Mastering America: Southern Slaveholders and the Crisis of American Nationhood (review)

A recent article on Richmond during the Civil War concluded with a rather unusual sentence, at least unusual in the context of the article, which was concerned with communication during the conflict, not its moral dimensions. "White Southerners have left us a record of their quest for certainty that has universal significance for the study of the human condition in times of war," it asserted; "The fact that they were fighting for the wrong cause should not prevent us from examining it."1 An historian is not the Recording Angel, but the need to reassure readers that an interest, any interest, in the white South is not accompanied by moral slippage toward the Confederate cause seems to be a requirement of our own historical period. This may, as Robert Bonner suggests, compromise our understanding of the forces at work in antebellum and Civil War America. Many historians, he notes, "have tended to conflate an understandable revulsion at proslavery ideology with a wilful disassociation of bondage from prevailing American norms," and the story of antebellum America thereby becomes one of the process whereby "southern slaveholders seemed to have become increasingly alienated from national ideals." (xv) Yet, as Bonner argues in this very careful, detailed and challenging work, the fascination with what made 'The South' sectional has obscured the extent to which slaveholders wished to nationalize American slavery, and their 'increasingly ambitious' but also increasingly successful attempts to construct "a proslavery version of American nationhood that sought to assimilate bondage to republican norms." (xvi, xviii).

Bonner begins by tracing the growing confidence of America's slaveholders, the development of what he terms the "first stage of proslavery imperialism" that marked a dramatic change from the early decades of the republic. Then, he argues, slaveholders "tended to be more anxious than ambitious," but the growth of both cotton and federal power "secured their mastery and established their credentials as guardians of the national interest." (5) By 1848, anxiety had been replaced by a "new sense of the South as more of a fortress than a flank," and from its battlements slaveholding spokesmen and women launched their crusade to establish the American republic on the secure—militarily and constitutionally—base that, they believed, slavery provided. (21) It is from this perspective that Bonner encourages us to explore afresh the "political crisis of the 1850s," and consider the larger "geopolitical considerations" of the slaveholders' world view; in particular the threat, articulated by Andrew Butler in 1847, posed by "an American continental empire that threatened to transform itself from a guarantor of security to the agent of slaveholders' destruction." (33) At the same time as they encouraged and promoted America's expansion as further evidence of the cause of God's chosen nation slaveholders formulated and refined the "cause of the South," states' rights. This was, Bonner argues, more "positive and expansive" a position—for those who adopted it—than hindsight has made it seem. "White southerners," he stresses, "understood their defense of a decentralized version of state sovereignty as a vital contribution to American liberty, just as they considered their march across the continent as achieving American grandeur." (41)

The first two sections of what is undoubtedly a broad-ranging and cogently argued work provide a nuanced analysis of the unsteady balancing act performed by a white South simultaneously ambitious for the growth of the federal republic and concerned that, in the words of John C. Calhoun, its expansion was "at once our glory and our danger." (64) Whether the focus is on the increasingly convoluted contortions involved in defining and defending proslavery Christianity, on the response to Uncle Tom's Cabin, or on the drive to preserve Mount Vernon as a "resonant national shrine," Bonner highlights southern slaveholders' "quest for security within a hostile world." (197, 218) Ultimately, of course, that security was sought in separation, and resulted in secession, the defining "crisis of American nationhood" and the first-step toward...