Declarations of Dependence is provocative and enlightening, possibly an important first step to rethinking how politics and the relationship of Americans to their government are viewed. It is an intellectual tour de force, a vital contribution to the historiography of the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, the Progressive Era, and southern history. It is also annoying and infuriating. In making an argument, it does too little and tries to do too much, alternatively leaving the reader hanging and impossibly hungry for more. Although Gregory Downs makes no claim to a complete study (nor has he provided one), those who read this book probably will never look upon these subjects the same way again.

Downs's thesis is that the Reconstruction Era South exemplified what he calls “an American patronalism,” meaning “a belief that services are distributed by big men on behalf of favored clients”—in this case, downward to an increasingly dependent citizenry (5). “In the decades following the attack on Fort Sumter, people spoke of politics not just through classic American languages of independence and autonomy, but also through a vernacular vocabulary of dependence,” he asserts. Downs traces the course of this political system: it “emerged from the particular circumstances of the Civil War and Reconstruction, flourished through the 1880s and 1890s, and was seemingly, if not completely, buried by progressive rationalization and disenfranchisement at the turn of the century” (1). Downs presents the Civil War as expanding the federal government's role in American politics and society by pointing out that it “sparked a revolution not just in what the state did but in what people believed it could do”—a seemingly small but crucial distinction. Downs claims, “By seeing Reconstruction as literally the reconstruction of American authority, historians can explore the gaps and weaknesses within the post-bellum American state” (11–12).

Although Downs means the American state generally, he focuses on one southern state, North Carolina, using a variety of sources and topics from the Freedmen's Bureau in the Civil War's immediate aftermath to show how patronalism contributed to Zebulon Vance's rise to political pre-eminence in the 1870s and 1880s. He traces patronalism's influence in the silver movement of the 1890s as well. In each case, Downs finds an aura of supplication—people asking for help, appealing to senses of charity, Christianity, loyalty, friendship, and almost any other emotion that might yield results. During the Civil War, African Americans and women more commonly sought aid from government, with the former in particular elevating Abraham Lincoln to an exalted position. But especially after the war, increasing numbers of white males, as Downs notes, demonstrated their loss or lack of independence by requesting assistance from political leaders and other officials. These authority figures supplanted those upon whom the supplicants had depended previously: family, employers, and masters. Downs presents this thesis with a breathtakingly deep and broad command of primary and secondary sources.

The story that Downs tells is of great use to historians who study the last half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century—and, indeed, beyond. The Jeffersonian ideal of the independent yeoman may not even have been realistic in Jefferson's time, but the changes in the American (and world) economy and society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries made it an even more distant possibility in Downs's Long Reconstruction. Downs makes the crucial point that “a little examined but defining aspect of the era [was] the federal government's massive and nearly immediate demobilization” after the Civil War and its short-term and long-term impact (77). Patronalism enabled some politicians—he emphasizes Vance—to achieve a status among their supporters that may have contributed to the progressive quest for political reform and, with the mass media's growth, changed the relationship between politician and constituent still further. Downs's support for this assertion includes a discussion of politicians appearing in advertisements, not for their campaigns but for products. By putting the silver fight and the issue of populism in that context, Downs provides another means of viewing not only those movements, but even mass movements in general.

Downs runs aground in several spots. The first problem is with his title: referring to “popular politics in the South” when the subject is North Carolina suggests more for the book than it can deliver. The author never answers the question of whether North Carolina was the only patronal southern state. Further, because Downs notes the increasing scholarly attention to Reconstruction as a national era, rather than limited to the defeated southern states, his argument might have benefited from comparisons to the similarly patronal machine politics that blossomed during the late nineteenth century in the urban North (as in New York City's Tweed Ring, to cite the most famous example) and in the trans-Mississippi West, where mining and railroad magnates sought and often achieved dominance over state legislatures. His study ignores the question of how much patronalism existed even before the Civil War, given the state's role, nationally and locally, in protecting and promoting such interests as slavery (fugitive slave laws come to mind), but also other economic and social issues dating back to the formation of the American state. Basing as much of his argument as Downs does on the behavior and fate of former slaves poses risks: a culture of dependence meant different things to whites who lost their wealth in the Civil War than it did to African Americans emerging into a long-overdue freedom or women who never or rarely had enjoyed the independence that seemed to dissipate within so many levels of North Carolina society.

Although this book clearly has problems, Downs nonetheless has blazed a trail that will entice and challenge scholars to reconsider the contested meanings and legacy of the Long Reconstruction.