Bloody Flag of Anarchy: Unionism in South Carolina during the Nullification Crisis by Brian C. Neumann

Abstract

When South Carolina seceded from the United States in 1860, Benjamin F. Perry wrote mournfully to James L. Petigru that he “had been trying for the last thirty years to save the State from the horrors of disunion. They are now all going to the devil” (141). For three decades—from the nullification crisis of the 1830s to Lincoln’s election as president in 1860—hotheads in South Carolina had bent their energies toward pushing the state out of the Union. It can be easy to read history backward and see South Carolina’s secession as inevitable, but doing so understates the strength of Unionism in the Palmetto State. Bloody Flag of Anarchy examines the nullification crisis with particular attention to what this important moment reveals about Unionism in the Cotton South, nationalism and internationalism, and manhood and masculinity.“The American public has largely forgotten the nullification crisis,” Neumann writes (3). He is certainly correct that many people see the nullification crisis as either insufferably boring—“South Carolinians worked themselves up into a fury over tariff rates?” puzzled students sometimes ask—or one among many amusing, but ultimately inconsequential, footnotes in nineteenth-century U.S. political history. In truth, the nullification crisis holds important lessons. While scholars tend to point to national politicians who forged a compromise, like Henry Clay, “the country also survived because of the depth and resilience of southern proslavery Unionism” (40). By Neumann’s careful calculations, about 40 percent of voters opposed nullification. Furthermore, 9,000 men pledged to fight the Nullifiers and preserve the Union. This should not be an easily dismissible story, and, by emphasizing the partisan crisis within South Carolina, Neumann provides “insights into the hopes, anxieties, and convictions of Jacksonian-era southern Unionists” (4).Bloody Flag of Anarchy contributes to five different conversations about the antebellum United States. First, it helps reframe understandings of the coming of the U.S. Civil War by highlighting Unionism as one reason why the Union held together for so long. Second, it illuminates the power and resonance of Unionism in the antebellum United States. Third, it examines how ideas about race and slavery impelled both Unionists and Nullifiers. Nullifiers usually drew support from areas with higher concentrations of slaves and argued that a strong federal government posed a threat to slavery. Unionists did not cede proslavery argumentation to their opponents and claimed that slavery could only be truly safeguarded within the Union. Fourth, the book discusses manhood and masculinity in antebellum South Carolina. Nullifiers jeered that Unionists were timid cowards, but Unionists considered themselves the only true men in South Carolina. Fifth and finally, Neumann demonstrates the ways in which many people in South Carolina, Nullifiers as well as Unionists, viewed contemporary events in a global perspective. Nullifiers “connected their struggle to the July Revolution and encouraged voters to display the same courage and conviction” (40). Unionists viewed the United States as the “world’s last hope” and “prayed its example would inspire humanity to strive for freedom” (43).Although Unionists represented a respectable minority in antebellum South Carolina, their Unionism was hardly unconditional. Many Unionists remained loyal to South Carolina and some pledged to fight for the state if war erupted. This foreshadowed the conditional Unionism that eventually led opponents of secession to side with their states against the Union. Furthermore, when abolitionists began flooding the southern states with anti-slavery written material, Unionism grew weaker. Even though the federal government permitted the mailings to be censored and the material burned, the abolitionist campaign “eroded the foundations of Unionism” (116). To be sure, Unionism never died, but it did become “more fragile, more contested, and more conditional” (135). By 1861, when President Lincoln sent Stephen A. Hurlbut to Charleston to gauge the strength of Unionism, Hurlbut found only one Unionist, Petigru.Bloody Flag of Anarchy offers an extended analysis of a moment that many people rush through as they dash forward to the coming of the U.S. Civil War. Neumann’s deep research into newspapers, manuscript collections, and census records illuminates the world of the Unionists in South Carolina and illustrates both the strength and weakness of Unionism.