“Forty years after the birth of American liberty, a race of kings arose from American soil,” writes Nabors in this challenging book about the antebellum South and the Slave Power (xvi). Seeing the war as a contest of civilizations, informed by political science’s Aristotelian regime analysis, he makes the destruction of a home-grown oligarchy “the great task of reconstruction”—a task left incomplete, since postwar elites used race prejudice to make a subordinate class rebuild the foundations.
Nabors’ technique is simple to the point of being elementary. To show what Republicans thought of the South and what the slave power did, he consults, almost exclusively, published Republican sources, particularly the Congressional Globe. In its pages, amassing facts and fearful speculations, Republicans described a place dominated by the lords of the lash, who managed to oppress both whites and blacks, pitting them against each other in the South and kneading the...