Who We Are - Volume 2 - Chapter 8: The Nation-Builders in Reconstruction (1865-1873) - Part 1
By Anton Chaitkin; Copyright Anton Chaitkin
Who We Are - Volume 2 - Chapter 8: The Nation-Builders in Reconstruction (1865-1873) - Part 1
A debate raged throughout America after the defeat of the slaveowners and the constitutional prohibition of slavery.
What should be done with regard to the freed African Americans? They had no property, education or industrial skills. They were not considered citizens and were not allowed to vote or otherwise to participate in Southern political life. They were thus at the mercy of their former masters. And the South was in ruins, widely impoverished, with no recovery in sight.
How should the South be changed, to aid those whose oppression continued beyond the end of slavery?
That intended “Reconstruction” of the South gave a name to the era, roughly 1865-1877.
The public today is under the vague impression that “liberals” favored African Americans having all the political rights that were already guaranteed to citizens, and that “conservatives” took the racist side of the issue.
But the deeper contention was over whether to actually secure such civil rights by changing the economic and social character of the South.
This became clear as the debate became increasingly bitter. It was the Pennsylvania-based economic nationalists, who favored industrializing that backward region and finally ending the plantation system, who were also the most faithful to the cause of civil rights.
And it was the anti-nationalists, the aristocratic Anglophile free traders, formerly abolitionists, who abandoned civil rights and preferred to “leave the South alone” as a zone of cheap labor for the imperial system.
The real identity of the two sides in Reconstruction cannot be understood without fully identifying the protectionist nation-builders and their antagonists, the transatlantic financier faction.
We have already seen (in Chapter 7) that the protectionists themselves organized the new American steel industry.
Progress in that powerful innovation would continue strongly until mid-1873, when an Anglo-American attack would cut down the power of the Philadelphia nationalists and bring on a deep economic depression. The Philadelphia center would fight back by sponsoring a colossal-scale steel enterprise that would propel the USA into global industrial leadership.
While the Philadelphians built American steel, they launched other projects that aimed simultaneously at both private profit and a vast enhancement of mankind’s powers.
It is most important to see, in the entirety of these projects, including steel, the bold scope of action, the creativity, and the intention to defeat the global financial power structure that suffocated progress. This action, this struggle, is at the real core of American and world history in the modern era.
The transatlantic imperial faction that eventually sabotaged Southern transformation did so by wrecking the financial-economic-political power of the Philadelphia nationalists. And they consolidated this political and racial outrage by controlling the writing of history, and erasing the nation-builders – their deadly political foes -- from public memory.
The following were leading development targets of the Philadelphia nationalists, on which we shall elaborate in this and subsequent chapters:
The modern railroad;
The petroleum industry;
The West and Mexico;
The Northern Pacific Railroad and through it, mutually beneficial connection with Asia; and, finally,
Transformation of the South.
The heroic fight for human rights and modern times in that region occurred simultaneously with the other nationalist pursuits, and its history cannot be competently viewed separately from that larger context.
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