In Quest of Freedom: American Political Thought and Practice

LIBERAL POLITICAL THOUGHT BETWEEN 1820 AND 1860 had two main drives: to win universal manhood suffrage, and thereby cast off the special constitutional safeguards for property written into the early state constitutions, and to abolish Negro slavery. The first of these goals was substantially achieved before the Civil War began; the second, by 1865, when Appomattox and the Thirteenth Amendment spelled the end of slavery in the South and in the nation. One might have then anticipated that before long the last vestige of privilege in the United States would be abolished. Yet, after substantial progress had been made in attacking its bulwarks during the Age of Jackson and in the years immediately following, an entirely new system of privilege began to emerge. Indeed, by 1870, the promise of plutocracy was brighter than the prospect of economic and social democracy, which had seemed so hopeful only a short while before. Yet even in the heyday of

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