The South of slavery and Jim Crow is often cast as the major historical reason for the US’s stunted welfare state. But the most fanatical resistance to taxation and redistribution came from the Northern ruling class.

To understand our current politics of austerity, we are better served to explore not the defeated ideology of slaveholders but the triumphant politics of liberal elites in the Northeast.

Indeed, the ink had barely dried on the Confederacy’s surrender when affluent New Yorkers and New Englanders — manufacturers, merchants, and financiers — began to campaign against the political power of the poor in the industrial North. In the aftermath of the war, urban workers became ever more adept at using the machinery of government to raise taxes, increase municipal budgets, and alleviate poverty — developments that, in reaction, triggered one of the foremost anti-taxation, counter-majoritarian, “small government” movements in American history. As historian Alex Keyssar has documented, the campaign was endorsed by the country’s leading intellectuals and public figures, often Ivy League–educated, who openly voiced deep hostility to tax hikes stemming from universal suffrage. Many of these men had fought against slavery, but they nevertheless decried the extension of the franchise to non-propertied citizens and their ability to redistribute private wealth via taxes.

The hostility of these urban elites to “universal manhood franchise,” though not free of racism and ethnic prejudice, had little to do with the legacy of slavery or with white supremacy per se. It was instead grounded in their analysis of the new massive inequalities generated by industrial capitalism. In a choice between political democracy and an economic system that produced unprecedented disparities, these men stood firmly with the latter. Writing in exclusive organs such as the North American Review and Atlantic Monthly, they lamented the “severance of political power from intelligence and property” and the rise of a “political system in which power was . . . lodged in the hands of the proletariat.” Driven by their overblown fears of a “communistic attack on property” via taxation and labor rights, they called for the universal right to vote be reversed.

The most prominent effort to eliminate voting rights of the propertyless took place in New York state in 1875, when the bipartisan “Tilden Commission” proposed a constitutional amendment to curb “the excesses of democracy.” Faced with an increase in spending, taxes, and municipal debt, as Sven Beckert has shown, the commission proposed to move control of city governments to boards of finance that would be elected exclusively by property holders. The commissioners asserted that “the choice of the local guardians and trustees of the financial concerns of cities should be lodged with taxpayers.” Business organizations such as the Chamber of Commerce and the New York Stock Exchange rushed to advocate for this proposal and were soon joined by organs such as the New York Times, Harper’s Weekly, and the Nation. Despite the support of these powerful institutions, working-class New Yorkers and the labor movement were able to defeat the measure, which would have disenfranchised large portions of the electorate. Elites then turned to other, more mundane methods to “purify the ballot box” — registration laws, literacy tests, prolonged residency requirements. In ways that anticipated the encasing of the market in our own neoliberal age, they insidiously worked to insulate government policy from democratic control. In this context, it was Northern publicists who often lectured to their white brethren in the Reconstruction South (who, of course, needed little advice) that “wise, capable, provident, and frugal rule” could never be compatible with universal suffrage.

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