| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, editors. Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2005. Pp. viii, 369. $18.95.
This book contains eight substantive essays on American elites from the late eighteenth century to the present. Gary Kornbluth and John Murrin begin with a superb study of revolutionary America. They argue that the colonial elite successfully united against a British oligarchy with vast military and patronage powers only to divide over two competing visions. Alexander Hamilton's would have recapitulated the British model: a powerful center welded to the financiers and supportive of growth (via subsidized banking and high tariffs) and order (via coercion and censorship). Thomas Jefferson sought, by contrast, a decentralized regime of "agrarian republican virtue." The election of 1800 was a contest between these visions, which Jefferson won by enlisting the interests and passions of "middling" smallholders and planters. This election transformed America by popularizing politics, liberalizing political speech, and opening a space for mass agitation that would constrain future elites. It also privileged expansion, states rights, and slaveholding and therefore opened an unbridgeable elite division that led to the Mexican War, secession, and the shattering of the slave power, the "glorious yet horrific culmination of the Jeffersonians' remarkable Revolution of 1800" (p. 63).	1
Adam Rothman analyzes how antebellum slaveowners dominated the Southwest (through the slave trade), poor whites (patronage and race solidarity), and the nation (the three-fifths clause). The system's heart, argues Rothman, was the owners' control of their slaves, which produced a sense of absolute masterdom and, by this interpretation, a complex ideology (freedom for white men, obligation for everyone else) sharply at odds with the individualistic, reformist North. This precluded an alliance with bourgeois northern elites to thwart the dual specter of Yankee abolitionism and growth. Secession was the logical result of these irreconcilable world views.	. . .

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