Tom DiLorenzo on how the American System differed from true capitalism

The American System... was the framework for a giant political patronage system.  Politicians who could control such a system could use it to maintain and enhance their own power and wealth almost indefinitely, as the Republican Party eventually did.  It was not an example of "capitalism," as James McPherson incorrectly stated in Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution, but quite the opposite: It was mercantilism, the very system that Adam Smith railed against in his epic defense of capitalism, The Wealth of Nations.

~ Tom DiLorenzo, The Real Lincoln, pp. 59-60