Illiberalism in America
With the election coming, I cannot think of a better book to read than Steve Hahn’s stunning new book Illiberal America: A History which was released earlier this year. It might be my favorite book of his, which is saying a lot. The sheer sweep of coverage is admirable. The opening chapter lays bare a deep historiographic tradition he hopes to both chart and challenge, and I think it should be mandatory reading for all U.S. historians.
But, perhaps not surprisingly, the chapter I will think most with is “The Measures of Bondage” where Hahn places the question of slave emancipation in the U.S. alongside a broad spectrum of coerced labor in antebellum America. While some historians have very recently seen abolition as an unalloyed victory, and others have contended that slavery would simply end of its own internal logic, Hahn persuasively disagrees. “Had the [U.S. Civil] war ended quickly or with an armistice” Hahn contends, “enslavement would have endured a long death and the constitutional amendments we associate with the war and Reconstruction . . .would not have been enacted” (152). The most insightful contributions are on the inter-relationship between slavery, convict labor, Chinese indentured labor, and many other kinds of servitude. Whereas some scholars have homogenized all unfree labor, Hahn shows us a better way, one that forces us to reckon with “the specturm of coercions that engulfed the Euro-Atlantic world[.]” (172). He ultimately concludes that we need to approach the era as “a coherent package of thought and class sensibility.” Doing so shows that “the nineteenth century was given over not so much to the transition from slavery to freedom as to the shifting boundaries of coercive practices[.]” (173).
I confess I have long grappled with the literature on the “afterlives of slavery.” As a concept it opens up a broad new set of questions, and has been enormously generative. Yet as an interpretive framework, I find it to be overly broad at times, covering seemingly everything, and therefore explaining too little. Here, I think, is a way to refine that concept, taking on its most important insights without making it do everything.
Per usual, Hahn’s work has sent my mind back to some of my favorite political histories of late. The partial list below has me wondering if we should even call the United States a democracy before the twentieth century.
Leonard, Gerald, and Saul Cornell, The Partisan Republic: Democracy, Exclusion, and the Fall of the Founders’ Constitution, 1780s–1830s )Cambridge University Press, 2019).
Joanne B. Freeman, The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018)
Jonathan Israel, The Expanding Blaze: How The American Revolution Ignited the World (Princeton University Press, 2017)
Heather Cox Richardson, To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party (Basic Books, 2014)
