Please spare me your expertise, if you don't even bother to read what I have posted. I own the book. (Do you?) I identified it and quoted from it in direct response to someone's reply/question put to me on this threas but you were too full of yourself to notice.
You're wrong about your interpretation of the Ticknor quote. You might read Richard Belsel's Yankee Leviathan (Subtitle: "The Origins of Central State Authority in America 1859-1877").
ML/NJ
I did indeed miss that, sorry. But "identifying" the book would have meant giving the title.
People on line shoot first and ask questions later. Even on this "threas."
And anybody trying to make a point is bound to be accused of being too full of themselves. Even you.
If you weren't you would have spared us the reference to your Ivy league class.
I own the book. (Do you?) ... You're wrong about your interpretation of the Ticknor quote. You might read Richard Belsel's Yankee Leviathan (Subtitle: "The Origins of Central State Authority in America 1859-1877").
I have both books and can spell Bensel's name. I'm not sure how that's relevant, though. Even Bensel admits that the Confederacy had more centralized bureaucracy than the Union and that the Civil War didn't leave behind a large lasting bureaucracy.
Democracy and industrialization had come to mid-19th century America and it was only natural that a Boston Brahmin like Ticknor would have trouble recognizing the country he was born in almost 80 years before. Ticknor had corresponded with and met Thomas Jefferson. It was only natural that he would feel out of place in a less aristocratic and agrarian country.