Translations:Abraham Lincoln/20/en

The Civil War had destroyed the power of the Southern landholding aristocracy and established the Northern industrial powers. “A new plutocracy emerged from the War and Reconstruction, masters of money who were no less self-conscious and no less powerful than the planter aristocracy of the Old South,” wrote historians Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager. “The war, which had gone far to flatten out class distinctions in the South, tended to accentuate class differences in the North.” This set the stage for the emergence of the Northern banking establishment as a national ruling class.