End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration

by Peter Turchin

Lincoln was another unlikely president whose rise to power was propelled by the twin social forces of elite overproduction and popular immiseration. Before the Civil War, the United States was ruled by an elite of aristocratic Southern slaveholders allied with Northeastern patricians—merchants, bankers, and lawyers.[18] The economic basis of this alliance was the agricultural commodities grown on Southern plantations with slave labor, first and foremost cotton. Trade in cotton was the most important business of New York’s merchant elites, who exported Southern-grown commodities and imported European-manufactured goods. Another segment of the elites (especially in Massachusetts) used Southern cotton to produce textiles. This coalition, and especially its Southern slaveholding component, dominated the politics of antebellum America. The votes of Southern white men had a greater weight due to the infamous three-fifths compromise of 1787, which counted three-fifths of the slave population in apportioning representatives and presidential electors (without, of course, letting slaves vote). The Southern elites also controlled half of the Senate, although the free population of the North was almost twice that of the South. Two-thirds of the wealthiest people in the US lived in the South—4,500 out of 7,000 Americans with wealth greater than $100K (more than $2 million in today’s dollars[19]