William W. Freehling

I consider this a well written book that deals with an issue of American politics in a new way. The author looks in unusual places for significant factors in the growth of succession. He certainly provided me with some new ideas to think about. Freehling places great emphasis on the border south, the middle south and the deep south as separate regions that reacted differently to slavery. He begins with an interesting discussion of the death of slavery in the North. According to him there show more were slaves in New York and New Jersey until the 1830's.
Freehling focuses on the low country South Carolinians as the part of the south that never joined the Union and pushed secession. He has many interesting portrayals of the people involved who present a wide ranging cast of characters. The men behind secession included everyone from intellectuals to low country sugar growers who all saw the Southern way of life as alien to Northern culture.
As he describes the lessening of the ties between the sections you can hear the bands that hold the nation fly apart. Very specific factors, such as the death of the Whig party are chronicled as secession comes closer. One item, the Kansas-Nebraska Act is not given the prominence of other authors. Mr. Freehling draws his own picture of the national disintegration.
I recommend the book highly. It is written very intelligently and once you forget that this isn't the story you usually hear several good points are made. Some knowledge of the era is useful. My favorite on the breaking up has always been The Coming Fury by Bruce Catton. show less

Probably the best study of the Nullification Crisis of 1832.

In November 1832, South Carolina was already making hints it would withdraw from the Union. The ostensible issue was tariffs (always money, always money,) but Freehling shows the importance of the slave issue in the crisis. Andrew Jackson threatened publicly to send in the troops and privately to hang John C Calhoun, the Everett Dirksen of ante-bellum. Nullification was the belief, prevalent in the south, that states could deny the show more constitutionality of federal laws and refuse to abide by them. In what has to be one of the most ironic pronouncements in American history, the S.C Congressman George McDuffie said, "We should infinitely prefer that the territory of the state should be the cemetery of freeman than the habitation of slaves." The governor marshaled an informal army and purchased weapons in the north so as to be ready to defend Charleston should Old Hickory invade the state and try to force collection of the tariffs due the federal government.

South Carolina low-country aristocracy, forced by malarial swamps where they raised sea-island cotton and rice, to abandon their plantation between May and the first frost in November, created a gentile society that valued social pretensions and was quick to see insult. They despised all forms of manual labor and reopened the slave trade in the early 1800's to insure an adequate labor supply. This raised its own set of problems for during the months when they were gone the ratio of black to white, already as high as 5-1 ballooned even higher. There was always a sense of paranoia amidst the gentry. But they had lots of time on their hands and became experts at politics and brooding.

Despite the difference between the lowlanders and the highlanders, one element that gave them common cause was slave ownership. It provided a political cohesion and unity that caused all other political movements to pale in comparison. Opposition to tariffs had not been exclusively South Carolinian. At one time or another all economic interests that deemed themselves to be at a disadvantage from federal tariffs had fought (if not literally) against federal interference.

"A society reveals its deepest anxieties when it responds hysterically to a harmless attack." The nascent abolitionist movement struck fear in the hearts of the southern gentry. But the fear had economic roots. After all, abolition would have wiped out $80 million in property. Naturally, the debate became infused with the threat of other dire consequences: rape, murder, mayhem, etc. The Declaration of Independence and the words of James Madison and Thomas Jefferson represented a real threat to slave owners who insisted that Fourth of July celebrations be for "white" only. "The sight of a slave listening to a fourth of July oration chilled the bravest southerner." The mere idea that if man's natural rights were violated, insurrection was a legitimate tool to fix the injustice was frightening. The Vesey slave insurrection of 1822 was a recent reminder of what they might face. Vesey, a brilliant and charismatic black who had purchased his freedom, used the words of the Bible and the Declaration of Independence to form an abortive insurrection.

This linkage of education and religion caused some difficult issues for the low-country gentry. Because the area was so malarial, they often left supervision of their slaves to overseers who remained unsupervised themselves. This meant cruelty was not unusual despite contracts that prohibited it. Until the Vesey rebellion, slave owners, not willing to risk possible salvation for their slaves, since the prevailing view was that eternal salvation depended on earthly conversion so it had not been uncommon for owners to permit their slaves relatively unencumbered religious education which often included instruction in reading. Until Vesey that is, when many began to worry more about their necks than their slave's redemption.

So what does all this have to do with nullification? The slaveholders had become quite defensive about their "peculiar" institution and began to argue in pro-slavery tracts that it was a national good because cotton and rice were national goods and that to place a tariff on those products was detrimental to the nation. Anything that smacked of discussion or defense of slavery was to be nipped in the bud.

John C Calhoun, in his bid to become president, had accepted the position of Secretary of War under Monroe. The War of 1812, despite the reasonably favorable Treaty of Ghent, had provided ample evidence of the need for a more national cohesion, robust infrastructure, and national currency through a national bank. Calhoun supported all of these and supported a national tariff to help pay for them. His provincial South Carolinians, relying on the export of staples and distrusting manufacturing as an economic base, required free trade so they had little preference for the tariff.

By the mid-1820's the Vesey rebellion, northern agitation for abolition and the tariff, commerce with free black sailors in S.C. ports (they were permitted to act as free while in port and this was considered a bad influence on S. C. slaves), as well as Pinckney's agitation against the Missouri Compromise, laid the groundwork for anti-federal feeling that resulted in sectionalist fervor. All of these forces combined to create a climate of fear and doom which caused an excessive reaction to federal power, even though the problems had been self-inflicted. (Dare one see a parallel to today given our excessive fear of terrorism?)

The theory behind nullification was that the states had existed before the revolution and that states should have the right to act independently and that federal law was not supreme. In the meantime, Calhoun was losing power and the Jacksonians were gaining. In fact, Jackson's response to the crisis might have prevented an early secession and his adherence to unionist principles laid the groundwork for Lincoln's response just a few decades later. One could argue that the failure of nullification made secession almost inevitable given the South's strong defense of slavery and reliance on agricultural economics susceptible to huge swings in value. On the other hand, had nullification succeeded, the union would most likely have failed to function.

The question of states v federal power, I believe, has yet to be fully resolved, the pendulum swinging back and forth throughout our history. (When the governor of Texas recently threatened secession only half in jest, I fear my response was, Yes!) And now that Senate filibuster rules have virtually created a parliamentary system, well, who knows what will evolve next. show less

This is a fantastic concept in an otherwise dull field, but unfortunately the author veers right into the tropes of civil war writing. Much of this book is mulling over the thoughts and feelings of Lincoln and the generals. The third of the book dedicated to "black anti-confederates" is especially disappointing. Freehling seeks a middle-ground between the Lincoln the Emancipator narrative and the Slaves Freed Themselves story. He calls this Cooperation, but still tells a strong-man history show more of Lincoln while reducing blacks and slaves to the role of doing what Lincoln hoped they'd do—reducing their agency. In fact, we don't get the names or narratives of any specific black southerns and the author constantly attempts to make "black people did X" points, reducing them to a monolith of predictable behavior. Instead we get accounts of what white people thought about black people. True, he details various battles with black regiments, and how they often made better soldiers than whites in spite of meager training, support, or respect for their lives. But he also qualifies that the only useful resistance slaves did was non-violently run away. Hell, he compares this Cooperation narrative—the necessarily union of blacks and whites to create change—to the civil rights movement. The analogy falls totally flat, unless you believe black people were predictably following the strategizing of Lyndon Johnson. show less

William Freehling’s “The road to disunion: Secessionists triumphant 1854-1861” is volume II of his examination southern secessionist politics. Today’s “common sense” leads us to believe that the south was unified behind one set of beliefs, Freehling’s well researched work shows just how fractured the south was on everything from slavery to economics and the proper form of government. I like to think I know something about American history, I did have a general knowledge of the show more events covered in the first volume but not the in depth knowledge Freehling provided. Except for the Kansas-Nebraska Act most of the information in this volume was new to me.

The Slave Power had more threats than the “Underground Railroad” and slave insurrections. In fact, after a brief panic, the lack of action by slaves after Brown’s raid reassured many that they had nothing to fear except an individual slave being misled by abolitionists to commit murder inside their “family”. The deep south’s concern about the Underground Railroad was that it discouraged slaveholders in the boarder states and could, would, eventually lead those states down the road to emancipation. As the deep south saw it, their biggest threats came not from the north but from other southerners. Southern preachers who preached that slaves had to be treated as fellow Christians, who had to be allowed to read the Word of God ,and could not have their families broken up simply to pay off the master’s debt. This was seen by slave-masters as a direct threat to their absolute authority. Prosperous northern farmers, looking for cheap land, purchased southern land not suited for use by large slave-holding plantations. This influx of Yankee opinions, opinions with enough wealth vote even in the restrictive south, highlighted another Slave Power fear. Non-slave-holding southern whites. The high price of slaves barred most southern whites from ever becoming a slaveholder. Northern style capitalism and other ideas threatened the loyalty of non-slave holding whites to the will of “their betters”.

Almost half of the book covers the year leading to war, from the Democratic Convention in Charleston to the bombardment of Fort Sumter on to Wheeling’s secession from Virginia. The depth of Freeling’s research is best shown here. I would say that the last half reads like a novel except that, while the detail is there, the poetry is not. In the seven years between publication of volume I and II Freehling’s writing style improved noticeably, he now makes his points instead of badgering them as in volume I. Freeling’s writing has improved but it is still the writing of an academic. The change in his writing style is impressive, it allowed me to read this book in half the time I spent with the first.

In spite of the fact that Freelhing recaps the events from the first book I have to recommend reading both volumes. The detail missing in the recaps is worth the extra effort. I recommend this book for anyone interested in learning about the causes of the US Civil War, often in the participants own, occasionally surprising, words. show less