Reconstruction

Reconstruction is a political and economic pamphlet by Henry Charles Carey, written during or shortly after the period of Reconstruction following the American Civil War. Carey, the leading American economist of the mid nineteenth century and the major theoretical voice of the American School of protectionism, devoted considerable attention to the questions of economic policy facing the United States as it tried to reintegrate the defeated Southern states into the national economy.

The pamphlet sets out Carey’s view of how the South should be reconstructed economically. He had been an opponent of slavery on both moral and economic grounds, and he believed the abolition of the slave system created an opportunity to rebuild the Southern economy on a more diversified and more productive basis than the old plantation system had allowed. He argued that the South had been impoverished by its over reliance on a single export crop, that the slave system had prevented the development of the diverse manufacturing and small farming that would have made the region genuinely prosperous, and that Reconstruction policy needed to encourage the development of Southern industry, Southern internal markets, and Southern small property ownership.

The protective tariff was central to Carey’s recommendations. He argued that the same tariff policy that had built up Northern industry over the previous decades could be used to build a diversified Southern economy if applied consistently. He was sceptical of the Northern carpetbagger model of Reconstruction, in which Northern capital simply extended its existing operations into the South, and he favoured policies that would build genuine Southern productive capacity rather than turning the South into an economic dependency of the North.

The pamphlet reflects Carey’s broader political position. He was a Whig and then a Republican, sympathetic to active government in the economy, hostile to laissez faire orthodoxy, and committed to a vision of national economic development that would lift all sections and all classes together. Reconstruction gave him the opportunity to apply these views to one of the most challenging questions of the period.

The pamphlet is short and is mostly of interest now to readers of American political and economic thought in the post Civil War decades. It pairs naturally with Carey’s longer Principles of Political Economy and Principles of Social Science, where the underlying theory is developed at greater length.