The Slaveholding Crisis: Fear of Insurrection and the Coming of the Civil War, by Carl Lawrence Paulus

Abstract

Contrary to the claims of the 45th President of the United States, plenty of people have asked why the American Civil War took place. Generations of historians have debated, at length, the causes of the Civil War and why sectional tensions culminated in a bloody internecine conflict. Most modern scholars would agree that ‘slavery’ is the short answer to the above question, but it is also a beguilingly simple one; slavery, as an institution, had diverse political, social, economic and cultural influences on nineteenth-century America and so what, in particular, made it such a divisive element? Carl Lawrence Paulus’s book locates the persistent fear of black insurrection in the slaveholding South as central to this sectional division because it helped foster a regionally distinct vision of American exceptionalism. The South’s vision of America was ‘one that placed the perpetuation of slavery at the forefront of the nation’s purpose. As the planter elite lost power in the 1840s, they came to think that the Constitution and the Union they participated in no longer formed an exceptional government’ (p. 6). When they perceived, by the end of 1860, that they could no longer dominate the federal government nor rely on the Constitution or the free states to protect them sufficiently in the event of insurrection, the southern political class looked toward secession and potential civil war as a safer bet than remaining within the Union.