Gold and Freedom: The Political Economy of Reconstruction (Nation Divided: Studies in the Civil War Era) - Hardcover

Thoroughly researched, Gold and Freedom brings the perspective of a gifted French historian to a perennial topic in U.S. history. By reinterpreting Reconstruction through a sectional lens, Barreyre shifts our attention from party conflict to what he calls its 'spatial dynamics.' It may well be that an outsider is best positioned to appreciate the enormous significance of sectionalism in U.S. national politics. Barreyre proves here that he definitely 'gets it.'"" --Richard R. John, Columbia University, author of Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications. ""Nicolas Barreyre's Gold and Freedom is the first serious attempt to analyze congressional policy making during the era of Reconstruction to appear in forty to fifty years. It is a brilliant piece of work. None of the previous studies of economic policy making have tied those disputes so integrally to the evolution of federal Reconstruction policy as Barreyre does here. The book will make a splash with students of the Civil War/Reconstruction period as well as with specialists."" --Michael Holt, Williams Professor of American History Emeritus, University of Virginia.

Historians have long treated Reconstruction primarily as a southern concern isolated from broader national political developments. Yet at its core, Reconstruction was a battle for the legacy of the Civil War that would determine the political fate not only of the South but of the nation. In Gold and Freedom, Nicolas Barreyre recovers the story of how economic issues became central to American politics after the war. The idea that a financial debate was as important for Reconstruction as emancipation may seem remarkable, but the war created economic issues that all Americans, not just southerners, had to grapple with, including a huge debt, an inconvertible paper currency, high taxation, and tariffs. Alongside the key issues of race and citizenship, the struggle with the new economic model and the type of society it created pervaded the entire country. Both were legacies of war. Both were fought over by the same citizens in a newly reunited nation. It was thus impossible for such closely related debates to proceed independently. A truly groundbreaking work, Gold and Freedom shows how much the fate of Reconstruction?and the political world it ultimately created?owed to northern sectional divisions, revealing important links between race and economy, as well as region and nation, not previously recognized.