Olive Branch and Sword: The Compromise of 1833 , and: Love of Order: South Carolina's First Secession Crisis (review)

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS355 tor has presented an impressive and exhaustive case, but the magnitude of the charge leaves at least one juror unconvinced. James I. Robertson, Jr. Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Olive Branch and Sword: The Compromise of 1833. ByMerrillPeterson. (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1982. Pp. 132. Cloth, $15.00.) Love of Order: South Carolina's First Secession Crisis. By John Barnwell . (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982. Pp. x, 258. Cloth, $25.00.) Olive Branch and Sword is based on the Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures given at Louisiana State University in 1980. It actually offers little new material on the background ofnullification or on the formulation of the compromise. There is also a certain imbalance in the presentation. While admitting that Henry Clay's tariff measure succeeded "only because Jackson wielded the sword behind him," the volume devotes much more space to the olive branch part of the compromise than to Jackson's Force Bill. Clay thus emerges as a more"masterful strategist" (p.84) than some students might allow. More new material is to be found in the third lecture. Here are drawn together the varied perceptions contemporaries had of the compromise during the following decade. The greatest value of the work lies in the many wise judgments historians have come to expect of Merrill Peterson. Resisting the temptation to claim long-run influences for the compromise reaching to the Civil War, he reminds us that such events are too complex and multidimensional for any straight-line analysis. In the context of the early 1830s Clay's efforts reflected a desire to salvage something of his beleagured American System; the compromise did serve to resolve an immediate crisis; and it bore more directly on Jackson's Bank War than many studies suppose. Jackson's determination in 1833 to remove the deposits from the national bank was in part, at least, a political response to the Clay-Calhoun coalition formed in the nullification crisis. More generally Peterson finds the event worthy of further study because it illustrated the positive features of the arts of compromise. Other elements were involved, yet his focus on the "factor of personality" properly reasserts the truth that events are at last made by men. "The history of the compromise of 1833 is largely the history of Clay and Calhoun, Jackson and Webster . . . "(p.126). In these terms students will look forward to a larger work on the Great Triumvirate, of which the presentvolume is a part. While recent studies have been done on South Carolina during the nul- 356CIVIL WAR HISTORY lification era and on the eve of the Civil War, Love of Order is the first book-length work on the secession crisis of 1850-1851 in fifty years. And it admirably meets the need for a new study. Initial examination of the work might suggest an imbalance of coverage , for only 70 of its 190 pages of text deal directly with the two-year crisis. But a closer reading will remove most objections about the lengthy background, aimed at showing why SouthCarolina was, among the slaveholding states, sui generis. The demography of the state, marked from an early day by a black majority, created anxieties among whites in a degree far greater than elsewhere. The aristocratic political structure, which gave to the legislature control over all other parts of government, enabled the gentry planters to create and sustain a consensus that made the defense of slavery the paramount goal. The isolation of the state during nullification showed that other southern states did not share its degree of anxiety, and the image of unique radicalism was a central legacy in the following years. Thus Calhoun was unable to unite the South in a radical response to the Wilmot Proviso or stave off the forces of compromise in 1850. The distinctive contribution of Love of Order, in this context, is its richly documented account of the struggle within the state among three groups. The "secessionists" wanted the state to leave the Union at once. The "Unionists" argued, by contrast, that the protection of the national government gave the best security to slavery. The "cooperationists" believed the defense...