Michael Hoover wrote
>successive presidents from the same state (i.e., Jefferson, Madison,
and
>then, Monroe)...
>
>in effect, the report aired Federalist grievances against the so-called
>'Virginia Dynasty'...other areas of the country saw the Federalists
pressing
>sectional claims amd the party never recovered from this perception...
I follow the school of thought that the slaveocracy was the ruling class from this time until the Civil War ;and that the slaveowners' competitors were, of course, the Northern manufacturing/merchantile bourgeoisie. The Southern control of the Presidency and dominance of the federal government is the main evidence of this.
>in 1816, the national economy turned down and in 1819, there was a
>major crash...in 1820 southern slave states appeared ready to fight
>northern states over the question of expanding their chattel system
>westward even as Monroe was running unopposed for reelection to the
>presidency...so underneath the 'Era of Good Feelings' were simmering
issues
>that would dominate the political nation's agenda for the next 40
years...
By the above theory, the Civil War was a revolution because it changed the fundamental property relations or relations of production, by abolishing one of the main forms of it, slavery. The war was started as a counterrevolutionary attack by the ruling class of the previous 40 or so years that was doomed by the Republican's and Lincoln's election on a platform of no expansion , though no abolition of slavery. Slavery's economic dynamic required more and more territory, so containment was equivalent to abolition.
Charles Brown
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