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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.
Nicolas Barreyre
Nicolas Barreyre is Associate Professor in American History at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris and author of The Politics of Economic Crises: The Panic of 1873, the End of Reconstruction, and the Realignment of American Politics (2011).
Michael Heale is Emeritus Professor of American History at Lancaster University, a member of the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford, and author of Contemporary America: Power, Dependency and Globalization since 1980 (2011).
Stephen Tuck is University Lecturer in American History at the University of Oxford and author of We Ain't What We Ought to Be: The Black Freedom Struggle from Emancipation to Obama (2010).
Cécile Vidal is Associate Professor of History at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), director of the Center for North American Studies, and editor of Louisiana: Crossroads of the Atlantic World (2013).
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