Yankee Leviathan

Second, secession would be a relatively easy process, with little disruption of state activity and no serious threat of social unrest from Southern whites.

Radical Republicans could justify federal intervention on the grounds that the extinction of slavery was inevitable anyway, and moderate Republicans could justify restraint on the same grounds, but the fundamental agreement over the point, along with persistent pressure from the abolitionist base of the party gave the radical position an advantage.

Bensel supports this point with an extended discussion of the contest for the Speaker of the House of the 36th Congress, in which John Sherman, the Republican candidate, was blocked for two months by Southern opposition and which concluded with the eventual election of William Pennington.

Bensel argues that all of this precipitated a secession crisis in which the federal government completely lost control over its southern installations.

Bensel roughly ranks these institutions' adherence to statist principles in descending order as follows: state bureaucracy, national courts, presidency, congress.

Confiscation of private property and the establishment of price controls were also features of the Confederate war mobilization effort.

The secession of the South led to a Republican party-state in the North which encouraged a high degree of patronage and clientelism, and sacrificed rational-bureaucratic considerations to more purely political ones.

The Union did not approach a command of its economy comparable to the Confederacy; instead, they depended almost solely on voluntary, open-market contracts with private persons and corporations for meeting the requirements of the war effort.

The latter policies, along with the massive expansion of national debt, rendered financial capitalists a client group of the central state.