The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina

Abstract

Manisha Sinha's argument, reduced to essentials, is this: South Carolina's planter politicians (her term) were archconservatives who defended slavery and distrusted democracy; they controlled the politics of the state and were at the fore in sectional controversies; the eventual secession of eleven southern states validated their leadership and the southern separatist ideology that they had formulated long before 1860–1861; therefore secession was an elite counterrevolution against the rising tide of abolitionism and egalitarianism in the Atlantic world, and any analysis to the contrary is wrong. A singlevolume account of the political thoughts and actions of the South Carolina gentry during the state's main sectional bouts is valuable and welcome, but Sinha unfortunately overstates her contributions. Her colleagues in southern history already know that Carolinians were ahead of other white southerners in embracing proslavery ideology and in elaborating theories of southern rights and that South Carolina played a provocative role in the sectional conflict. Familiar characters, incidents, and quotations appear throughout the book; it could hardly be otherwise, given the huge literature on South Carolina and antebellum politics. Sinha, though, does not display much regard for the efforts of her scholarly predecessors and is particularly dismissive of what she calls “the republican school of southern political historians.”