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

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Slaveholding Crisis: Fear of Insurrection and the Coming of the Civil War by Carl Lawrence Paulus Daniel W. Crofts (bio) The Slaveholding Crisis: Fear of Insurrection and the Coming of the Civil War. By Carl Lawrence Paulus. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017. Pp. 311. Cloth, $49.95.) Carl Paulus contends that white southerners from the 1790s to the 1860s were haunted by the possibility of slave insurrection. He starts by showing how deeply the Haitian Revolution stirred repercussions on the North American mainland. "Santo Domingo" signified a dreaded nightmare of black rebels, slaughtered whites, and a world turned upside down. Paulus then moves ahead to revisit dozens of familiar handholds—Gabriel, the War of 1812, Denmark Vesey, David Walker, Nat Turner, Thomas R. Dew, emancipation in the British West Indies, immediate abolitionism, the postal campaign, the gag rule, James Henry Hammond's and John C. Calhoun's proslavery overtures, controversies about western territory, and the intensifying political snarl in the 1850s. Paulus harps constantly on a "planter elite" that exerted apparently unlimited power. Edmund Ruffin has a special appeal for Paulus. From 1856 through the war years, the colorful Virginia fire-eater with the silvery shoulder-length mane kept a meticulous diary. Thanks to the tireless editing of William Kauffman Scarborough, three stout volumes (and over two thousand pages) reveal how Ruffin reacted to the twists and turns of that eventful era.1 One must remember, however, that Ruffin never wielded the political influence he thought he deserved. He considered himself a prophet without honor, doomed to know hard truths that timorous, trimming politicians tried to evade. Ruffin insisted that the Republican Party was hopelessly corrupted by abolitionism, and Paulus appears to agree. But plenty of stubborn evidence points the other way. Who was the party's paramount architect in 1856 when it first burst to prominence? According to the late William E. Gienapp, who knew far more about such matters than anyone else, that person was the elder Francis Preston Blair, a Maryland slaveholder.2 Once a right-hand man to Andrew Jackson, Blair hated abolitionists and disdained black people. Four years later, Republicans scrambled to win the big states in the Lower North that eluded them in 1856. Michael F. Holt's new book on the 1860 presidential campaign shows how Abraham Lincoln's [End Page 663] promoters, especially in Pennsylvania, downplayed slavery-related issues and focused instead on the corruption and malfeasance of the outgoing Buchanan administration. Hence the moniker "Honest Abe."3 Paulus also appears to assume that sensible white southerners were bound to embrace a radical agenda. But William W. Freehling explains why militants such as Ruffin were for decades a frustrated minority.4 They could not persuade fellow white southerners to seek a separate destiny. The Old South's political leaders remained Whigs or Democrats who tried to secure southern interests within the Union. They spurned Calhoun's repeated efforts to create a southern party. And until late 1860, they called the shots. Then everything changed. Just as Ruffin had long advocated, the South finally did make a desperate bid for independence. In late 1860, a critical nucleus of white southerners suddenly decided their slave system stood in such grave peril as to require drastic countermeasures. For example, three days after Lincoln's election, one hysterical Mississippian denounced the "declaration by the northern people" that they intended to "emancipate the Slaves of the South." He was convinced that "poison, knives and pistols" had been distributed to slaves by abolitionist agents. Public sentiment, he reported, was "almost unanimously in favor of an immediate withdrawal from the Union" and establishing "a government of our own."5 Secessionists ultimately drew in many others who dreaded secession but would not fight against fellow southerners. They thereby triggered a war that, most ironically, transformed the North into the abolition force it scarcely had been before. Paulus juxtaposes competing northern and southern versions of American exceptionalism. By his lights, the North defined a national uniqueness based on legal equality, democratic governance, and widened economic opportunity, whereas the white South considered "progress, democracy, and civilization" impossible without slavery and racial hierarchy (4). He appears to accept...