>On the Civil War, it was all quite in the open - though once the
>South fired on the North, the NYC bourgeoisie turned into
>superpatriots and vowed to crush the slavocracy.
>
One point about the Civil War. I think you should look at Beckert's NYC bourgeoisie as *becoming* the American ruling class as a *result* of the Civil War. I don't think you can say unequivocally that they were already the RC in 1860. The whole reason we had a Civil War was that the ruling class and the underlying political economy splintered in the 1850's, in large part because of a social movement/political insurgency called the Republican Party. The Party's base was Northern commercial farmers and manufacturers. Their enemy was the Southern ruling class and its northern fifth column based in the NYC financial world.
Once this social movement took control of the state in 1861, you certainly can't say the NYC bourg. was the Northern ruling class anymore. Hoever, during the war it was *incorporated* into the Republican coalition through Chase's reform of the financial system (this is written up in Richard Bensel's Yankee Leviathan). From that point on, the NYC bourg. began to assume leadership of the Northern ruling class. By 1880, the NYC bourg. *was* the ruling class.
Seth