The Self-Inflicted Wound: Southern Politics in the Nineteenth Century (review)

book reviews363 Arthur inherited the family homestead in 1919 and found the task of providing for its extended families and for his own to be aheavy burden. He was finally crushed by the depression of the 1930s and forced to sell the homestead. The seeds of Sally Good'n, however, continue to multiply and make valuable contributions to the nation as doctors, lawyers, judges, military and business leaders, and educators. C. Calvin Smith Arkansas State University The Self-inflicted Wound: Southern Politics in the Nineteenth Century. By Robert F. Durden. (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1985. Pp. x, 150. $16.00.) Durden's thesis is that "the single greatest cause of the essentially tragic political fate of the South in the nineteenth century was a self-inflicted wound: the gradual surrender ofthesouthern whitemajority, beginning in the 1820s, to the pride, fears, and hates of racism" (p. ix). By 1890 the South had suffered war and economic underdevelopment, and was "yet mired in sullen, defensive sectionalism and bitterly worsening relations between the races" (p. 132). In the era of Jeffersonian ascendency, southerners and northerners could at least agree in feeling uneasy about slavery. After the Missouri Compromise, however, southerners' deepest fears seemed to be confirmed by the growing numbers of slaves within their midst. Virginia alone attempted to deal with the problem, but in 1832 the legislature defeated a proposal to "initiate steps looking toward abolition" (p. 38). Opportunity was lost, and southerners attempted to overcome their misgivings by claiming that slavery was a positive good. Exactly why the South "closed ranks in defense of slavery" (p. 39) has never been satisfactorily answered, says Durden, who believed the explanation lies not in class but in race. The white equality implied in the advance of democracy in the 1820s and 1830s could be more easily maintained if there were agreement that blacks must occupy a position of inferiority. But when southerners expanded their argument to claim that federal law prohibiting slave expansion in the territories would be unconstitutional, they paved the way for the creation of the Republican party and Lincoln 's victory in 1860. In the challenge of the Civil War, Jefferson Davis, a nationalist who refused to "let old-time scruples about states' rights" (p. 99) bother him, interfered with slavery and successfully pressured Congress into accepting slave soldiers. The decision was too late, but Durden believes the slave soldier debate was another lost opportunity, which "might have been a turning point in southern history" (p. 105) if the decision and its accompanying emancipation had been unequivocal. Durden believes that the real struggle of the postwar years was not 364civil war history between whites and blacks but between the New South-oriented business and planter interests and the majority of white farmers. In the long run, the Redeemers left apositive legacy: the South embraced industrialization , which eventually led "to its full reintegration into the mainstream of the nation's life" (p. 131). In a mere 132 pages of text Durden provides an amazingly complete sketch of southern race relations and politics during the nineteenth century . That so little of the discussion seems new or unusual may only be a measure of the degree to which a concensus has been achieved over the revisionism ofthe last two generations. Accordingly, this book will have an important role if it is brought out in a less expensive paperback edition and promoted for use as collateral reading in courses on race relations , the Civil War and Reconstruction, southern politics, even perhaps the U.S. survey—wherever a background in nineteenth-century politics, sectionalism, and race is necessary to place a course in proper context. One must be cautious in ascribing too much to racism. If it is really the South's self-inflicted wound, we must remember that the entire nation shot itself in the foot. It was not racism that made the South distinctive from the North but rather the way in which it found expression. Certainly the surrender of the white majority to racial fears is a self-inflicted wound that helps us to understand the nineteenth-century history of all the United States. If this is true, the explanatory power...