Gold and Freedom is an ambitious account of Southern Reconstruction after the Civil War interwoven with national currency and tariff policy. Nicolas Barreyre, Associate Professor at the Ã?cole des Hautes Ã?tudes en Sciences Sociales, views Reconstruction as a reordering of the American republic that exceeded in scope the constitutional-legal problem of restoring the former Confederate states to the Union.
According to Barreyre, the Southern project called for a redefinition of the American nation, citizenship, the relationship of the people to the body politic, and â??the economic model and the type of social relations on which it depended.â? In short, â??it is impossible to understand Reconstruction apart from the economic debates that engulfed the nation.â?
Under the rubric of territorially based state sovereignty, sectionalism was a formative feature of the American republic. The concept was ambiguous, however, insofar as sections provided ground for unification of parts into a whole or separation into independent confederacies. After decades of debate, sectional conflict over slavery between the North and the South resulted in Civil War. The fundamental purpose of Reconstruction was to induce in, or otherwise impose on, the seceded states national constitutional standards of republican government.
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