Sectional Conflict Research Articles

Calculating the Value of the Union: Slavery, Property Rights, and the Economic Origins of the Civil War (review)

Calculating Value of Union: Slavery, Property Rights, and Economic Origins of Civil War. By James L. Huston. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Pp. xvii, 394. Illustrations. Cloth, $45.00.)James L. Huston's new study of coming of Civil War is intended to demonstratethat rights in slaves generated sectional conflict, that concentration of valuable rights in one region thwarted any attempt at compromise and undermined genius of democratic process. Southern slaveholders searched for a sanctuary founded on absolute guarantee that all members of Union would view slaves as and agree that no law at any level of government anywhere within Union could directly or indirectly harm value or ownership of that property-the absolute sanctity of rights m Northern resistance to southern demands about rights in African Americans stemmed from a number of sources, but crucial one was economic.Northerners, he concludes, came to oppose because they saw growing system as a ruinous competitor to their system of free village labor (xiv).A casual reader of this thesis statement might wonder what, exactly, is original in it. The short answer is, not much. One finds here an account of 1840s and 1850s with much more in common with those of David Potter and Hermann von Hoist than with more recent ethriocultural school. At least since Abraham Lincoln, and arguably since James Madison, conflict within federal system has been traced to distinction between slave states and free. Huston is aware of this, as his reliance on Potter and rejection of Holt show. So what does he believe to be historiographical contribution of his jaunt through fractious events beginning with Wilmot Proviso and ending in southern secession?Instead of referring to slavery as nub of sectional crisis, Huston points to the right to own slave property. To my mind, this distinction does little to further understanding. What does one glean, for example, from learning that John Brown's raid prompted many southerners' concern for future of their rights in slaves under a Republican government instead of, as he might have thought, concern for future of under a Republican government? Very little, it seems to me.In one characteristic paragraph, Huston states that Kansas-Nebraska debate highlighted property rights in slaves. He then quotes an Alabama senator's reference, in course of arguing for legality of in territories, to constitutional protections of rights. …

A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861-1868

Historians often assert that Confederate nationalism had its origins in pre-Civil War sectional conflict with the North, reached its apex at the start of the war, and then dropped off quickly after the end of hostilities. Anne Sarah Rubin argues instead that white Southerners did not actually begin to formulate a national identity until it became evident that the Confederacy was destined to fight a lengthy war against the Union. She also demonstrates that an attachment to a symbolic or sentimental Confederacy existed independent of the political Confederacy and was therefore able to persist well after the collapse of the Confederate state. White Southerners redefined symbols and figures of the failed state as emotional touchstones and political rallying points in the struggle to retain local (and racial) control, even as former Confederates took the loyalty oath and applied for pardons in droves. Exploring the creation, maintenance, and transformation of Confederate identity during the tumultuous years of the Civil War and Reconstruction, Rubin sheds new light on the ways in which Confederates felt connected to their national creation and provides a provocative example of what happens when a nation disintegrates and leaves its people behind to forge a new identity.

From Rail-Splitter to Icon: Lincoln's Image in Illustrated Periodicals, 1860-1865

A copiously illustrated history of the development of Lincoln's public profile. From Rail-Splitter to Icon is enriched by editorial, news, poetic, and satirical content from contemporary periodicals artfully woven into a topical narrative. The Lincoln images, originally appearing in such publications as Budget of Fun, Comic Monthly, New York Illustrated News, Phunny Phellow, Southern Punch, and Yankee Notions, significantly expand our understanding of the evolution of public opinion toward Lincoln, the complex dynamics of Civil War, popular art and culture, the media, political caricature, and presidential politics. Because of the timely emergence and proliferation of the illustrated periodical, and the convergence of representational technology and sectional conflict, no previous president could have been pictured so fully. But Lincoln also appealed to illustrators because of his distinctive physical features. (One could scarcely conceive of a similar book on James Buchanan, his immediate predecessor.) Despite ever-improving techniques, Lincoln pictorial prominence competed favorably with any succeeding president in the nineteenth century.

The story of America: freedom and crisis from settlement to superpower

Exploration and conquest - Cortes and Moctezuma American profile - Francesco-Giuseppe Bressani, James Axtell. The plantation colonies - the founding of Jamestown American profile - Squanto, Elliott West. Puritan New England - the witches of Salem American profile - Anne Hutchinson, Ann Braude. The American Revolution - the Boston massacre American profile - Samuel Adams, Jack N. Rakove. The new republic - the constitutional convention. Jeffersonian America - the Lewis and Clark expedition American profile - John Marshall, Joseph J. Ellis. Jacksonian America - the people's inauguration. Slavery in the Antebellum South - Nat Turner's revolt American profile - William Lloyd Garrison, Ira Berlin. Social reform in Antebellum America - the Seneca Falls Convention American profile - Harriet Beecher Store, Joan Hedrick. The deepening sectional conflict - the compromise of 1850 American profile - Matthew C. Perry, John W. Dower. The road to civil war - John Brown's raid American profile - Harriet Tubman, Catherine Clinton. Civil war and reconstruction - Sherman's march to the sea American profile - Thaddeus Stevens, Eric Foner. The American West - the Battle of the Little Bighorn American profile - Quanah Parker, Elliot West. The gilded age - the Pullman Strike American profile - John Fiske, David Levering Lewis. The crisis of the 1890s - the 1896 election. Becoming a world power - the Filipino revolt American profile - Henry Cabot Lodge, Thomas Fleming. The progressive era - the triangle fire American profile - Theodore Roosevelt, Michael Barone. The new era - Lindbergh's flight American profile - Robert A. Millikan, Daniel J. Kevles. The new deal - the hundred days American profile - Jim Braddock & Joe Louis, Geoffrey C. Ward. World War II - the attack of Pearl Harbour American profile - Wendell L. Willkie, Robert Dallek. The Cold War at home - the Hiss-Chambers Case American profile - Lillian Hellman, Alice Kessler-Harris. Pax Americana - the Cuban Missile Crisis American profile - George F. Kennan, Robert Dallek. The sixties - the march on Washington American profile - Coya Knutson, Richard Reeves. The seventies - the Watergate Crisis American profile - Jimmy Carter, William E. Leuchtenburg. The end of the Cold War - the last days of the Soviet Union. A new millennium - September 11, 2001.

An Autopsy for Reconstruction

After less than a decade, the United States government ended its campaign to reconstruct the former Confederacy. Historians have offered several explanations for this change of course. Some have argued that new priorities and demands, mainly related to the emerging industrial order in the North, took precedence over the old and familiar issues of the sectional conflict. Others have claimed that political necessity compelled the Republican party to terminate its support of the increasingly unviable and unpopular Reconstruction governments it had created earlier in the South. Last, and perhaps most widely held, is the assertion that racial attitudes in the North were the ultimate cause of the weakening commitment to the former slaves as well as to the state governments whose survival depended on the votes of African Americans. But these propositions seem unconvincing to Heather Cox Richardson because they represent little more than "slices of the late-nineteenth-century Northern experience that were not easily reconciled into a larger picture"(p. x).

Democracy and Slavery in Frontier Illinois: The Bottomland Republic

During the late eighteenth century, southern immigrants introduced black bondage—un-der the pseudonym of indentured servitude— into Illinois Territory. They did this despite the Northwest Ordinance's exclusion of slavery from it and other territories in the region. In 1824, after Illinois had become a state, voters rejected, by a margin of 6,822 to 4,950, a call for a constitutional convention that in all likelihood would have allowed slavery to continue indefinitely. The relatively close vote suggests that Illinois could have become a slave state. Imagine the impact of such an outcome on the sectional conflict! James Simeone's Democracy and Slavery in Frontier Illinois is an admirable contribution to our evolving understanding of American political development. It is based on a thorough understanding of the interaction of class, culture, sectionalism, republicanism, and religion. Yet readers who on the basis of the book's title assume it centers on the issue of slavery in early Illinois will be disappointed. Instead the book analyzes an effort by poor white men to destroy elitist politics in that new state and establish for themselves an egalitarian democracy. According to Simeone, slavery in this context was a peripheral issue. It helped galvanize support for a state constitutional convention, but it was subsidiary to taking power away from the elite.

The Washington National Road Bill and the Struggle to Adopt a Federal System of Internal Improvement

Tocqueville: are roads made and repaired in America? Poinsett: It's a great constitutional question. . In March 1830, the House of Representatives considered a bill for the construction of a road 1,500 miles in length. When completed, this national highway would have extended from Buffalo to New Orleans through the nation's capital, and would have been one of the most ambitious transportation improvements contemplated by Congress in the nineteenth century. For nearly a month, this legislation (hereafter referred to as the Washington National Road bill) dominated the congressional agenda. Several scholars have given passing mention to this hotly contested road bill, though no one has tried to place it within the larger context of the struggle to adopt a federal system of internal improvement. Two weeks after its defeat, supporters of a federal program of roads and canals introduced compromise legislation-the Maysville Road bill. Most scholars agree that Andrew Jackson's veto of the bill was a critical blow to a federal transportation system, but this is only part of the story. The history of the Washington National Road bill provides a more complete picture of the struggle to achieve a federal system of internal improvement than previously demonstrated by showing that the Maysville legislation was only one of two possible paths.1 The story of the Washington National Road bill also provides a window into the political culture of the early national period. What were the limits of federal authority? What was the role of the central government within the states? How does the issue of federalism connect to the emerging sectional crisis and the developing party system of this period? The United States has witnessed three periods of federal expansion: the period following the Civil War, during the New Deal, and, perhaps less well known, the period between the War of 1812 and Andrew Jackson's presidency. Following the Treaty of Ghent in 1814, Congress pursued a number of economic policies that extended federal authority: the charter of the second bank of the United States, the passage of a higher protective tariff, as well as several attempts to secure a federal transportation program. By the late 1820s, the shifting sectional coalitions and party alliances had begun to harden over issues that could have extended the federal role within the states. Scholars recognize the centrality of the transportation issue in shaping American political culture during the first half of the nineteenth century. There is, however, disagreement about why a federal transportation system failed to materialize. At the turn of the century, Frederick Jackson Turner called attention to this issue when he blamed the failure of coherent federal action on sectional bickering. In the1960s, Carter Goodrich also dismissed constitutional arguments and stressed regional or sectional conflicts. More recently, however, scholars have emphasized that a number of factors influenced the outcome. Daniel Feller has argued that the shifting sectional coalitions over internal improvements, federal lands, and the tariff gave way, by the late 1820s, to an alliance between the Southeast and the Southwest in opposition to a protective tariff and a federal transportation policy that could pose a threat to slavery. John Larson makes the case that the shifting sectional coalitions eventually fell apart over the jealousies that erupted during the scramble for federal aid following the passage of the General Survey Act in 1824. The central concern of opponents, Larson contends, was that a federal system would lead to corruption over appropriations and destroy the harmony of the Union. Other scholars, however, have placed constitutional arguments and the fear of federal encroachment on states' rights at center stage. Richard John argues that the expansion of the state into domestic policy after the War of 1812 ignited an anticonsolidationist campaign that by the late 1820s had turned into a states' rights argument by southerners that warned that if the federal government could build roads and canals, it could emancipate the slaves. …

The Founders and the Interstate Slave Trade

During the antebellum decades of the nineteenth century, opponents of slavery often argued that the federal government possessed the constitutional power outlaw the interstate slave trade. Such prominent politicians as John Jay, Daniel Webster, John Quincy Adams, Salmon P. Chase, and Charles Sumner all asserted at one time or another that possessed the requisite authority. At its founding 1833, the American Anti-Slavery Society declared, Congress has a right, and is solemnly bound, suppress the domestic slave trade between the several States. By 1838 the abolitionists had presented the U. S. House of Representatives with petitions signed by more than 23,000 people calling for a federal ban on interstate slave trafficking. spurned the abolitionist appeals, declaring that it had no right do that indirectly which it cannot do directly and therefore any effort to prohibit the removal of slaves from State was in violation of the Constitution, destructive of the fundamental principle on which the Union of these states rests, and beyond the jurisdiction of Congress. Defenders of slavery remained worried, nevertheless, that if the North ever came dominate the federal government, it might move against the slave trade. Although the issue of slavery the territories was paramount during the climactic sectional conflict of the 1850s, the fundamental reason that slaveholders demanded more slave territory, and thus ultimately more slave states, was that they feared for the political security of slavery within the Union, and the threat the interstate slave trade was a major cause of that anxiety. During the 1860 election campaign and the secession crisis that followed, debate raged the South as the intentions of Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party. The refusal of the Republicans accept the Washington Peace Conference proposals, which included an amendment the Constitution prohibiting from ever interfering with the movement of slaves across state lines, was the last link the chain of events that culminated the outbreak of civil war. Given the role that the interstate slave trade issue played bringing on national catastrophe, the question that stirred so much controversy the antebellum period is still worth asking: Did the nation's founders intend give the power, under the Constitution, abolish the interstate slave trade?1 When representatives of the several states met at Philadelphia 1787 construct a more perfect union, they agreed that the new government should have the power regulate commerce. They disagreed, however, on the details. New Englanders, heavily involved the carrying trade and eager for regulations that would benefit their mercantile and shipping interests, wanted the federal commerce power be broadly defined and easily wielded. Southerners, dependent upon their cash crops of tobacco, rice, and indigo, wanted export taxes prohibited altogether and a two-thirds majority of required for the adoption of other commercial legislation. In addition, the two southernmost states, South Carolina and Georgia, sought protect from federal interference their right import African slaves. Many delegates from the other states, even other southern states, viewed the continued importation of captive Africans as an embarrassment a nation that had justified its birth on the noble theory that all men are created with an inalienable right liberty. But the delegates from South Carolina and Georgia insisted that their states needed more slaves. If the new constitution banned the importation of Africans, they said, then their states would never accept it. When Luther Martin of Maryland protested that allowing the importation of slaves was inconsistent with the principles of the revolution and dishonorable the American character, John Rutledge of South Carolina replied that Religion & humanity had nothing do with this question-Interest alone is the governing principle with Nations-The true question at present is whether the Southn. …

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

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.”

’Refined, highfalutin’ principles’: The northern public, the constitution, and slavery, 1861–62

Early in the Civil War an anticonstitutional rhetoric arose on the Northern home front in response to military delays and defeats as well as congressional debates over the constitutionality of punitive actions against rebel citizens. This critique was based in part on the Constitution's protections of rebel citizens’ rights, especially their disputed right to hold human property. Impatient Northerners also perceived the political compromises with slavery throughout the sectional conflict as based on constitutional principles. As a result, some Northerners began to equate the Constitution with slavery, and began to demand that the document be revised or even rewritten. This essay argues, however, that in spite of their critique of the Constitution's perceived protections of slavery, war‐minded Northern citizens did not advocate immediate or widespread emancipation.

Surveying the South: A Conversation with John Shelton Reed

A Conversation with John Shelton Reed Editor's note: On a Saturday afternoon in August 2000, John Reed sat down for a conversation with Betsey and Gene Genovese, noted historians of the South, at their home in Atlanta. The tape recorder was turned on-- JOHN SHELTON REED: Aren't you supposed to read me my rights? ELIZABETH FOX-GENOVESE: I'd like to start with what you mean by the South. You've written a lot about the South. You do all this mesmerizing stuff with how many more people eat Moon Pies down here than in other parts of the country, or go to church, or what have you. But what's beyond that, beyond what those numbers add up to? JSR: As I've often said, I'm less interested in the South than I am in southerners. I'm less interested in the region than I am in the group. And social psychologist that I am, I see the group as defined by identification with it. Basically, the question arises: Who are these people who describe themselves as southerners? And what does that mean? How has it changed? How is it changing? I don't see southern identification as some sort of Platonic ideal to which people are in some sort of approximation. I see it as defined on the ground by the folks who choose to affiliate. And this means that the group is open to attrition and infiltration. It doesn't mean the boundary doesn't exist, it just means people cross it. What that boundary contains can change and has changed. What it contains is an empirical question. EFG: Then why do you think, as I do myself, that history seems to be so important to people's sense of what it means to be a southerner? History, place, confinuity in place, family, all of those things. JSR: I agree with you that history has been and still is important, and that one way many groups define themselves is by a shared history transmitted through ancestry. It's not the only way groups define themselves. Social classes are defined by what they have in common in the present, although they have histories, too. But it's a shared predicament in the present that gives rise to class consciousness. EUGENE D. GENOVESE: Let me press a bit further on the question of identification as southerners. That identification surely has an objective basis historically. You suggest it has been a changing basis, but then it seems to me necessary to trace the main lines of that basis. What over time has made the South a distinct region, understanding that it has not been static? It seems to me implicit in your work that there is something that could legitimately be called a tradition, which again would distinguish the South and southerners from other Americans. JSR: Well, the South emerged, historians tell me, as a self-conscious region in the sectional conflicts of the early nineteenth century. These were over slavery. And I don't have much patience with folks who say the Civil War was not about slavery. It certainly wouldn't have happened without it. It's true most white southerners weren't slaveholders, but a good many of them would have liked to be. Folks up where I come from used to sing, All I want in this creation's a pretty little girl and a big plantation. Just as plainly, southern identification is not about slavery any more. For a long time it was about Jim Crow. That's what Ulrich Phillips said in the 1920s: The cardinal test of a southerner was the commitment that the South be and remain a white man's country. That was a glaring and obvious distinction. The minute you crossed into the South you were under a different system of laws. Ninety-eight percent of white southerners in 1942 thought black and white children should go to separate schools. But that's not what the South's about any more. These days southern identification is not so much a matter of shared history as a shared cultural style--some cultural conservatism, religiosity, manners, speech, humor, music, that sort of thing. I don't think many southern blacks at the turn of the century referred to themselves as southerners; Booker T. …

Missouri's Confederate: Claiborne Fox Jackson and the creation of southern identity in the border West

Missouri's Confederate: Claiborne Fox Jackson and the Creation of Southern Identity in the West. By Christopher Phillips. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000. Pp. xv, 342. Illustrations, map. $29.95.) When he remembered at all outside of his home state, Claiborne Fox Jackson typically recalled as the ardently proslavery Democrat and Border Ruffian leader who, as the newly elected governor of Missouri, schemed unsuccessfully to lead his state into the Confederacy despite the Unionist proclivities of his constituents. With remarkable candor, Christopher Phillips confesses at the outset of his new book, Missouri's Confederate, that Jackson's brief moment of national notoriety insufficient to justify a full-length traditional biography. Thus Missouri's Confederate is not so much about a man as it about a man's world (ix). On the basis of exhaustive research, Phillips uses the contours of Jackson's life as a framework for the exploration of a number of major topics in both western and southern history, focusing above all on the construction of regional identity. Phillips begins by tracing Jackson's ancestry, following the succession of westward migrations that propelled his rootless and ambitious forebears from England to the Chesapeake to the Virginia Blue Ridge and, ultimately, to Kentucky. The same drive for personal independence, wealth, and status prompted Jackson, at age twenty-one, to leave Kentucky for the Boon's Lick section of central Missouri in 1827. Claib Jackson's early career as a merchant leads Phillips to a detailed assessment of the economy and society of frontier Missouri, while Jackson's subsequent entry into state politics in the late 1830s-he eventually served five terms in the state legislature-prompts an extended overview of the Second Party System as it originated and operated in this young western state. Similarly, Jackson's emergence in the late 1840s as one of Missouri's most outspoken champions of slavery and states' rights provides the opportunity for an indepth analysis of the growing sectional conflict and, in particular, the complicated process by which many Missourians came to think of themselves as southerners, rather than as westerners, by 1861. In the process of tackling such large issues, Phillips provides an engaging portrait of Jackson himself, who figures in the larger narrative as a calculating, opportunistic politician whose intense hunger for national office was frustrated by modest abilities that suited him perfectly to the pedestrian climate of a state legislature (82). Given that Jackson most remembered for his role as Missouri's governor during the secession crisis and the early months of the Civil War, it a bit surprising that only two of the book's ten chapters deal with that period. Phillips briefly traces Jackson's efforts to engineer the state's secession, but in its brevity, this concluding section leaves a number of basic questions unanswered. Most importantly, it remains unclear why a state electorate supposedly so supportive of slavery and so opposed to federal coercion of the Confederate states could so widely repudiate its procession governor. By the author's own estimate, sixty percent of Missouri voters in February 1861 either favored secession outright or were conditional Unionists. Throughout the work, Phillips skillfully interweaves three related topics: democracy, slavery, and regional identity. Like numerous historians before him-most notably George Fredrickson-Phillips struck by the centrality of slavery to southern white definitions of democratic society. …

Tracking the Economic Divergence of the North and the South

Questions relating to the distinctiveness of the American North and South have intrigued historians and the public for generations. In fact, these questions and broader related controversies have proven among the most long-lived and provocative in the literature of American history. Travelers visiting British North America in the eighteenth century, for example, often commented on the differences between the northern and southern colonies. Such travel commentary grew in both abundance and verve in the first half of the nineteenth century, with Tocqueville's Democracy in America being the most notable case in point. Questions relating to regional distinctiveness gained even greater currency with the approach of the Civil War, and many historians since that time, perhaps taking their cue from William Seward's famous irrepressible conflict speech of 1858, have sought to interpret the rupture between North and South in schematic, dichotomous terms: a split between two distinct economies, societies, and, at times, even civilizations. It is much easier, after all, to impart meaning to the 620,000 lives lost during the Civil War by arguing that those who died did so in defense of beliefs and values under attack by people with antithetical worldviews. Despite the power of this appeal to difference and to the idea of the irrepressibility of sectional conflict, this interpretation has not gone unchallenged. In the 1940s and 1950s, a number of Civil War historians sought to downplay differences between North and South by arguing that the war was repressible and targeting one group in particular for blame: the blundering generation of politicians holding office in the decades prior to the war. To these revisionists, political fallibility rather than distinctive beliefs and values, chance and circumstance rather than inevitability, best explain the coming of war. Scholars emphasizing difference quickly pointed out that the qualitative differences between the sections far outweighed their similarities, however numerous, and that even if the North and South were more similar than different, it does not necessarily follow that war was repressible. The Civil War revisionists never completely rebutted these arguments, and their interpretation is currently out of favor. Today, most scholars once again stress the differences rather than the similarities between the North and the South, even as they disagree among themselves over the details.(1) While political historians would doubtless offer alternative chronologies, economic historians commonly trace the roots of regional difference and distinctiveness back to the seventeenth century. The North and the South began to diverge as early as the mid-to-late seventeenth century when the formalization of racial slavery, the production of a staple crop (tobacco), and the rise of a nascent plantation sector set the South down a path never followed in temperate colonies in the North. These divergences were due largely to differences in climate, profit possibilities, and what classical economists called land--or natural resources--rather than to any stark contrasts in settlers' backgrounds, culture, or worldviews. Once the South embarked upon this path, inertial forces--what economists call lock-in mechanisms associated with path dependence, or path influence--worked to keep the region on a developmental route distinct from those followed in the North.(2) Not surprisingly, the materialist argument for path dependence or influence goes against the view that attributes economic differences between North and South predominantly to cultural differences between the dominant groups in the two regions. To downplay the importance of culture and cultural difference as independent variables is not to suggest that from the start the European settlers in the southern colonies were just like those in the northern colonies. Nor is it to privilege in any absolute or universal sense material concerns above all others. …

Religion and the Antebellum Debate over Slavery.

This anthology of original essays by historians explores the religious dimensions of the antebellum sectional conflict over slavery. Covering such familiar topics as the proslavery argument and denominational schisms, these essays emphasize the diversity that existed within regions, states, and denominations; the importance of local factors in shaping responses to the slavery controversy; and the powerful pulls toward moderation and unity that existed within the institutional church. Drawing on the recent flowering of scholarship on religion, the essays collected here provide a variety of new approaches, including quantitative methodologies and a heightened sensitivity to issues of race, class, and gender.

Into the Fight: Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg , and: Gettysburg: Regimental Leadership and Command (review)

BOOK REVIEWS8l Sturtevant was a student at Yale University in the 1820s when debate about slavery was avoided because "Yale was the favorite college for Southern families and numerous sons of planters were there" (1 1). In fact, utterances against slavery could result in "insult or even physical attack" (18). Sturtevant observed the movement towards the Civil War—the Mexican-American War, Compromise of 1850, Kansas-Nebraska Conflict, and the election of Lincoln—while president of Hlinois College. Sturtevant's strongest condemnation of slavery surfaced after Lincoln's election: he was "most deeply impressed with the belief that we cannot have a country half slave and half free" (251). After the attack on Fort Sumter he became an ardent Unionist who argued that "slavery was contrary to Christian principles of brotherhood and equality" (256). Three chapters in the text relate dkectly to the sectional conflict and provide a unique interpretation of the slavery issue from the perspective of frontier America. In discussing Sturtevant's mission to England (1863), Yeager provides an interesting and important argument about the British pro-Southern tendencies and argues that they originate from British ideas on aristocracy. The three Civil War chapters are the best in the entire text. Yeager is to be commended for his ability to weave a multifaceted individual into a logically organized monograph. The entire text is balanced, clearly written and well documented. My single criticism is short-ckcuited by Yeager, who states early in the text that his biography "is consciously sympathetic to Sturtevant and the causes he espoused" (xii). Some references to Sturtevant's critics would balance the account and might even add additional color to the Sturtevant persona. Aside from this minor criticism, Yeager has produced a readable, interesting, and factual "old style" biography. James T. Carroll lona College Into the Fight: Pickett's Charge atGettysburg. By John Michael Priest (Shippensburg , Pa.: White Mane Books, 1998. Pp. xi, 278. $34.95.) Gettysburg: Regimental Leadership and Command. Edited by Mark Snell. Introduction by Carol Reardon (Mason City, Iowa: Savas Publishing, 1999. Pp. v, 199. $12.00.) John Michael Priest, a Maryland high school teacher and the proUfic author and editor ofnumerous books on the Civil War, turns his attention in his latest work to one ofthe most legendary events ofthat conflict. Like Priest's previous works, Into the Fight: Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg narrowly focuses on the battlefield experiences of the soldiers and officers on both sides. The author completely ignores the social, political, and even the strategic context of the bloodshed. Priest's narrative is essentially a series ofmore or less disconnected vignettes, which abruptly shift from one side to another, and from one part ofthe battlefield 82CIVIL WAR HISTORY to another. Using workmanlike prose, Priest does manage to portray vividly many of the battle's remarkable incidents. Who can forget Union Ueutenant Alonzo Cushing clutching his mangled groin while dkecting the devastating fire of his battery during the last minutes of his Ufe, Confederate sergeant June Kimble nervously assuring himself before the attack that he would do his duty "so help me God," and Robert E. Lee courageously and accurately informing the charge's demoralized survivors "it is all my fault." These, and many less familiar but equally powerful scenes, give the book considerable interest and readability. Priest effectively captures the fear, confusion, and horrifying violence of July 3, 1863. Civil War buffs exclusively interested in the fighting as individuals experienced it may deUght in this book's straightforward presentation of these memorable events. Most scholars, however, will likely find that Priest's failure to contextualize events, look for relevant themes, or draw conclusions sharply limits both the book's interest and its importance. Also, even within its limited scope, there are some problems. Priest states that "Confederate morale was not as high as it should have been" (85) going into the charge, but the evidence he presents doesn't really substantiate this conclusion, nor does his description of the fighting indicate that poor morale played any significant role in the poorly conceived attack's failure. Oddly, the author relates two separate versions of Lee's conversation with the seemingly mortally wounded Gen. James L. Kemper at...

Profiles in Courage: Televisual History on the New Frontier

Marcus | Profiles in Courage: Televisual History on the New Frontier Daniel Marcus Wayne State University Profiles in Courage: Televisual History on the New Frontier NBC's Profilesin Courage(1964-65) was situated within the discourse ofpragmatic moderate liberalism and the historiographyofanAmerican political leader, John F. Kennedy. 38 I Film & History Television as Historian | Special In-Depth Section The Presidential administration ofJohn F. Kennedy is widely seen as significantly expanding the interaction between White House politics and broadcast television. Kennedy's use oftelevision—to convey his personal qualities and political stands—culminated in the television adaptation of his book Profiles in Courage, which ran on the National Broadcasting Company during 1964-65. The docudrama series emerged in the context of the Kennedy Administration effort to resuscitate the tradition of "high-quality " television in the early 1960s, and corresponded to theories ofhistory associated with Kennedy's New Frontier. The series shared with other New Frontier texts the themes of the importance ofnational unity, political moderation, and the public display ofmoral courage and personal strength. In keeping with a belief that domestic ideological dilemmas had been resolved by the triumph of a pragmatic, moderate liberalism , the political theory ofArthur Schlesinger, Jr., Theodore Sorensen and others called for a politics of charisma, constructing a notion of citizens as individuated but undifferentiated spectators of the images of strong leaders. Such a view of history was easily translatable into televisual terms. Profiles in Courage constructed a pantheon of American heroes who dramatically displayed the judgment and fortitude needed to sway the nation's populace. The television version ofProfiles in Courage varied at times from Kennedy's book in its examination of the nation's racial past. The gains of the civil rights movement in the early 1960s made Kennedy's 1956 approach to racial issues, which had downplayed questions of racial justice, seem increasingly out ofstep with liberalism's activist, integrationist thinking in 1964-65. The political developments of the early 1960s made clear that not all domestic conflicts had been resolved, and the series producers struggled to come to grips with America's racial history, while maintaining Kennedy's preference for moderate positions. Other areas ofsocial conflict in American history, such as class differences and gender inequalities, were more easily effaced from the series' narratives; indeed, gender relationships in the programs tended to bolster the authority ofmale political figures, even as racial prerogatives were being explicitly questioned and explored. The Book (1956) The original Profiles in Courage told the stories of eight United States Senators who took principled political stands that threatened their careers, and gives shorter profiles to ten other politicians. Rumors circulated for many years that Theodore Sorensen had ghost-written the book for Kennedy, which both stoutly denied while Kennedy was alive. The book can be considered akin to Kennedy's speeches, written mostly by Sorensen, but reflecting Kennedy's own views and understandings.1 Five of the eight Senators treated at length were profiled for their stands surrounding the issues ofslavery , the Civil War, and Reconstruction. All five Senators wanted to mute sectional conflict, to seek compromise that would unify the nation. Kennedy's position was that the importance ofunity was paramount for the young nation, and that slavery was evil but could only be eradicated by and within the preservation of the Union. Once the Civil War was over, the North was obliged to rebuild the former Confederate states as full partners in America, and the Radical Republicans who wanted harsher treatment ofSouthern white society were destructive and dangerous. The historical study was published in 1956, became a best seller, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in History in 1957. Profiles gave Kennedy aveneer ofintellectualism and seriousness that proved helpful to his 1960 campaign for the Presidency. As a child ofprivilege and fame, Kennedy's demonstration ofintellectual achievement served to strengthen his identity as an individual in his own right; as an Irish Catholic, his knowledge ofAmerican history placed his public persona more securely within what may have been considered by many voters as mainstream America. New Frontier Historiography The Kennedy Administration included historians and political scientists in prominent positions. The treatment ofhistory in both the print and television versions...

Antislavery Violence: Sectional, Racial, and Cultural Conflict in Antebellum America

Antislavery Violence: Sectional, Racial, and Cultural Conflict in Antebellum America

On the Borders of Slavery and Race: Charles T. Torrey and the Underground Railroad

Boundaries are physical, political, legal, cultural, and psychological limits on individuals and nations. They indicate points beyond which prudent persons must not venture because the risks are too great. Yet by crossing into a different country, a different cultural framework, individuals change themselves and-if they risk enough-their times as well. The more formidable the barrier, the more profound the potential change. Recent studies of the borderlands of the southwestern United States, where American and Mexican cultures overlap, affirm that it is at geographical boundaries that such differences are most striking. It is in borderlands where cultures collide and tensions are highest as they physically challenge one another in a struggle for dominance. But, as studies of the Southwest also show, it is in such volatile areas where cultures interact that change may come quickly.1 During the decades prior to the Civil War this was the case in the Chesapeake and other borderlands between the North and the South. Traditional southern economies and values interacted with modernizing influences from the North. There was tension between free and slave labor, between industry and agriculture, between conflicting moralities, and between hope and despair among black families as economic chance led on the one hand to manumission and on the other to sale south.2 These borderlands were also where the more adventuresome of northern white abolitionists came face to face with slaveholders, desperate slave families, and free black southerners who were the slaves' keenest allies. Charles T. Torrey is now generally forgotten by historians of antebellum America. But Torrey was among the more prominent northern white abolitionists when in December 1841 he crossed the Mason-Dixon Line for his first time and proceeded south to Baltimore and Washington. Like many others who had traveled from the North into this region, Torrey became acutely aware that he had crossed a cultural border. He remarked economic decline, physical desolation, and moral depravity in contrast to what he perceived to be northern vitality, wealth, and piety. But what struck him most deeply was the suffering of enslaved African Americans.3 His visceral reaction to what appeared to him to be barbaric cruelty and his empathy for those subjected to it led Torrey to cross a more strictly drawn boundary than that between the free and slave states-the boundary of race. He exemplified in his subsequent conduct the potential in northern abolitionism for organized interracial cooperation against slavery in the border South. Just as significant, he initiated a tradition of such cooperation that persisted in the Chesapeake into the Civil War years. Torrey's activities in this region led to his arrest on charges of helping slaves escape, his imprisonment in the Maryland Penitentiary, and his death there in 1846. He became an antislavery martyr, revered especially among African Americans for having initiated an underground railroad. Yet there has been no detailed investigation of his activities in the border South that led to his legendary status and no attempt to link those activities to larger issues associated with the character of the underground railroad in particular and the antislavery movement in general. Most significant among these larger issues is the crucial role of racial and cultural turmoil in the Chesapeake borderlands themselves in metamorphosing Torrey and those who followed his example from peaceable advocates of emancipation into revolutionaries. It was this confrontational context that shaped the aggressive northern abolitionism of the 1840s and 1850s and, correspondingly, a growing apprehension among slavery's defenders.4 Torrey's career as a practical abolitionist in the border South also provides insights into long-standing disputes among historians. These include disagreements concerning involvement of white abolitionists in the underground railroad, the extension of its activities into the South, and the relationship of the antislavery movement to the sectional conflict. …

The Fugitive Slave Act in Emerson's Boston

No event of the antebellum period transformed the sectional conflict into a community crisis more directly than the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Designed to overcome the reluctance of some northern jurisdictions to recognize slaveholders' claims on alleged runaways, the summary process provided federal assistance for slave catchers and checked potential instruments of local subversion by dispensing with juries, inducing enforcement officers to act vigorously, and providing protection against potential rescues. The legislation forced African Americans in the free states to decide whether to flee from their homes or risk kidnapping, and it prompted some northerners to unite in defense of their neighbors through forcible resistance to the law.

Shadrach Minkins: From Fugitive Slave to Citizen , and: The Trials of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson's Boston (review)

Reviews 121 single truth" (75), as they are but "fragments of stories" (83), especially where their "context is unspecified" (93), with the admonition that they be seen as "constructions to be taken apart, analyzed, and understood" (135); and the perception that "photography also represents the imaginary and the intangible" (90). Neither ray of joy nor spark of humor lights the melancholy pages of Family Frames. There is a useful, informative discussion near the end about the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., which puts to shame the self-concerned pages that precede it, and puts to flight 'theoretical' comments about what "exposes cinema and photography for their constructedness and their dependence on convention" (180), or about how "as we read photographs, we project particular masks, particular ideological frames, onto the images" (86), or about how one may "overturn several essential elements of photography: its illusion of mimetic representation or the effect of the real" (87). Patrick Maynard Collison, Gary L. Shadrach Minkins: From Fugitive Slave to Citizen. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997.304 pp. ISBN 0-674-80298-5, $27.95. Von Frank, Albert J. The Trials of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson's Boston. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998. 431 pp. ISBN 0-674-03954-8, $27.95. Fugitive slaves in nineteenth-century America present biographers and historians with formidable methodological and interpretive challenges. Clearly, the stories need to be told; collectively and individually, fugitive slaves played a central role in the country's sectional conflict. Yet even those famed cases that commanded the historical stage involved slaves who, thrust by circumstances into the spotlight, might not have been remembered otherwise, who likely would have left no more to posterity than any other ordinary human being, whose stories were always told for them, not by them. As a result, scholars writing their histories confront several related difficulties: the dearth of primary sources and reliable second-hand accounts, the adjustment of argumentative claims to the available material, the problems of contextualization and theoretical perspective. Gary Collison and Alfred J. Von Frank, approaching this undertaking from two quite different directions, have produced works that, considered together, illustrate the strengths and shortcomings of the biographical genre in completing a fugitive slave's journey from bondage to freedom to scholarly fame. In Shadrach Minkins: From Fugitive Slave to Citizen, Collison draws on contemporary newspaper accounts, personal correspondence, census records, and court documents in order to reconstruct part of the life of the first runaway slave captured in Boston under the notorious 122 biography 22.1 (Winter 1999) 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. Given the paucity of primary material, Collison extrapolates much of the rest of Minkins's life as he delves into the issues that the case embodied. Ultimately, what becomes apparent is that the importance of this biography lies less in what it has to say about Minkins himself than in what it says about African American life in the mid-nineteenth century and about the political and legal workings of the Fugitive Slave Law. Coming at a time of deteriorating intersectional conflict, the Minkins case quickly became a cause célèbre for abolitionists, who saw an opportunity to challenge the reviled fugitive slave provision of the Compromise of 1850; for conservative Whig politicians, who wanted to reaffirm the authority of federal statute; and for proslavery southerners, who longed for an embarrassing legal defeat of the Boston radicals. Collison's biography of Minkins, which begins with his childhood and ends with his death, is the most comprehensive treament to date of the episode. We learn that the young man at the center of the case had been a domestic slave in Norfolk, Virginia, before escaping in 1850 (probably aboard a northbound ship), making his way to Boston, and beginning to integrate himself into the free black community there. Within a year, a southern slave-hunter had tracked Minkins down, arrested him, and set up a legal battle over his fate. The showdown never came to pass, however, because several members of the Boston Vigilance Committee re-captured Minkins from within the courthouse itself and spirited him away, first to Concord, and then to Montreal, where he lived out the rest of...