Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877 (usually shortened to Yankee Leviathan) is a book written by Richard Bensel published by Cambridge University Press in 1991. In the book, Bensel undertakes an analysis of the causes of the American Civil War and the failed policies of Reconstruction to construct an argument about the rise of the American national state. The book is a contribution to scholarship on American Political Development and political and economic modernization.
Synopsis
Causes of the American Civil War
Bensel argues that the attractiveness of secession for Southerners rested on a threefold calculation. First, the Republican Party won both the presidency in the election of Abraham Lincoln and a plurality in the House of Representatives at the 36th Congress. The Republicans represented a credible threat to the continued dominance of slavery in the national political economy, particularly when it came to the question of slavery in the western territories and the Lecompton Constitution. Second, secession would be a relatively easy process, with little disruption of state activity and no serious threat of social unrest from Southern whites. Third, secession would be increasingly difficult as the southern economy was increasingly bound up with and subordinated to the industrial northern economy. For this reason, it was seen as better to secede earlier rather than later.
Given the attractiveness of secession for the South, Bensel argues that civil war became unavoidable for three reasons. First, there was an absence of constraints on the further radicalization of the Republican Party on the question of slavery. 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. Second, the compromise measures proposed by the South were largely self-defeating. 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. Third, the threat of further fragmentation of the northern part of the country motivated federal intervention to prevent secession. Only New England was firmly Unionist in response to the secession of the south; the Midwest and other parts of the Northeast had more ambivalent responses to secession.
Bensel argues that all of this precipitated a secession crisis in which the federal government completely lost control over its southern installations. The context of a lack of a substantial federal statist bureaucracy capable of handling the crisis meant that the only way to regain federal control was military intervention.
Comparison of Union and Confederate states
Secession and the subsequent war mobilization rendered the central state apparatuses of both the Union and the Confederacy substantially stronger than at any point in the antebellum United States.
In a comparison of the two states regarding their relative sizes, and their relationships to their respective economic and social bases, Bensel argues that the Confederacy was, in many respects, much more statist and modern than the Union.
Theoretical framework
Bensel undertakes the analysis of the two states in a framework which distinguishes between the structural design of the state and the substantive content of its policies. Structural design refers to the skeletal form of organization of the state apparatuses themselves, while substantive content refers to the actions of the state. In total, Bensel investigates forty-two different policy areas under this framework.
Structural design
There are two dimensions of structural design: centralization of authority and administrative capacity. Centralization of authority refers to measures which concentrate decision-making power in any of the central state institutions, while administrative capacity concerns the distribution of decision-making power between the central state institutions themselves.
The state has a higher degree of centralized authority to the extent that it is able to shift discretion to itself from subordinate governments such as states, counties, and municipalities; and also to the extent that it encroaches on the private sphere and civil society.