On September 18, 1873, the announcement of Jay Cooke and Company's bankruptcy sent Wall Street to a panic, and the country to a long, harsh depression. Americans interpreted this economic crisis in the light of the acrimonious financial debates born of the Civil War—the money question chief among them. The consequences transformed American politics. Ideologically ill-equipped to devise cohesive economic policies, political parties split dangerously along sectional lines (between the Northeast and the Midwest). Particularly divided over President U.S. Grant's veto of the 1874 Inflation Bill, the Republican Party decisively lost the 1874 congressional elections. As a Democratic majority in the House spelled the doom of Reconstruction, the ongoing divisions of both parties on economic issues triggered a political realignment. The dramatic 1876 elections epitomized a new political landscape that would last for twenty years: high instability in power at the national level and what has been described as the “politics of inertia.” Therefore, by closely following the ramifications of the 1873 panic, this article proposes an explanation of how an economic crisis transformed into a pivotal political event.
With its victory in the Civil War, the Union affirmed the primacy of the national sovereignty of the United States. After the conflict, the country was absorbed by the consequences of this momentous event. Yet, even in this context, the monetary policies of the government became contentious and led to the eventual redefinition of sovereignty. This article explores how the American institutional structure and political system allowed the money question to become a spatial issue, opposing the great sections of the country. In turn, this sectionalism triggered a confrontation between alternative understandings of what sovereignty entailed in terms of both political legitimacy and spatial scales. By the end of the century, the scope of sovereign power would be redefined, and currency abandoned as one of its instruments.
In the past thirty years, historians have deeply renewed our understanding of the state in the early republic period of the United States as much more powerful, deep reaching, and proactive than the traditional image represented. In France, too, new work has revised our vision of the state in the early nineteenth century, which looked different from the triumphant, Napoleonic leviathan that often appears in discourse. Yet both historiographies, having evolved separately, still base their conclusion on implicit comparisons, with an imagined “European” state or with a later “modern” state. This article uses the new historiographies on both countries to go beyond those unstated exceptionalisms to propose a reconstruction of the state in that period. Pulling those studies together, and mobilizing insights from one to shed light on the other, it recovers a common repertoire of statecraft that emerged in the revolutionary era. It hinged on fostering consent of key segments of the population and therefore organized the work of the state in mostly nonbureaucratic forms. States in that period reflected a particular enmeshing of public and private forms that needs to be analyzed for itself, especially if we want to understand the specificity of today’s practices.
RésuméCet essai propose une lecture duCapital au XXIesiècle, avec une perspective ancrée dans les États-Unis au XIXesiècle. Il explore certaines des pistes que le livre de Thomas Piketty et sa réception américaine suggèrent pour repenser l’histoire de la jeune république, et en tire en retour des éléments pour prolonger et infléchir ses conclusions, notamment sur le rôle du politique dans les processus au coeur de l’analyse de l’accroissement des inégalités dans le capitalisme moderne.
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