Alan Taylor: prediction

Transcript context

…Insofar as you view the Jacksonian period differently from your mentor, how does that difference shape your view of 1850 to 1873, which is what you cover in your new book? I agree with Meyers on most things. Meyers was of a generation where the focus was less on race than it has become, in thinking about American history. That’s not an important dimension of his one great book, Jacksonian Persuasion. The role of American expansion into the West at the expense of native peoples is just not on his agenda. Now, that’s not to criticize him. It’s to say he was focused on political culture, and that political culture he brilliantly illuminated. If we expand out the story, literally, to think about American expansion, then it looks like a somewhat different story. Not an entirely different story, because the political culture is very much as Marvin Meyers described. If we also bring in just how obsessed American leaders were at that time with racial difference, and at their sense of being beleaguered by the British Empire — in that there’s this very defensive expansionism that American leaders commit the country to — I would say that that expansionism, the bill that has to be paid for it comes due in the 1850s. That the United States had a magnificent military success over a weak country, Mexico, during the late 1840s. They have conquered 40% of Mexico, extremely valuable potential territory, including California, Arizona, New Mexico. Then the issue becomes, what kind of labor system will be allowed by law in this conquered territory? Will it be the labor system that prevails in the Northern states of free labor, or will it be the more mixed labor system of the South, where enslaved people are a critical element of the economy? These economic questions are linked to visions of what’s the good society. Northerners had become quite committed to the notion that they had a superior system. Southerners had become quite committed to the notion that their system was superior at favoring white men and at favoring republican government. The two systems have evolved in parallel. Now they’re going to come into conflict over what labor system will prevail in this newly conquered territory. Is a civil war inevitable by that point?…

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