The Slaveholding Crisis: Fear of Insurrection and the Coming of the Civil War
- ISBN-10
- 0807164372
- ISBN-13
- 9780807164372
- Category
- History
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2017-01-03
- Publisher
- LSU Press
- Author
- Carl Lawrence Paulus
Description
In December 1860, South Carolinians voted to abandon the Union, sparking the deadliest war in American history. Led by a proslavery movement that viewed Abraham Lincoln’s place at the helm of the federal government as a real and present danger to the security of the South, southerners—both slaveholders and nonslaveholders—willingly risked civil war by seceding from the United States. Radical proslavery activists contended that without defending slavery’s westward expansion American planters would, like their former counterparts in the West Indies, become greatly outnumbered by those they enslaved. The result would transform the South into a mere colony within the federal government and make white southerners reliant on antislavery outsiders for protection of their personal safety and wealth. Faith in American exceptionalism played an important role in the reasoning of the antebellum American public, shaping how those in both the free and slave states viewed the world. Questions about who might share the bounty of the exceptional nature of the country became the battleground over which Americans fought, first with words, then with guns. Carl Lawrence Paulus’s The Slaveholding Crisis examines how, due to the fear of insurrection by the enslaved, southerners created their own version of American exceptionalism—one that placed the perpetuation of slavery at its forefront. Feeling a loss of power in the years before the Civil War, the planter elite no longer saw the Union, as a whole, fulfilling that vision of exceptionalism. As a result, Paulus contends, slaveholders and nonslaveholding southerners believed that the white South could anticipate racial conflict and brutal warfare. This narrative postulated that limiting slavery’s expansion within the Union was a riskier proposition than fighting a war of secession. In the end, Paulus argues, by insisting that the new party in control of the federal government promoted this very insurrection, the planter elite gained enough popular support to create the Confederate States of America. In doing so, they established a thoroughly proslavery, modern state with the military capability to quell massive resistance by the enslaved, expand its territorial borders, and war against the forces of the Atlantic antislavery movement.
Get the book
Other editions
-
- 2017-01-03
- 326 pages
- Paperback
- LSU Press
Similar books
-
Mountain Masters: Slavery and the Sectional Crisis in Western North Carolina
By John C. InscoeJohn B. Boles , " Cycles of Racism in Southern History , " paper delivered at conference on “ Black and White Perspectives on the American South , ” Univ . of Georgia , Apr. 1994 . 2. Allen W. Batteau , The Invention of Appalachia ...
-
Wolf by the Ears: The Missouri Crisis, 1819–1821
By John R. Van AttaIn Wolf by the Ears, John R. Van Atta discusses how the sectional conflict that led to the Civil War surfaced in the divisive fight over Missouri statehood.
-
The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It
By Hinton Rowan HelperDeBow, of Charleston, South Carolina, editor of the Review that bore his name. The Review was an ardent defender of slavery and the only publication in the South of any considerable literary merit.
-
Families in Crisis in the Old South: Divorce, Slavery, and the Law
By Loren SchweningerFamilies in Crisis in the Old South: Divorce, Slavery, and the Law
-
The Impending Crisis: America Before the Civil War, 1848-1861
By David M. PotterNow available in a new edition, The Impending Crisis remains one of the most celebrated works of American historical writing.
-
The Republic in Crisis, 1848-1861
By John Ashworth"The Republic in Crisis, 1848-1861 meticulously analyzes the political climate in the years leading up to the Civil War and the causes of that conflict"--
-
The Impending Crisis of the South
By Hinton Rowan HelperThe parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose rein to the worst of passions; and, thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, ...
-
Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War
By Drew Gilpin FaustExploring privileged Confederate women's wartime experiences, this book chronicles the clash of the old and the new within a group that was at once the beneficiary and the victim of the social order of the Old South.
-
Mastering America: Southern Slaveholders and the Crisis of American Nationhood
By Robert E. BonnerLooking beyond previous studies of the links between these "proslavery nationalists" and secession, the book sheds new light on the relationship between the conservative Unionism of the 1850s and the key formulations of Confederate ...
-
West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire
By Kevin WaiteFrance, 203, 204–5 Franciscan missionaries, 32 Frazier, Donald S., 252n29 Frederick Douglass' Paper, ... Gary, 295n83 Garnett, Richard B., 184 Garnett, Robert S., 241 Garrison, William Lloyd, 230 genízaros, 216–17 Georgia, ...