The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (review)

The puzzle of secession continues to fascinate the chroniclers of America's past. Historians have long debated who supported the break with the Union, as well as when and why they did so. The stakes are high. The answers reverberate through contemporary political debates about flags, reparations, and national monuments. Sinha wades straight into the center of this discussion. Drawing on the standard tools of the historian's trade-personal papers, newspapers, political speeches, and federal census returns-Sinha argues that secession was a deeply conservative movement led by a cadre of South Carolinian planter politicians willing to sacrifice democracy on the altar of human bondage.

That antidemocratic impulse thrived in antebellum South Carolina. A dense population of slaves spread widely across the state along with a political system that had always been stingy in terms of equal participation made the state fertile ground for the secessionist leaders. Largely protected from meaningful challenges from Unionists and upcountry yeomen, antebellum South Carolina's slaveholding secessionists refined an ideology designed to secure their property in people.

Despite a careful reading of secessionist writing, Sinha falls short of explaining fully what motivated her counterrevolutionaries. The ownership of many slaves-which she demonstrates through an analysis of manuscript census returns-is insufficient explanation. Not every southerner who took up arms during the spring and summer of 1861 was a slaveholder. Nor was every slaveholder compelled by the secessionist argument. Indeed, as Sinha points out, the same population of planter elites that gave birth to rabid secessionism also produced men resistant to such radical policies. John C. Calhoun and his ideological offspring crafted the political arguments for disunion and took good advantage of South Carolina's antidemocratic political structure to steamroll their way to secession, but as secessionists discovered during the political crisis of 1850, the rest of the slaveholding South could be stubbornly deaf to their siren song of state rights.

Missing as well are the people who purportedly made secession necessary-the slaves. Sinha's dependence on the writings of planter politicians removes her-and her audience-from the enslaved men and women behind the politics. By examining the relationship between South Carolina's secessionists and their human property more carefully-through, for example, plantation journals and correspondence with overseers-Sinha might have been prepared to distinguish more clearly between slaveholders who bought into secession early and those who held back.