done us all a great service. In the context of the American Civil War, it is important to understand that the northern bourgeoisie who bankrolled the Union effort were fighting on multiple fronts: to destroy the Confederacy and the power of the cotton planters while simultaneously limiting the autonomy of freedpeople and taming the northern working class. Reading from both perspectives thus becomes absolutely essential. History needs to be understood not just at the top or the bottom, but from the bottom all the way up, or the top all the way down.
This is partly why I find the study of revolutions so fascinating and appropriate for the American Civil War era. In order to be persuasive, the subject demands comparative approaches both internal and external to the society in question, as well as a clear analysis of social conditions. In times of revolution, the contradictions of one system are exposed and the possibilities for restructuring are exploded wide open. Yet the outcome of the new order is also inherently limited by the conditions created by the ancien regime, as well as the agency of the revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries, and their relation to one another. Hahn’s story of agrarian transformation and subaltern self-organization helps to illuminate how the goals of the northern white bourgeoisie were often coopted and modified by those supposedly on the receiving end.
On a related note, I look forward to today’s lecture by Robin Blackburn, whose book An Unifinished Revolution: Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln appears to explore many of these questions.
Bibliography
Beard, Charles A. and Mary R. Beard. The Rise of American Civilization. New York: Macmillan, 1937.
Beckert, Sven. The Monied Metropolis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Chatterjee, Partha. Nationalist Thought in the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse. London: Zed, 1986.
Guha, Ranajit. “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency” in Subaltern Studies II. Ed. Ranajit Guha. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983 [1995].
Prakash, Gyan. “Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism.” American Historical Review, Vol. 99, No. 5 (Dec. 1994): 1475-1490.
Roediger, David R. The Wages of Whiteness. London: Verso, 2007 [1991].
[1] It should be noted that some contemporary intellectual observers, such as Karl Marx, clearly took this view of the American Civil War as it unfolded. This is not to ignore that the war’s revolutionary meaning was immediately clear to the slaves and, arguably, the slavemasters. This position will be discussed later.
[2] Prakash, 1481.