Southern Politicians Research Articles

Borderlands of Slavery: The Struggle over Captivity and Peonage in the American Southwest by William S. Kiser

Reviewed by: Borderlands of Slavery: The Struggle over Captivity and Peonage in the American Southwest by William S. Kiser Lauren Brand (bio) Borderlands of Slavery: The Struggle over Captivity and Peonage in the American Southwest. By William S. Kiser. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. Pp. 280. Cloth, $47.50; paper, $24.95.) Could slavery in any form expand into the American West? Was it realistically possible? Did the U.S. government have the right to regulate the expansion of slavery? These are some of the massive questions that dominated the political discourse of the antebellum United States. William S. Kiser’s Borderlands of Slavery explores how the reality of Native captivity and debt peonage in New Mexico played a crucial role in the answers that both northern and southern politicians offered to these questions. New Mexico not only shaped national conversations about slavery’s expansion in the antebellum era, but also influenced national policy makers’ decisions regarding the definition of unfree labor during the Reconstruction era. Kiser argues that the existence of a different form of slavery in New [End Page 248] Mexico “forced Americans to think more broadly about slavery and brought awareness to the fact that involuntary labor was not limited to the chattel system in the South” and that this realization “informed profound political debates during the 1850s regarding the future role of unfree labor in the country” (21). The prologue provides a concise overview of the history of New Mexico from the Spanish colonial era through the territory’s integration into the United States in the mid-nineteenth century in order to quickly familiarize readers with this complex period. Indeed, scholars from many subfields of nineteenth-century United States history will find much of interest in this short book. For example, historians studying the various forms of enslavement endured or practiced by the Indigenous peoples of North America (or “the other slavery,” as Andrés Reséndez describes it)1 will appreciate Kiser’s description of the widespread prevalence of Native captivity in New Mexico from the Spanish colonial era through the Civil War. Additionally, historians of the antebellum U.S. South will be interested in Kiser’s dissection of how southern politicians used New Mexico and the various forms of captivity there as a foil to compare to the southern system of enslavement. Although debt peonage was not a racially based system of enslavement, it was a structure that “nonetheless operated upon manipulated conditions of dependency that typically ensured perpetual bondage” (16), leading many southern congressmen to view New Mexico as a valid point of comparison to demonstrate the compatibility of slavery with peonage in the American West. Kiser shows throughout that such comparisons were not unwarranted. For example, he explores comparisons between the ways captive women in the Southwest were described as “likely girl[s]” and valued for their attractiveness and sexual availability in the same way that African American women were in the South (61). However, despite some similarities that prompted these comparisons, Kiser notes that, in the end, there remained “widespread confusion about the differences between Southern slavery and New Mexico’s traditional forms of bondage . . . among federal lawmakers” (52). State and local historians will also appreciate Kiser’s attention to the perspectives of people actually living in New Mexico during this period. Kiser explains how residents of New Mexico themselves thought about these issues. For example, he notes that local people were somewhat ambivalent about chattel slavery and the comparison to the U.S. South but remained just as concerned about retaining their rights to captives and peons as they always had. Kiser also explores how, after 1846, local New Mexico law-makers purposely kept quiet about the issue of debt peonage, because they often personally benefited from it. Thus Kiser notes how challenging it can [End Page 249] be for historians to study the ways captivity and debt peonage impacted the lives of people in New Mexico. The sources have to be carefully mined to reveal what was really going on behind the surface. Kiser is very open about these challenges and how he reads the available sources. As time passed and sectionalist sentiment increased in both the United...

Evolution of the US Democratic Party in the 1830s-1840s

The article focuses on the history of the Democratic Party during the bipartisan Democrat-Whig system. It shows how the nationwide issues of tariffs, slavery and expansion influenced the formation of sectional factions. Having progressed from a small-scale factional struggle, by the end of the period under review the party consisted of two major factions divided geographically by North-South. Particular attention is paid to the “Young America” movement, which originated with young and ambitious politicians who promoted infrastructure development and the idea of expanding borders. This idea came to be known as the "idea of predestination". Although the movement died out in the 1840s, the Predestination idea became the ideological basis for the invasion of Texas, California and other Mexican territories, as well as for the justifcation of the spread of slavery. The article examines how the controversy over the extension of slavery to the newly acquired territories caused a division of political forces in the country. "The Wilmot Proviso", which prohibited slavery in these territories, provoked protests from southern politicians, who not only began voting against the amendment in a single section, but began preparations for a convention that would decide the Southern states' secession from the United States.

Upon the Altar of Work: Child Labor and the Rise of a New American Sectionalism

Upon the Altar of Work: Child Labor and the Rise of a New American Sectionalism

Review: West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire, by Kevin Waite

The past decade has seen a major shift in the historiography of slavery. Thoroughly demolishing a century of Lost Cause revisionism, recent works by Walter Johnson, Edward Baptist, Sven Beckert and others have argued that southern slavery in the nineteenth century was no relic of a pre-modern age and was instead inextricably linked to the emerging global capitalist order. Southern elites are recast from reactionary states’ rights zealots to savvy nationalists tilting U.S. federal policy to their economic advantage. In his first book, Kevin Waite adds to this literature by shifting focus to the Far West, arguing for the existence of an expansionist continental South dedicated to international trade and maintaining various forms of unfree labor. Waite contends that the sway of pro-slavery politics extended to the Pacific coast, challenging the notion that the American West was somehow united against slavery.Waite breaks from earlier historians by urging readers to look beyond Bleeding Kansas for explanations on how westward expansion contributed to sectional dissolution. Instead, he adds a new region, the Desert South, to the historical framework of “many Souths.” Comprising Southern California, New Mexico, and Utah, the Desert South was a site where southern support for chattel slavery merged with local desires to preserve other forms of race-based coerced labor, including captive Native labor and lifelong debt peonage. Waite insists that southern lawmakers’ push for federal transportation projects (designed to link the South with Asian markets) merged with pro-slavery separatist movements in the West to hasten the arrival of the Civil War. Despite vain attempts to secure a southern railroad route and the political blunder of southern secession, the collaboration between southern and western politicians later achieved a remarkable postbellum revival.Waite’s scope is unusually ambitious for a debut. He begins by demonstrating how antebellum southern politicians utilized their influence within the federal government and exploited patronage networks in the favor of the planter class. Section two shifts focus to the West, examining local office holders who adapted pro-slavery politics to their own regional contexts. For instance, California Democrats sought to overturn the state’s free-soil constitution, New Mexico legislators passed an 1859 slave code, and Utah legalized slavery in 1852. Section three posits the Desert South as a theater of the Civil War where various separatist plots stoked a popular backlash, leading to the rise of the once floundering Republican Party in the West. The section ends with western Democrats’ postwar comeback, as white solidarity against the region’s diverse population of Natives, Chinese Immigrants, African Americans, and Hispanos—combined with antipathy towards an expanding federal government—helped fueled the demise of Reconstruction on a national level.Waite is a writer of unusual clarity, and his book is an accessible contribution to the new slavery historiography as well as the growing literature addressing linkages between free and unfree labor systems in the West. None of the information he provides is necessarily new, but he consistently reads his source material in fresh ways. Similarly, elements of his argument will be familiar to readers of earlier works by such historians as Richard White and David M. Potter, but no writer has so forcefully elucidated why the slave South cast such a long shadow in the Far West.

Editors' Note

Editors' Note Kate Masur and Gregory P. Downs As we write this editors' note in summer 2021, we are hopeful that many in-person activities will soon resume, including the conferences, seminars, workshops, and writing groups that are so important to our collective work. Our issue features three research essays about men's lives that touch on politics, ideology, and power. Daniel Crofts takes a new look at a famous diarist in "Sidney George Fisher and the Coming of the Civil War: How Southern Overreach Alarmed a Conservative Philadelphian." An elite Philadelphian, Fisher had generally conservative political instincts. Yet he became increasingly troubled by southern politicians' demands for dominance in the 1850s, eventually siding with the Republicans and, when war came, even supporting emancipation. The story of Fisher's political evolution is a reminder of the diversity and contentiousness of the Republican coalition. In "William Henry Trescot, Pardon Broker," Cynthia Nicoletti follows Trescot, a South Carolina lawyer and politician (and historian), to Washington, DC, where he lobbied President Andrew Johnson to restore land to his state's planter elite. Trescot entered directly into political negotiations about the future of land confiscated from Confederates during the war, using his legal savvy and political connections to discredit demands for land redistribution by South Carolina freedpeople and O. O. Howard, the commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau. Tarik Yiğit explores Civil War veterans in Egypt in "Reconstructing the American under the Most Unimaginable Conditions: Civil War Veterans in the 'Arabian Nights.'" Egypt's leader, Ismail Pasha, sought American advisors after the war, and many U.S. and Confederate veterans were happy to oblige. Impelled by the chance to earn an income and an associated sense of manhood, Civil War veterans in Egypt contributed their skills in surveying, military training, and armed conflict itself. Many had known each other before the war, and Egypt became a site where Americans who had fought on both sides grappled with one another and with the Civil War's legacies. In his review essay, "The Common Soldier of the Civil War: His Rise and Fall," Gerald Prokopowicz examines evolving scholarly interest in Civil War soldiers. Historical scholarship on the rank and file has been shaped by subsequent wars and by historians' changing approaches to the past. What was once represented as a generalizable "common soldier" experience—atleast [End Page 447] for Confederate soldiers on the one hand and US ones on the other—has been shattered, but questions of why people fought endure. With this issue, we say goodbye to our editorial assistant, Megan Hildebrand, a PhD candidate at Penn State, whose term is ending and whose excellent work we have appreciated tremendously. Edward Green is the new editorial assistant, and we welcome him to the team. We also express special gratitude to the authors, peer reviewers, and book reviewers who made time to contribute to the journal during the difficult months of the pandemic. We hope they and all our readers are faring well and that we'll see one another soon. [End Page 448] Copyright © 2021 The University of North Carolina Press

Good Trouble: Pioneering the Power of Protest

30 | BLACK HISTORY BULLETIN VOL. 84, NO. 1 84 No.1 GOOD TROUBLE: PIONEERING THE POWER OF PROTEST By Andrew Jezisek Introduction The right to protest is enshrined in the Constitution of the United States of America. It is the bedrock of democracy, granted to all citizens of the United States regardless of race, gender, or ethnicity. However, the power of protest has been employed by African Americans for generations. From the local level to the federal level and even on the world stage, African Americans have demonstrated the power of protest in order to forward their cause for social justice. Since the three Reconstruction Amendments were added to the US Constitution, African Americans have struggled for social change despite systemic and stigmatic obstacles at every turn. Nonetheless, they have steeled themselves by mobilizing alongside their allies in protests that have shaped the history of the United States of America. Blueprints for Action In 1954, the battle for integration began. The United States Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren struck down the “separate but equal” precedent established by the controversial Plessy v. Ferguson case in 1896. The ruling in the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education declared that school segregation policies directed against African Americans were unconstitutional.1 However, pro-segregation southern politicians had no intention of toeing the new line. A struggle between African Americans and white supremacists was inevitable. African American civil rights leaders such as John Lewis and Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. had a roadmap to the goal of equality drawn out. The vehicle to get to that ultimate goal was nonviolent civil disobedience as a form of protest. John Lewis, the chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and future representative of Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District, referred to this practice as getting into “good trouble.”2 Civil rights leaders planned to mobilize in activities that would potentially elicit legal penalties and violent retaliation. Marches, sit-ins, freedom rides, and boycotts were the manifestations of “good trouble.” Many of these nonviolent tactics had been implemented before the American Civil Rights Movement in countries that were colonized by large European empires. Most notably, India was led to independence from the British Empire in the 1940s by nonviolent protests spearheaded by Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi’s nonviolent movement gained a large following, especially from bystanders who witnessed the British’s violent opposition to the Indian Independence Movement.3 Drawing from the tactics of Gandhi, African American civil rights leaders such as Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. reinvented the meaning of protest in the United States in order to overturn the Jim Crow status quo.4 “Good Trouble” in Practice Nonviolent protests by African Americans continued after the success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the establishment of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1956. Jim Crow was beginning to lose footing from 1956 to 1960 as boycotts and sit-ins organized by civil rights groups forced local communities to do away with segregation on buses and in businesses.5 These acts of nonviolent civil disobedience achieved success at the federal level after local efforts were successful. The Supreme Court declared segregated busing and segregated counters in businesses unconstitutional by 1960. Yet cities in states that ignored Supreme Court rulings on segregation, particularly Alabama, still enforced discriminatory laws.6 Additionally, African American votes were suppressed by pro-segregation politicians who sought to cling to both power and the past. As a result, the same tactics of participating in “good trouble” were employed against these more entrenched discriminatory policies. At every sit-in, every march, and every freedom ride, protestors were met with brute force from white supremacy. Alabama became a central battleground in the Civil Rights Movement as one of the most segregated states in the country, an assertion that was reinforced in 1963 by its newly elected governor, George Wallace, who proclaimed his oppositiontointegrationinhisinauguraladdress.Nonetheless, massive grassroots nonviolent protests were organized by the SCLC in Birmingham in April of 1963. As the protests persisted into May, the authorities in Birmingham drastically escalated their response; Birmingham Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor allowed the police to arm themselves with nightsticks, fire hoses, and attack dogs...

Review: Unusually Cruel: Prisons, Punishment, and the Real American Exceptionalism, by Marc Morjé Howard

Review: Unusually Cruel: Prisons, Punishment, and the Real American Exceptionalism, by Marc Morjé Howard

The roots of conservative radicalism in southern Thailand’s Buddhist heartland

ABSTRACTSince the beginning of Thailand’s protracted political crisis in 2005, the country has experienced a conservative political turn centered on the monarchy. One of the regions where this turn has been most pronounced has been in southern Thailand. Studies of the south have tended to focus on the border provinces, its Malay Muslim community, and a long-running separatist movement. The more populous parts of the upper south with a Thai-Buddhist majority have been largely overlooked. In recent decades the south’s old Buddhist heartland has witnessed a high level of cultural and religious dynamism. This region has given birth to an influential new academic field of southern Thai studies and a distinctive southern Thai literature. These factors have contributed to the hardening of a southern Thai Buddhist identity. Politicians and activists from the south have played a prominent role in Thailand’s on-going political crisis. This article explores the rise of conservative radicalism in southern Thailand’s Buddhist heartland with reference to the roles of southern academics, writers, poets, activists, and politicians over the last half century. It offers a regional case study of the roots of Thailand’s political crisis as well as the rise of Buddhist radicalism in Southeast Asia.

Midwestern Soldiers in the Civil War

Midwestern Soldiers in the Civil War L. Bao Bui John Zimm, ed., This Wicked Rebellion: Wisconsin Civil War Soldiers Write Home. Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2012. 240 pp. $22.95 (cloth). James E. Potter, Standing Firmly by the Flag: Nebraska Territory and the Civil War, 1861–1867. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012. 400 pp. $29.95 (paper). Rhonda M. Kohl, The Prairie Boys Go to War: The Fifth Illinois Cavalry, 1861–1865. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2013. 328 pp. $39.95 (cloth). In Standing Firmly by the Flag, James E. Potter ably covers the campaigns and tribulations of the 1st Nebraska Regiment. Although Nebraska was short on population, its white settlers proved long on patriotism: the territory provided some 3,000 soldiers out of a pool of barely 9,000 men of military age (xiii). However, the heart of Potter's research centers on the Civil War's effects on Nebraska's political, social, and economic development during the 1860s. Passed by Congress in 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act fueled sectional tensions and led to the rise of the anti-slavery Republican Party in the North. Hence, from its very beginning as a political entity, Nebraska found itself at the center of the fierce debate over the meanings of freedom and the role of African Americans in the national social fabric. As Potter points out, "Although Nebraska Territory was distant from the Civil War's major theaters, its people were not unmindful of the war's issues, un-involved in its prosecution, or insulated from its effects" (xiii). Nebraska's soldiers fought not only the regular army of the Confederacy, but also bushwackers, partisans, and guerilla fighters, as well as Native Americans. Like other regiments, the 1st Nebraska saw high rates of death from disease, and its members complained regularly about physical hardships, [End Page 185] lack of supplies and food, and the monotony of camp life. Potter also highlights the war's consequences for "Nebraskans who stayed home" (xiv). His book gives due attention to the role of civilians, especially women, in shaping the war's eventual outcome and legacy. Whatever the sufferings of both civilians and soldiers, Nebraska benefited substantially when southern politicians who had opposed the transcontinental railroad and free homesteads in the western territories left Congress. During the war, the Union government passed favorable legislation regarding both issues, giving a huge boost to Nebraska's economy and population growth (xv). Although hundreds of miles removed from the major battlegrounds, and with only a handful of black residents among them, white Nebraskans engaged fully in the national dialogue over the nature of the war, emancipation, and the role of freed slaves in postwar America. Through analysis of newspapers accounts, diaries, and letters, Potter reveals the thoughts of common people and their stance on the most divisive issues of the day. To enrich the reader's visual understanding of a frontier society at war, Potter includes in his book dozens of newspaper etchings and photographs, including one of free black people laboring in Nebraska in 1864. The highly useful maps and illustrations found throughout Standing Firmly by the Flag allow for a broad overview of the strategic theaters of operations. However, the book lacks photos or drawings of the Native American Peoples who remained powerful actors in the shaping of Great Plains societies and politics until the end of the nineteenth century. The American Civil War lasted only four years. The transformation of Nebraska from frontier to territory to state occurred over the span of thirteen years. Both events took place against the larger and longer drama of a 400-year war against Native Americans. Indeed, Potter emphasizes that the white settlers in Nebraska waged war against both secessionists of the South and Native Peoples of the Great Plains. For those Native Americans, 1865 did not mean a new birth of freedom; if anything, a united United States could now focus more of its energies and resources on subduing the last remaining Native resistance movements in the Great Plains and the Southwest. Even for newly freed African Americans who now called themselves Nebraskans, the post-1865 era witnessed the rise of Jim Crow and racial...

Sunbelt Capitalism, Civil Rights, and the Development of Carceral Policy in North Carolina, 1954–1970

This article investigates an important yet poorly understood aspect of the origins of the U.S. carceral state. Many explanations attribute the rise of mass incarceration to the conservative tide in American politics beginning in the late 1960s: “tough on crime” policies advanced by southern Democrats and Republicans, white backlash against black civil rights, and the law-and-order politics of Nixon's “Southern Strategy.” But in focusing on conservatives, prevailing theories have ignored how the changing economic and political landscape of the post-WWII South shaped how policymakers thought about crime. This article examines how key elements of the carceral state emerged in the rapidly growing, metropolitan, and business-minded Sunbelt South between 1954 and 1970, using North Carolina as a test case. Drawing on a variety of archival sources, it unearths how moderate southern politicians with material links to extra-regional sources of capital, political links to northern liberal elites, and ideological links to postwar liberalism pioneered state-level carceral policy. It argues that the swift development of crime policy in midcentury North Carolina was the product of how the state's moderate elites chose to govern the emerging Sunbelt economy in the wake ofBrown v. Board of Educationand the civil rights movement. The problems of rampant civil disorder, racial extremism, and lawlessness, they argued, threatened the economic progress of North Carolina and required the implementation of strong yet race-neutral crime policy. This study offers an analysis of how the Sunbelt South, in shedding Jim Crow and entering the national political and economic mainstream, came to help spearhead the carceral turn in American politics.

‘Creating insurrections in the heart of our country:’ fear of the British West India Regiments in the Southern US Press, 1839–1860

ABSTRACTIn the decades leading to the Civil War, the United States and Great Britain faced a number of diplomatic crises, during which southern politicians often became alarmed at the prospect of British soldiers invading the southern coastline. The perceived threat was part of a wider southern paranoia over Britain’s role in what was seen as a conspiracy to demolish the southern American system of slavery for Britain’s ultimate economic gain. The alarm over an imagined British invasion was exacerbated by the fact that the anticipated invaders were free black men, the West India Regiments, stationed in the British West Indies. The tone of this paranoia was shaped by the memory of black participation in the War of 1812 and the fear that slaves would flee to British lines in any future conflict. An analysis of the discourse about these men in the southern press tells us much about the fears of southern slaveholders with regard to the trustworthiness of their own slaves and the ever-present threat of slave rebellion. Ultimately, the fears expressed about a disciplined black army led by an abolitionist imperial power reveal the true nature of southern anxiety over the stability of the South’s own form of white supremacy.

Dividing the Union: Jesse Burgess Thomas and the Making of the Missouri Compromise by Matthew W. Hall

Reviewed by: Dividing the Union: Jesse Burgess Thomas and the Making of the Missouri Compromise by Matthew W. Hall Nicholas P. Wood (bio) Dividing the Union: Jesse Burgess Thomas and the Making of the Missouri Compromise. By Matthew W. Hall. ( Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2016. Pp. xiii, 269. $29.50 cloth) Virtually every book and college course on nineteenth-century American politics mentions Jesse B. Thomas, though he rarely gets more than a single sentence. The Illinois senator’s claim to fame is authoring one piece of the three-part Missouri Compromise of 1820. Matthew W. Hall’s Dividing the Union confirms the centrality of the Missouri Compromise to Thomas’s historical importance, while placing the event in the larger context of Thomas’s colorful life in the Old Northwest. Little has been written about Thomas’s life, but a large body of literature has examined the Missouri Compromise. Hall, a retired attorney connected to Thomas’s family through marriage, briefly notes the existence of this scholarship in a short essay on sources, but he rarely engages with the existing historiography, relying mainly on the Annals of Congress in addition to Thomas family papers. Nonetheless, his book offers a unique contribution. Beyond the biographical details of Thomas’s life, the most valuable aspect of Dividing the Union is Hall’s close attention to the ambiguous nature of constitutional questions surrounding congressional powers over slavery in the territories and new states. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 (reaffirmed in 1789 after the ratification of the Constitution) forbade slavery in certain federal ter [End Page 428] ritories. Yet, it was not clear whether these territories could legalize slavery after they became states. Hall shows that Jesse Thomas exploited this ambiguity in different ways at different times. In Indiana during the 1810s, Thomas joined an effort, supported in part by a proslavery faction, to create a separate Illinois Territory. The success of this move effectively ended efforts to revive slavery in Indiana, and when Indiana became a state in 1816, its constitution not only prohibited slavery (as Ohio had in 1803), but also forbade any future amendments legalizing the institution. Thus it was clear that in Indiana the Northwest Ordinance’s ban on slavery would be perpetual even after statehood. But in Illinois, Thomas collaborated with inhabitants who wanted to protect forms of unfree labor and “preserve the possibility of approving slavery in Illinois in the future” via “a revision of the constitution after statehood” (p. 99). In 1818, the ambiguity of Illinois’s constitutional provisions that ostensibly prohibited slavery provoked some opposition in the U.S. Congress but not enough to prevent a grant of statehood. As one of Illinois’s first two senators, Thomas was present the following year during the much larger controversy about the Missouri territory’s request to enter the Union as a state with legalized slavery. The ensuing political crisis led to threats of civil war and disunion along with extended debates about constitutional interpretation. Although Missouri had never been subject to the Northwest Ordinance, the constitutional ambiguities of the ordinance’s slavery ban had implications for it. Northerners, who tended to assume that the ordinance’s ban on slavery continued after statehood, believed that any restriction Congress placed on Missouri would be similarly perpetual. Southern politicians believed that Missouri, like the states carved from the Northwest Territory, would be free to legalize slavery after statehood. This question was never fully settled, for the final Missouri Compromise, negotiated a year later, allowed Missouri to preserve slavery in its state constitution. Another provision admitted Maine (previously part of Massachusetts) as a free state, while Thomas’s provision banned slavery in the remaining federal territories north of 36°30’ latitude. [End Page 429] Thomas’s provision intentionally left unanswered the question of whether northern territories could legalize slavery after statehood. Thomas and most southern politicians believed they could, while northerners generally believed the opposite. Such ambiguity was intentional and necessary to “gain a majority in Congress” (p. 169). President James Monroe and his cabinet also avoided a definitive interpretation on this point, though few other historians have recognized the importance of this ambiguity to the Missouri Compromise. The proslavery...

Win the Race or Die Trying: Uncle Earl's Last Hurrah by Jack B. McGuire

Reviewed by: Win the Race or Die Trying: Uncle Earl's Last Hurrah by Jack B. McGuire Jeff Broadwater Win the Race or Die Trying: Uncle Earl's Last Hurrah. By Jack B. McGuire. ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016. Pp. xiv, 285. $35.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-0763-2.) Earl K. Long, the younger brother of the demagogue Huey P. Long, ran for governor of Louisiana three times and for lieutenant governor four times between 1932 and 1959, but Win the Race or Die Trying: Uncle Earl's Last Hurrah is centered on Long's last campaign, an ill-fated race for Congress in 1960. Written by Jack B. McGuire, a financial executive and longtime Louisiana political junkie, the book offers a sympathetic look at an unvarnished man who liked to campaign in the hinterlands, haggle at country stores, hunt wild hogs from his modest Pea Patch farm, and gamble everywhere. Criticizing Long as "undignified," in the words of the Chicago Daily News, "was about like criticizing a hog for bad table manners" (p. 208). Elected lieutenant governor in 1936, Long served briefly as governor when scandal forced the incumbent to resign. In 1948 he was elected governor in his own right, but Long's gifts were more forensic than administrative, and he served with no great distinction. Attempting a comeback in 1956, he lambasted his opponent, New Orleans mayor deLesseps S. "Chep" Morrison, as "so high and mighty he has to get on a stump to spit" (p. 39). Winning the governor's office in a landslide, Long proved to be more assertive in his third term as governor. He vetoed 326 bills, a record that still stands. He pushed for the creation of a New Orleans branch of Louisiana State University, and in 1958 the school opened on an integrated basis and without incident. In a chapter that is likely to be of most interest to historians, McGuire describes Long's battle to prevent the state legislature from purging black citizens from voter registration rolls. After the U.S. Supreme Court declared the white primary unconstitutional in 1944, the number of African American voters in Louisiana increased dramatically, and many of them voted for Long. Unlike so many southern politicians, Long refused to exploit the race issue and supported equal pay for black schoolteachers. Always impulsive, Long seemed to crack under the strain. He hatched a scheme to circumvent the constitutional ban on consecutive gubernatorial terms; he contemplated resigning so he could run again in 1960. His health failing, Long lost his composure speaking before a legislative committee in May 1959. His wife, Blanche, and Senator Russell Long, Huey's son, had him committed to a mental institution in Galveston, Texas. A judge later ordered him committed to a Louisiana hospital. Long escaped confinement by firing the officials who were holding him. But his reputation was in shreds. He began seeing a New Orleans stripper named Blaze Starr, although McGuire argues strongly that the 1989 Paul Newman movie Blaze wildly sensationalized their relationship. Long only made matters worse on an extended tour of racetracks in the West and Mexico. He was photographed in a Fort Worth airport with a pillowcase on his head trying to avoid reporters. Long ran for Congress in an attempt to rebuild his career, making it into the runoff before suffering a heart attack a week before the final vote. He won the race but died a few days later. McGuire has given readers a fine window on a lost age of southern politics. In the solid South, only the Democratic primary mattered, and personality [End Page 736] trumped ideology, but, McGuire argues, the advent of television doomed Long's style of politics. "Uncle Earl" was, as he liked to call himself, "the Last of the Red Hot Poppas" (p. 227). Jeff Broadwater Barton College Copyright © 2017 The Southern Historical Association

Liberty Power: Antislavery Third Parties and the Transformation of American Politics by Corey M. Brooks

Reviewed by: Liberty Power: Antislavery Third Parties and the Transformation of American Politicsby Corey M. Brooks John H. Matsui Liberty Power: Antislavery Third Parties and the Transformation of American Politics. By Corey M. Brooks. American Beginnings, 1500–1900. ( Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Pp. [viii], 302. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-226-30728-2.) Liberty Power: Antislavery Third Parties and the Transformation of American Politicssets out to reintegrate antislavery third parties into the history of antebellum politics. Corey M. Brooks focuses on the decades-long campaign [End Page 678]of political abolitionists to contest and expose the slave power's control of national politics, culminating in the birth of the explicitly antislavery Republican Party by the mid-1850s. In analyzing primary sources on the political wing of the antislavery movement, Brooks sails between the Scylla of antislavery hagiography and the Charybdis of proslavery screeds. Most crucial to Brooks's thesis among recent scholarship is James Oakes's Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865(New York, 2012). As Oakes notes, by the 1850s three constituencies—political abolitionists, antislavery moderates, and slaveholders—recognized that if the federal government ceased to treat slaves as property, voluntary state abolition would follow. Abolitionists quickly recognized that Congress was the linchpin to fight the slave power; slaveholders' interests were disproportionately represented in both houses thanks to the three-fifths clause. Even as the American abolitionist movement fractured in the late 1830s over women's rights and pacifism, the volume of antislavery voices calling for a purely antislavery third party increased. Although many abolitionist voters chose to support the Whig Party in 1840, that election saw the birth of the Liberty Party. The Liberty Party had two potential goals: "achieving national political victory or pressuring one or both of the major parties to adopt an unequivocally antislavery platform" (p. 78). The chronology moves forward predictably for historians familiar with antislavery politics. Conscience Whigs and Liberty men gave way to Free Soilers in the wake of opposition to the invasion of Mexico and debate over the Wilmot Proviso, followed by the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854) giving birth to the Republican Party as the Whigs fell apart. Yet Brooks places far more emphasis in Liberty Poweron prominent congressional posts than Richard H. Sewell dedicated to such seats in his foundational text on antislavery politics, Ballots for Freedom: Antislavery Politics in the United States, 1837–1860(New York, 1976). Brooks pays close attention to contests over the speakership of the House of Representatives, a post that readers of Leonard L. Richards's The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780–1860(Baton Rouge, 2009) will know was occupied by slaveholders for two-thirds of the years through 1850. Republican Nathaniel P. Banks's successful campaign for this seat in 1856 thus marked a crucial moment in antislavery politicians' long war to craft a viable congressional coalition. Banks was a recent convert to the Republican ranks, and his candidacy united Republicans and nativist Know-Nothings. The Republican Party embodied the culmination of decades of labor by Liberty men and Free Soilers to found a voluntary association with millions of members dedicated to thwarting the mastery of slaveholding politicians over free state voters by "divorcing the federal government from slavery" (p. 211). Brooks's book deserves to be read in tandem with This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy(Cambridge, Mass., 2016) by Matthew Karp. As Karp demonstrates, the antislavery politicians Brooks studies faced a very confident—not isolationist—group of slaveholding politicians who had global ambitions. If Britain was an antislavery and antidemocratic empire by 1833, if not 1807, as is acknowledged in Liberty [End Page 679] Power, then the growing global influence of the British empire is seen as an existential threat to American slavery by the influential southern politicians Karp studies. Liberty Powermisses an opportunity to contribute to the historiography of antislavery politics in a transnational context by not paying more attention to trends in British politics from 1833, but then it would not be the book that Brooks promises his readers. John H. Matsui Virginia Military Institute Copyright...

This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy by Matthew Karp

Reviewed by: This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy by Matthew Karp Brian Schoen (bio) This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy. By Matthew Karp. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2016. Pp. 360. Cloth, $29.95.) Not that long ago scholars portrayed antebellum southern planter-politicians as parochial, keen on walling themselves off from the changing world. Even as intellectual and economic historians chipped away at the image of a culturally isolated, anticapitalist South, political historians [End Page 660] continued to study their actors chiefly within their plantation kingdoms, state legislatures, or as combatants in an increasingly raucous national political arena. Starting in the late aughts, however, historians thrust southern statesmen onto the world political stage. Building on the pioneering work of Robert E. May's The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 1854–1861 (1973) and more fully developed nineteenth-century global histories, Edward Bartlett Rugemer's The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War (2008), Matthew Pratt Guterl's American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation (2008), and Robert E. Bonner's Mastering America: Southern Slaveholders and the Crisis of American Nationhood (2009) highlight the challenges of navigating slavery through rocky waters. My own (bias alert) The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics, and the Global Origins of the Civil War (2009) stresses the power that slaveholders perceived cotton gave them as they did battle in the global arena. Matthew Karp's This Vast Southern Empire draws deeply from this scholarship, while moving beyond it to demonstrate just how crucial southern politicians were in directing federal policy toward what he calls a "proslavery internationalism" (4). This densely researched, carefully argued, and artfully written book persuasively shows that the South's politicians were often at the helm of the federal government's core military and diplomatic apparatus during the late antebellum period. Karp reminds us of their outsized influence by showing that southerners held nearly 80 percent of the secretaryships of war and the navy. From 1847 to 1861, they also dominated the House and Senate Committees on Naval and Military Affairs, providing a majority of the committee appointments and controlling the leadership in 73 percent of the sessions. Southern influence over the War Department, from John C. Calhoun through Jefferson Davis and to John Floyd, has been long known. Karp will surprise many readers by showing that less well known southerners like Abel Upshur, John Y. Mason, Matthew Fontaine Maury, Thomas Butler King, and Stephen Mallory dominated U.S. naval policy. Nor in Karp's telling were these small government-types. Instead—like Max M. Edling in A Hercules in the Cradle: War, Money, and the American State, 1783–1867 (2014)—he sees this era and these men as expanding and modernizing federal power, from gunboats to artillery to administrative systems. Though southern leaders were divided over the pursuit of territorial expansion, their single-minded desire to preserve slavery at home and abroad led them to expand American federal influence on land and at sea in the Caribbean Rim and South Atlantic. Far from fatalistic or recoiling at the modern arc of history, southern slaveholders applied strength to [End Page 661] bend it toward their will, believing that "slavery and progress had proved impressively congruent" (169). Situating this story within the broader contours of global, national, and sectional political narratives is tricky business, but Karp proves up to the task. He offers nuanced examinations of singular moments, such as Henry Wise's tempestuous time as minister to Brazil, and of major events, including Texas's annexation and the Mexican-American War. He moves adeptly from the halls of Congress to cabinet deliberations to, when necessary, the broader public debates over American foreign policy. His argument that southerners' concern about slavery's stability in Cuba, Texas, and Brazil likely outpaced their desire for territorial aggrandizement is particularly noteworthy. In a few places Karp's emphasis stretches beyond the evidence. Southerners may have agreed that "the record of U.S. foreign policy in this period forms little more than a chronicle of anxieties about Cuban slave emancipation" (61). Nationally, however, there were many...

The Local, National, and International Politics of Slavery: Edward Everett’s Nomination as U.S. Minister to Great Britain

The Local, National, and International Politics of SlaveryEdward Everett’s Nomination as U.S. Minister to Great Britain Matthew Mason (bio) On July 16, 1841, President John Tyler nominated Edward Everett to be the United States’ minister to Great Britain. The Senate debated Everett’s nomination in executive sessions; this dragged on intermittently until Everett’s appointment was confirmed by a 23–19 vote on September 13, the last day of this special session of Congress.1 The Senate’s executive sessions were secret, but as the delay grew protracted word leaked out that southern senators opposed Everett’s appointment because they considered him a dangerous abolitionist. Those in the press who seconded that opposition based it on public letters Everett had written while governor of Massachusetts in the late 1830s. The resulting press furor in the North produced talk of retaliation and ultimately disunion. The storm dissipated when Everett won confirmation, but its lightning had illuminated how interconnected local, national, and international questions could be in American politics when slavery was at issue. Most historians of American foreign relations have underrated the links between sectional domestic politics and international questions. Those who call for study of these connections continue to take the posture of voices in the wilderness, insisting quite rightly that both political and diplomatic historians could benefit from increased interchange.2 In recent years, scholars of the sectional politics of slavery in the Civil War era have turned their attention increasingly to the international arena.3 But the Everett episode adds to this emerging picture by demonstrating that what a politician said with an eye to reelection to his state capital could reverberate in deliberations in the nation’s capital concerning who should represent the nation in a great foreign capital. The Everett confirmation imbroglio thus highlighted how vulnerable national party coalitions were to sectional disruptions by epitomizing the multiple angles from which such disruptions could appear. At a time in which the Whig Party already faced serious sectional and ideological cleavages, the confirmation combat placed even greater pressure on party unity. [End Page 3] Northern Whigs, previously among the staunchest of unionists, shocked many observers by indulging in bitter sectional rhetorical responses to the threat to Everett. And while Democrats were happy, from a partisan point of view, to inflict travail on a Whig nominee and potentially divide their opponents, only southern Democrats found opposition to Everett on grounds related to slavery a straightforward proposition. The course of the debate and the Senate’s eventual endorsement of Everett, however, demonstrated how loyalty to party and the Union could triumph over sectional politics. Within the framework of southern politics, the Democrats and southern rights men in this debate employed a classic version of what scholar William Cooper has called “the politics of slavery,” in which antebellum southern politicians accused the other party of unsoundness on slavery. In this cycle of “sectional one-upmanship practiced by the two parties,” the standard charge was that one’s own northern allies were reliable on slavery, while the other party’s northern men were rank abolitionists. Although pushing the slavery issue into state and sectional politics in this way proved counterproductive to keeping it out of national politics, Cooper argues, neither party could seem to help itself.4 But while national party managers were caught off guard by the controversy, they neither found themselves paralyzed by it nor blundered through it, proving creative and resourceful in managing the final vote. Furthermore, the months-long war of words demonstrated the passionate devotion to the Union among southern Whigs. Strongly committed moderates may seem oxymoronic to us, but southern Whigs, as leading unionists, deserve more attention than most modern scholars have paid them.5 They were certainly much in evidence in key roles during the Everett confirmation dispute. While this controversy seems to have genuinely shocked many observers, Everett was not one of them, despite being much farther removed from Washington than they were. Upon receiving word of his nomination while traveling in Europe, he wrote in his diary that he “should not be surprized if some opposition—perhaps successful—should be made to it from the South.”6 This reaction showed...

Upstate New York on the Brink of War: The Garrisonians and the March Toward Civil War.

Upstate New York on the Brink of War: The Garrisonians and the March Toward Civil War. Nick Thony (bio) The day Thurlow Weed departed for Illinois to meet with President-elect Abraham Lincoln, his influential newspaper, the Albany Evening Journal, published a controversial editorial criticizing the radical element of the Republican Party. In an attempt to temper concerns the secession debate had created across the United States, the politically astute Republican newspaperman, “drew the line between radical and conservative Republicans.” As the prospects of war became more apparent to Weed, he argued that amplifying the conservative voices in the Party would ultimately give rise to a much stronger Union in the event of conflict. “By insisting that the war was prosecuted to maintain the government and preserve the Union,” Weed argued, “the Democratic masses, with some of their leaders, would remain loyal.” However, if “the whole Republican party proclaimed it a war for the abolition of slavery, a united South would prove too strong for a divided North.”1 By the time Weed arrived in Springfield, Illinois, the recently elected Lincoln had read the editorial. Lincoln admitted that he had been instructed by the piece, but told Weed he still held out hope that war could be avoided. He also expressed concern over Weed’s critique of his fellow Republicans in New York saying, “You have opened your fire at a critical moment, aiming at friend and foe alike. It will do much good or much mischief.” It would not take long for some of those friends to respond to Weed’s stance.2 Upstate New York had long been a hotbed of abolitionist activity. While many reform-minded residents joined anti-slavery societies in the [End Page 149] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Hon. Thurlow Weed (between 1855 and 1865). Photograph courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, it was not until 1827 –when “An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery” (passed in 1799) brought an end to slavery—that the movement gained momentum.3 Various antislavery factions, often hindered by schisms within their ranks, emerged. Historian Judith Wellman argues that these upstate New York reformers can be divided into three key groups: legal reformers, political abolitionists, and egalitarian abolitionists (some of whom defined themselves as [End Page 150] “Garrisonians”). These groups regularly chastised one another, but, as Wellman explains, the lines distinguishing these groups were often blurry.4 This is illustrated by the relationship between Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott. Stanton, the organizer of the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, who was initially associated with the political brand of abolitionists, dedicated most of her early advocacy promoting equal rights for women through political reforms. However, Stanton’s introduction to Mott, a Quaker and prominent social advocate, connected her to the Garrisonian element of abolitionism which “emphasized not political action but moral suasion.” Widely viewed as radicals, the Garrisonians embraced “total equality for all people.”5 It is not surprising, then, that when the Garrisonians responded to Weed’s editorial, they assailed his integrity. Lydia Mott, a fellow Garrisonian and distant relative of Lucretia Mott’s husband, shared her perspective in a late November personal letter to Stanton. Mott declared that Weed was “entirely devoid of any fixed moral principle.”6 For Mott and other abolitionists of the moral suasion sect, Weed’s willingness to compromise with southern politicians on the expansion of slave territories and slave compensation was too much to bare. “Opposed to all compromises,” the Garrisonians organized the aptly named “No Compromise With Slaveholders” speaking tour. Just as Lincoln had predicted Weed’s letter had an impact, and this group took up the task of traveling across upstate New York early in the winter of 1861. Bouncing precariously from faction to faction, those who participated in the “No Compromise With Slaveholders” tour navigated the tangled abolitionist networks of upstate New York that existed in the decades proceeding 1861. The key organizer, Susan B. Anthony, began her career as a social reformer, engaging in numerous debates regarding equal pay for women teachers, women’s suffrage, temperance, and abolition. Guided at times...

Black Woman Reformer: Ida B. Wells, Lynching, and Transatlantic Activism by Sarah L. Silkey

Reviewed by: Black Woman Reformer: Ida B. Wells, Lynching, and Transatlantic Activism by Sarah L. Silkey Lauren Acker Black Woman Reformer: Ida B. Wells, Lynching, and Transatlantic Activism. By Sarah L. Silkey. (Athens, Ga., and London: University of Georgia Press, 2015. Pp. [xiv], 206. $49.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-4557-4.) Lynching and the life of antilynching activist Ida B. Wells have received ample attention from historians, but Black Woman Reformer: Ida B. Wells, Lynching, and Transatlantic Activism offers a new transatlantic dimension to the current scholarship. The book explores public discourse about mob violence in Great Britain and the United States in the nineteenth century, with particular emphasis on Wells’s two antilynching campaigns in Great Britain in the early 1890s. Sarah L. Silkey contends that these campaigns deserve new consideration, and she offers an in-depth discussion of Wells’s reform networks, arguments, tactics, and global impact on the debate about lynching. Wells faced great resistance to her antilynching activism from white Americans, but in Great Britain Wells established herself as a “‘black lady reformer’” presenting the truth about mob violence (p. 4). Wells asserted that mob violence was not caused by black men raping white women, as white southerners maintained, but that it was animated by racism and the need to preserve white supremacy. Many Britons came to accept Wells’s [End Page 461] race-based explanation for mob violence, motivating antilynching activism in Great Britain and forcing Americans to contend with this critique on an international stage. Drawing on newspaper coverage from both sides of the Atlantic, Silkey demonstrates that Wells’s British campaigns not only amplified her voice but also transformed transatlantic discourse about lynching. This transformation was possible because Britons accepted Wells as an “appropriate and ladylike” truth-teller who was pushed to action out of necessity and the desire to protect the public welfare (p. 78). Wrapped in the regard this status conferred, Wells managed to push the limits of public propriety and speak about brutal violence and interracial sex. Although Wells’s campaigns in Great Britain were not without struggle, many of the obstacles she faced were internal to British activist networks. Eventually, Wells did win substantial support from the British press, igniting a national discussion. Public outcry then motivated letter-writing campaigns and petitions to U.S. politicians and the formation of the London Anti-Lynching Committee, which sent a delegation overseas to investigate mob violence. While it is clear that Wells helped create momentum for antilynching activism in Great Britain in the 1890s and elicited strong responses from southern politicians, how to evaluate the impact of Wells’s campaigns and British antilynching efforts is challenging. The brutality of publicized lynchings and the perception that Americans were flouting due process in favor of mob rule created negative press for the United States, which southern leaders and concerned individuals sought to combat. Through newspapers at home and abroad, white southerners defended their regard for justice and worked to educate the British on the “true” reason for lynching: the rape of white women. While these responses show American engagement with British antilynching discourse, Silkey also suggests that British criticism was directly responsible for subtler shifts in the way white southerners justified and managed mob violence. But this assertion is difficult for Silkey to prove because of the tumultuous domestic landscape of the United States in the 1890s. Additionally, British antilynching efforts ultimately elicited a prolific backlash, shifting the focus from the causes of mob violence itself and motivating the defensive retrenchment of lynching apologists. Wells eventually realized that her British campaigns had yielded little measurable gain, leaving her a lone crusader, unable to rally support for an African American–led antilynching campaign. While mob violence would persist, Wells’s arguments influenced lynching discourse for decades to come, and her British campaigns forced Americans to contemplate the price of lynching on the international stage. Through an exploration of British perspectives on lynching, Black Woman Reformer broadens the scope of what is typically viewed as a distinctly southern phenomenon. Lauren Acker Georgia College Copyright © 2016 The Southern Historical Association

Senator James Eastland: Mississippi’s Jim Crow Democrat by Maarten Zwiers

Reviewed by: Senator James Eastland: Mississippi’s Jim Crow Democrat by Maarten Zwiers Catherine A. Conner Senator James Eastland: Mississippi’s Jim Crow Democrat. By Maarten Zwiers. Making the Modern South. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015. Pp. [x], 293. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-6001-5.) Maarten Zwiers’s book Senator James Eastland: Mississippi’s Jim Crow Democrat joins a growing literature that reconsiders white southern politicians who held powerful sway over national politics from the New Deal to the Reagan Revolution. No longer mere segregationists in these retellings, Mississippi’s James O. Eastland, South Carolina’s J. Strom Thurmond, and others are cold warriors who stifled civil rights and labor unions in the name of states’ rights and free enterprise. Such revisionism, coupled with recent explorations of Sun Belt politics, reveals the bipartisan, multiregional, and diverse ideological origins of the New Right and the decline of the Democratic South. To enter these debates, Zwiers uses a political biography of Eastland, one with a purposeful focus on the relationship between Mississippi Democrats and the national Democratic Party in the middle third of the twentieth century. Eastland becomes the great compromiser within this milieu, moving from staunch Dixiecrat to loyalist Democrat even as his party moved toward racial liberalism. Yet the tension between the national and state Democratic parties is not exactly the full story of this book. The Democratic Party’s retaliation after the Dixiecrat revolt, Zwiers suggests, kept Eastland in line. Zwiers continually asserts that Eastland’s position as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee explains why the senator remained a Democrat even as Mississippi began to move toward the Republican Party by the mid-1950s. Though many of his constituents challenged his position, Eastland maintained that staying within the Democratic Party—and keeping his chairmanship—was the best way to keep the state’s interests represented in Washington, D.C. Zwiers succeeds remarkably well in documenting such internal tension among Mississippi Democrats. Within this story line, Eastland becomes a moderate segregationist in an era of massive resistance, a characterization that only makes sense against the backdrop of Governor Ross Barnett’s hardline actions that incited a riot at the University of Mississippi over James Meredith’s admission. The ghosts of the Dixiecrats were ones that Eastland, though a founding father, could not control. And indeed, Eastland becomes a background character in the last few chapters that focus on the classical civil rights era. Zwiers’s investigation of gubernatorial races and the transition of the state’s GOP from the Black and Tans to rebranded Dixiecrats, overrides his intended story line and reveals a longer history of white southern Republicans and the internal disintegration of the Democratic South. Such historical work makes Zwiers’s book invaluable to scholars of modern American politics. Who Eastland was, however, remains a mystery, though it needs unraveling to further add to the scholarly conversations about southern and national politics. Democratic senator Patrick A. (Pat) McCarran of Nevada mentored [End Page 725] the young Eastland on the Judiciary Committee, a relationship that reveals ideological similarities between the South and the West before the regions banded together under the GOP. Zwiers also treats Eastland’s racism, anti-unionism, and anticommunism as givens, the unexplained worldview of a patrician planter from the Delta. Yet Zwiers misses an opportunity to concretely link states’ rights to free enterprise, the de facto ideology promoted by the New Right, free of white supremacy. Of equal importance is the unexplored inconsistency between Eastland’s championing of free enterprise and his state’s dependence on federal largesse, which he secured through his position on the Senate Agriculture Committee. With the exception of a few anecdotes of dinners and drinks, one humorously featuring Senator Edward M. Kennedy, ever-flowing whiskey, and an office plant in desperate need of rehydration, Zwiers rarely shows how Eastland wielded his power on the Judiciary Committee to protect Mississippi’s state sovereignty against what he perceived to be an encroaching federal government. Nonetheless, Zwiers uses Eastland to reveal a much more politically dynamic Mississippi than its history as a one-party state suggests. Catherine A. Conner North Carolina State University Copyright © 2016 The Southern Historical...

The Mississippi Secession Convention: Delegates and Deliberations in Politics and War, 1861–1865 by Timothy B. Smith

BOOK REVIEW The Mississippi Secession Convention: Delegates and Deliberations in Politics and War, 1861-1865, by Timothy B. Smith. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014. 296 pp. $25.00. THE MISSISSIPPI SECESSION CONVENTION, WHICH MET IN JACKSON IN January and March 1861, laid out the causes for which they had chosen to secede from the Union by stating, “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest in the world” (229). This statement made by these Mississippians leaves little doubt as to the cause of secession and, subsequently, the American Civil War. The institution of slavery, its economic viability, its expansion, its future, were all threatened by the 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States. The waning influence of Southern politicians in the United States Congress allowed slave owners across the South to increase the rhetoric of secession as a viable option to the inevitable abolitionist attempts that would come from the North in the 1860s. As such, following the lead of politicians in South Carolina, Mississippians called a special convention, to begin in January 1861, in order to debate the idea of seceding from the Union and whether or not to join with other Southern states in a newly established confederacy. InTheMississippiSecessionConvention:DelegatesandDeliberations in Politics and War, 1861-1865, historian Timothy B. Smith presents the most comprehensive examination of the deliberations held at the convention, filling a gap in the historical record and challenging the prevailing historiography of the convention. Smith provides a day-byday assessment of the nearly month-long convention, arguing that the typical view of solidarity amongst the convention delegates is not shown in the historical record. Rather than being in lockstep on every issue, including secession, Smith notes, delegates voted on a number of resolutions due to ideological, political, and local forces important to each individual. By focusing on the debates and voting records of the delegates, Smith shows that the men of the convention dealt with the subject of secession and the creation of a new government as distinct issues. 130 Mississippi Quarterly Smith begins his work by providing brief introductions to the significant power players of the convention. These men are placed into two camps: the “Secessionists” and the “Cooperationists.” Chief among the secessionists are L. Q. C. Lamar, then still a member of the United States House of Representatives, and James Z. George, a Mexican War veteran who would later become one of Mississippi’s prominent political leaders. The cooperationists were led by James L. Alcorn, wealthy plantation owner and political rival to Lamar, who, Smith argues, “realizes that war means destruction and destruction means poverty” (8). These men would clash over the question of secession, yet, once the die was cast, would occasionally cooperate on one legislative matter or another. Smith conveys to the reader that the members, through their interactions during the convention, systematically managed both the greater ideological questions of secession and the minutiae of dealing with daily functions previously under the responsibility of the federal government.Thesemen,Smithnotes,werenotthegreatpoliticalleaders of the state but “the vast majority of the delegates were mid-level statesmen, and not a few were lower-level county politicians at best” (145). Though mid-level statesman, the men of the convention were tasked with enacting a monumental decision and dealing with the political and economic issues that followed. According to Smith, the differences between the secessionists and cooperationists that existed prior to the vote for secession retreated into the background as the delegates were forced to deal with the changes that secession brought. The cooperationists “left their former ideals and morphed with the secessionistsintoasupportingroleforMississippi”(146).Theirdecisions, Smith notes, affected every person in the state and changed how Mississippians dealt with the rest of the country and the rest of the world. “It was perhaps in the racial realm,” Smith writes, “that their decisions would have the most effect, because their convention would eventually lead to war and a complete turnover in the economic and social aspects of slavery, and would begin the long process of equalization of the races that is still going on today” (146). It is “in the racial realm” where the consequences of...