Political Patronage and Capitalism in Southern U.S. Politics During the Nineteenth Century

Jeffrey Broxmeyer, University of Toledo

What is the historical relationship between political patronage, the State, and capitalism? This paper uses southern patronage politics as a starting point to theorize the historical role of “emoluments” as both a material and symbolic feature of the U.S. capitalist state. I compare two historical eras of patronage in the U.S. South during a critical juncture of the country’s capitalist transition: the Second Party System (1830s to 1850s) and the post-Civil War era (1870s to 1900s). The nineteenth century was the heyday of the “party state” under the spoils system in places like the customhouse, post office, and other key administrative positions. However, the southern political economy of Black enslavement was radically disrupted by the Civil War, emancipation, and Reconstruction. Public offices are a window to explore the shifting historical dynamics of capital accumulation; that is to say, the link between the circulation of capital, public office, and political mobilization. During the antebellum period, patronage rewards for political services rendered were less focused on internal party markets for lucrative offices, as careerists were in the north, than on converting political capital into greater ownership of slaves, the principal source of wealth and status in southern life. Antebellum patronage markets functioned primarily through the Democratic party as a model of the patrimonial household; for example, in the Colcock family’s control over the Charleston customhouse. After the 1870s, a cohort of Black officeholders emerged who were rooted in the Republican party’s post-bellum economy of national markets. Spoilsmen like William D. Crum, a medical doctor and Charleston’s port collector from 1903 to 1909, were part of a new Black middle class, which often placed emphasis on formal political rights rather than simply officeholding accumulation.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 21. Critical Perspectives on US History