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Patrick Newman shows how liberty-minded reformers, once holding the levers of power, were pulled toward favoritism of their own—beginning with Jefferson, who could not refuse five hundred million acres. He traces the 1850s scramble over land grants, bailouts, and transcontinental subsidies, the slavery-extension fight that stalled the parceling of the spoils, and the Panic of 1857, which turned the Republicans into a supercharged Federalist-Whig coalition reviving Henry Clay’s American System.
