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64CIVIL WAR HISTORY later (two months in McHenry's life) the same gentleman is found anticipating that the Federalists would have no cause for alarm in the Republican program—all of which proves little, except that suitable quotes can be found to prove almost anything. Perhaps it is unfair to ask an author to do more than he intended. Moreover, there is good reason to suppose that most of his interpretations will stand up under further investigation. But it remains a rather impressionistic study containing more provocative suggestions than satisfying conclusions. If the reader expects no more than this, he will find it a rewarding experience. Norman K. Risjord University of Wisconsin Crisis of Fear: Secession in South Carolina. By Steven A. Channing. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970. Pp. 315. $7.95.) "Secession was a revolution of passion," writes the author of this prizewinning book, "and the passion was fear." Succinctly stated, this is the essential argument of this thoughtful study of South Carolina during that state's last year in the Union. Channing rejects those interpreters of the coming of the Civil War who have persistently looked beyond the issue of slavery in their search for more "fundamental" (the quotes are his) causes for conflict and focuses his attention properly on the body of beliefs, myths and emotions which the existence of slavery brought into being. The dominant, even overwhelming, attitude of South Carolinians on the eve of secession was an attitude of fear—fear for the future of their "peculiar institution," fear of slave insurrection and fear for the integrity of southern civilization itself—and it was on the basis of these fears that they constructed their argument for disunion. All their apprehensions were irrevocably tied to membership in the Union and disunion , for some reason, seemed to offer safety and tranquillity. The "fear-of-insurrection-abolition syndrome," we are informed, "was the core of the secession persuasion" and "was so very vast and frightening that it literally consumed the mass of lesser 'causes' of secession which have inspired historians." While South Carolina's situation was in some ways unique, the attitudes of its citizens reflected southern opinion on a broader scale. The idea is not entirely new but it has never before been so thoroughly examined, so well-articulated and so convincingly presented as it is in this volume. Channing's conclusions are ably demonstrated by the weight of his evidence and by his own skillful analysis. The fears of South Carolinians were deep-seated and widespread, providing a unity within the state that pushed older sectional and class antagonisms into the background. They had also been building for a long time. The emergence of militant abolitionism had early raised the spectre of slave rebellion and racial conflict and had driven southerners into an increasingly desperate defense of slavery. The growth of the BOOK REVIEWS05 Republican party in the late 185Cs provided a political dimension to their anxiety. No matter that South Carolinians exaggerated the strength of the abolitionist movement or the unity of northern antislavery opinion or that they misread the appeal of the Republican party. The threat of outside interference in their established pattern of social relationships seemed real, all the more so because of their own basic sense of insecurity . In the closing months of 1859, all these fears boiled to the surface and assumed new and frightening significance with John Brown's Harpers Ferry raid, the incident with which Channing initiates his study. Crisis of Fear is the story of South Carolina's desperate search for security , either within or outside the Union, during the year from John Brown's raid to the passage of the state's secession ordinance in December , 1860. Fear was felt and expressed in varying degrees by South Carolinians but all agreed that the time for action on behalf of the South and its institutions had arrived. Moderates looked to other slave states in the hope that a united South, through its collective strength in the nation, might discover a solution to the crisis. Their effort failed and "cooperationism" as a southern strategy, either for exacting concessions within the Union or for the employment of the ultimate...

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