Two Perspectives on the Secession Crisis

TWO PERSPECTIVES ON THE SECESSION CRISIS MargaretM.R. Kellow Charles Hoffman and Tess Hoffman. North bySouth: The Two Lives of Richard James Arnold. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988. xxii + 318 pp. Rtchard H. Sewell. A House Divided: Sectionalism and Civil War, 1848-1865. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988. xii + 223 pp. These two books survey the sectional crisis as if from opposite ends of a powerful telescope. Beginning in 1848with "the legacy of the Mexican War," Richard Sewell's A House Divided deftly surveys the broad range of events which led up to the firing on Fort Sumter in April of 1861 and which culminated four years later in Lee's surrender at Appomattox, giving as it were a macroscopic view of the sectional crisis. In North by South, the Hoffmans painstakingly reconstruct the experience of one man, Richard James Arnold. A member of a wealthy Northern mercantile family,Arnold became by his 1823 marriage, a Southern planter and slav~holder. For fifty years, his life and work straddled the Mason-Dixon Line, and thus, the Hoffmans argue, Arnold's experience epitomizes the sectional crisis microscopically. Sewell's crisp narrative takes into account much of the recent scholarship on this period, weaving political, economic, cultural, diplomatic and military history into a brief but coherent and highly readable account. Well-chosen anecdotes and vivid sketches of personalities and locales highlight clear analysis. Sewell's chapter on the military aspects of the War is particularly lucid, well-paced and concise. Moreover, Sewell takes his stand in the historiographical debate regarding the causes of the Civil War. He acknowledges the emergence of distinctly antithetical economic systems in the two sections. He also concedes the resulting disruption of partisan politics which rendered the political structures of the country no longer capable of defusing sectional antagonisms. But Sewell makes his own case for the centrality of slavery, in a real and not a symbolic sense, among the causes of the CivilWar. A House Divided will readily find a place as an introduction to the sectional crisis and the Civil War. Sewell's prose should ensure that the 234 Margaret M.R. Kellmv student or the general reader will be encouraged to read further, and the bibliographical summaries for each chapter will facilitate this undertaking. This is especially desirable because Sewell's "big picture 11 tends at times to flatten some details. In particular, more could have been said about class and regional differences within the two sections, although this may be beyond the scope of the work as it was conceived. Sewell may well be correct in according primacy to slavery itself among the causes of the Civil War, but the differing ways in which the "peculiar institution" interacted with local circumstances and issues are what ultimately tipped the balance toward war and therefore even in an overview, their impact needs to be acknowledged. Turning to the other end of the glass, Nort.h by South focusses on a single American, one uniquely situated to comprehend the sectional crisis. The Hoffmans centre their study of this son of a Quaker abolitionist around portions of Arnold's plantation journal, augmenting it with letters, diaries and account books of friends, family members and business acquaintances. For several decades, Arnold spent the winter months of every year managing his Georgia plantations. Then as the warm weather returned, bringing ·with it the threat of malaria, he would take his family north to summer at his family home in Providence and later Newport, Rhode Island. In neither situation did he turn his back on concerns arising out of the other portion of his life. Letters from his overseers and from a favoured slave kept him in touch with his plantations while he was in the North. Similarly, his brother-in-law and business partner kept him abreast of their Northern ventures during Arnold's sojourns in Georgia. In theory, no individual was better placed to apprehend the approaching crisis. Nevertheless, "the outbreak of the war caught the Arnolds unprepared" (xx), and why this should have been the case points to the most intriguing and, at the same time, the most frustrating aspect of the book. What the reader...