No Peasant Mass Party, No Slaveocracy: The Anti-Bourgeois Coalition in Barrington Moore's Old South.

Barrington Moore (1966) once famously argued that the violent overthrow of the southern planter class was the key to inaugurating a liberal capitalist democracy in the United States. Moore's claim is dependent in turn on the notion that poor white farmers, who comprised the overwhelming majority of white southerners, deferred uncritically to the rule of the planter class. There are, however, three empirical problems with this claim, namely the democratic ethos of the planter class, the divergent political allegiances of farmers and planters, and the split within the planter class at the decisive moment of the 1860 presidential election. Using county- and precinct-level electoral returns from antebellum Alabama, this paper argues that the origins, character, and consequences of transitions to capitalism cannot be understood without an analysis of institutionalized party politics. That is, to the extent that transitions to liberal capitalism often involve a bourgeois revolutionary offensive against landed elites, the overall theoretical payoff of this paper will be to show that the illiberal class coalition that must defeated in such a revolution is sometimes forged in the crucible of party formation. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]