Economic forces, not race, united America’s ruling classes against Reconstruction.

Evidence

The racial consciousness that prevented the development of democratic structures in America had begun as a concomitant to the slave system but ultimately acquired the character of a material force. But all along, it was economic forces that led to the unification of the nation’s ruling classes: “It was not, then, race and culture calling out of the South in 1876; it was property and privilege, shrieking to its own kind, and privilege and property heard and recognized the voice of its own.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 2193