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Reviews in American History 32.1 (2004) 41-48



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The Infrapolitics of Slavery?

Mark Voss-Hubbard


William A. Link. Roots of Secession: Slavery and Politics in Antebellum Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. xvii + 387 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $45.00.

The struggle to understand and give meaning to secession started in 1860-61 and has raged ever since. At the time, most southerners viewed secession as a justifiable and heroic act to preserve white freedom and state's rights against the centralized tyranny represented by an abolitionist president and his northern partisan allies, a rather spontaneous explosion of popular liberty analogous to the American Revolution. In the view of most northerners, a small clique of aristocratic, slaveholding ideologues orchestrated secession to maintain the power they were losing over the nation as well as over the South's non-slaveholding and pro-Unionist majority. Recent scholarship has simultaneously enriched, clarified, and complicated the story. On the one hand there is virtual unanimity that the defense of slavery lay at the heart of the secession movement. Yet because of slavery's manifold dimensions and consequences—it was a system of labor expropriation and of race control; it was the fountain of southern culture, ideology, and social ethics; and it was the foundation of economic and political power in the antebellum South—current explanations of secession appear no less divergent than those offered by the Civil War generation. Some scholars see secession as a response to the social and economic threats that the Republicans' non-extension policy regarding slavery posed to the South's ruling class. Secession would mitigate latent class conflict—and maintain slaveholder hegemony—by preserving the opportunities of non-slaveholders to acquire slaves and plantations of their own. 1 Others stress the non-slaveholders' interest in defending their traditional society based on white privilege, economic self-sufficiency, and patriarchal values against the abolitionist-Republican coalition and its modernizing, centralizing, amalgamating ways. 2 Still others emphasize the politics of secession, whether the story of the fire-eaters' ultimate triumph or the essential congruence between secession and the values of honor and manly independence that had long characterized southern political culture. 3 And in yet another approach to the problem, some scholars situate secession in a [End Page 41] broader party system perspective, stressing the Democratic party's dominance in the Lower South. The demise of party competition in the Lower South by the 1850s created a political dynamic that favored extreme reactions to the election of a Republican president. Those reactions, expressed through the apparatus of the southern Democratic party, simply steamrolled other efforts, principally of former Whigs in the Upper South and northern conservatives, to convince folks that genuine alternatives to secession existed in 1860-61. 4

William Link's contribution to this venerable historiography is part synthesis and part provocation. It is synthetic in the sense that Link skillfully integrates many of the above lines of inquiry and analysis in this well-written account of Virginia's politics from 1850 to 1861. It is provocative because Link wastes little time in announcing that "historians have said little about how slaves' actions affected politics or how politics affected slaves' actions" (p. 1). Here Link is not referring to the many scholars who have discussed in broad terms how slavery's social relations affected antebellum southern society, its political culture, its legal codes, its leaders' sense of honor and duty and obligation and entitlement. Indeed I know of no recent historian of antebellum southern politics whose analysis is completely disconnected from or wholly uninformed by the copious literature on the master-slave relationship. 5 Rather Link draws on anthropologist Donald Scott and historian Robin D.G. Kelley to argue that the politics of secession masked a "hidden transcript" of slave agency. The politics of secession, Link insists, "reflected an infrapolitics of slavery" (p. 4). 6 Link thus proposes a very specific empirical connection between slavery and secession in Virginia, a connection in which slave action becomes a pivotal, causal agent in secession.

In making this very large claim, Link...

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