ABSTRACT
Prosecution of the war, implementation of the major elements on the northern agenda, and the reentry of the South into the political system all combined to compromise control of the central state by the Republican party and allow the development of internal contradictions within the alliance to halt expansion. As an increasing divergence of interest within the alliance spawned factional conflict within the Republican party, support for reconstruction of the southern political economy withered away. With the return of former Confederate nationalists to Congress, the Democrats became a competitive alternative to the Republicans in national politics. All of these factors – Republican factionalism, the return of former Confederates, and Democratic competition – brought the Civil War party-state to an end. The Civil War and Reconstruction period thus encapsulated several stages in which a starkly defined and exclusive party coalition captured the nascent American state, infused the central government with vast powers to remake the national political economy, and, finally, was compelled by internal contradictions within its alliance to compromise its own control of the state apparatus. The process delineated by these three stages produced the context for the Compromise of 1877 – the resolution of the Hayes-Tilden presidential election in the Republican’s favor and the associated withdrawal of Union troops from the South. This, in turn, slowed the pace of postReconstruction state development. Once it became possible for the “rebel” South to participate in a winning presidential coalition, the state bureaucracy became a potential balance-wheel between rival political-economic coalitions. With that possibility of a balance-of-power position in national politics and the emergence of civil service protection from partisan influence, the state could at last begin to develop a “statist” sensibility, an identity and interest apart from any class or partisan interest.2
