Toward a Patriarchial Republic: The Secession of Georgia (review)

BOOK REVIEWS93 but they will not find it to be a history of antislavery or any aspect of it as usually conceived. Rather, it examines the concerns of one set of ante-bellum Americans regarding, among other matters, antislavery tactics, religion and morality, sexuality, the family, the economy , and the Union. Abolitionists, the author shows, suffered doubts concerning American practices in all these areas. But for all his preoccupation with tension and anxiety, his major theme is consensus. Mr. Walters joins those who emphasize continuities, shared values, and mutual goals rather than their opposites. Here abolitionists do not appear markedly different from a great many other Americans sensitive to society's imperfections. Abolitionists too are found to have been all of a kind, despite their proclaimed differences and sectarianisms. The conflicts within the fraternity lacked the significance both contemporaries and later historians accorded them. In this assessment The Antishvery Appeal differs sharply with some signal recent scholarship, most conspicuously with Aileen Kraditor's Means and Ends in American Abolitionism, a work Mr. Walters says he admires but does not agree with (p. 153). The author's argument is supported by evidence culled chiefly from writings of the best known, most voluble abolitionists, some of them dating from many years after the end of their crusade. Thus the case is made. Yet the consensus view would be even more persuasive if the reader could forget that such was not the opinion held by abolitionists themselves and certainly not by either their contemporary foes or friends. Merton L. Dillon Ohio State University Toward a Patriarchial Republic: The Secession of Georgia. By Michael P. Johnson. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977. Pp. xxiv, 244. $15.00.) Only a few volumes ago in Civil War History, William W. Freehling suggested in an essay review of George H. Reese (ed.), Proceedings of the Virginia State Convention of 1861 (4 vols., Richmond, 1965), that themes of "internal conflict" and "sectional and class divisions" composed a "persistent dirge" in the deliberations of the secessionist South. His interpretation of the debate in Virginia as well as his research in secession movements of other southern states convinced Freehling that disunion came in large measure from the "fear that border planters would sell out, that nonslaveholders would turn against the institution if they had no free Negroes to worry about, that the cotton South and the border South were two different lands." 94CIVIL WAR HISTORY Freehling drew his tentative conclusions about internal conflict in the ante-bellum South from so-called "traditional" sources and appealed in his essay for the publication of more of these primary materials in the continuance of what he termed "the editorial revolution ." It is, therefore, ironic that Michael P. Johnson in his Toward a Patriarchal Republic: The Secession of Georgia reaches conclusions similar to Freehling's by relying most heavily upon the techniques of quantification. Johnson analyzes Georgia votes in the 1860 presidential election , in the selection of delegates to the secession convention, and in the ratification of the new state constitution drawn by the convention . On the surface the results of these contests appear quite puzzling. In November of 1860 Georgians gave arch-Southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge a plurality of their votes but endorsed moderation by dividing a majority of their ballots between John Bell and Stephen A. Douglas. Then on January 2, 1861, Georgians reversed the moderate stance by electing a small majority of immediate secessionist delegates to the state convention. And stranger still, significant numbers of Breckinridge voters endorsed cooperationist candidates (who possibly received a majority of the total vote), while equally significant numbers of Bell and Douglas voters chose secessionist candidates. Only in the ratification poll did Georgians display predictable behavior by dividing in rough accord with their stance on cooperation—immediate secession. However , in this election, held on July 2, 1861, the voter turnout was so small that conclusions drawn from an analysis of the returns must be tentative at best. From this somewhat confusing data and his interpretation of the "literary" evidence, Johnson concludes that secessionists in Georgia feared threats to the slave plantation system within the state as much or more than the challenge posed by...