Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1800-1860 (review)

74CTVTL WAR HISTORY mob,' to secure and perpetuate that ordered well-regulated environment that was essential to economic and social progress" (253), but he also insisted on equality of opportunity. In a controversial judgement that many historians may have some trouble accepting, Johannsen even claims that "to Lincoln, liberty and equality, that is, the freedom that was essential to equality of opportunity, was not constrained by racial bounds" (257), but Lincoln did not think that included social and political equality. " 'Equality of all men,' " remarks Johannsen, "obviously meant something less than 'equality of all men' " (262). The point is simply that Lincoln was not thinking in modern civil rights terms. In the first of two previously unpublished essays, Johannsen examines Carl Sandburg's Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years as a transition between older histories and the objective professionalism we know today. Many historians were upset by Sandburg's use of his imagination—what would be called "faction" today. In a judgement call that some historians will disagree with, Johannsen asks us to look upon Sandburg's work as an extension of his poetry, and contends that such work can have value as biography. The second newly published essay points out "that to midnineteenth -century Americans, the spirit that lay behind an event or a period was crucial to its understanding" (287), and suggests that understanding this Zeitgeist is just as essential to historians today. This means that we must consider history as literature, just as nineteenthcentury historians did. Johannsen does not claim to have settled "any of the problems of America's mid-nineteenth-century years. So few (if any) problems in the past are ever really settled anyway. [But] perhaps they will make the pursuit of those vibrant and troubled years a little more interesting to the pursuer" (xii). Indeed they have, and we are all the better for Johannsen's work. Richard E. Beringer University of North Dakota Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, 18001860 . By Lacy K. Ford, Jr. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Pp. xiii, 414. $39.95.) Origins of Southern Radicalism is an important book which focuses our attention on one of the central puzzles of antebellum Southern history: why did the white majority of nonslaveholders and small slaveholders join the planter elite in a defense of slavery which ultimately ended in bloody civil war? In his ambitious attempt to answer this question for a single region of the South, Lacy K. Ford, Jr. tells us a great deal about the details of economic and political life in the upcountry of BOOK REVIEWS75 antebellum South Carolina. Historians may disagree over his interpretation but not over his contribution to the historical literature. At the heart of this study is the description of a tension between political values and economic development—a tension which repeatedly fueled the political radicalism of the region. Ford argues that "republican ideology," with its emphasis on individual independence, provided the core set of values for upcountry white males during the period 1800 to 1860. But at the very same moment that independence reigned as the dominant ideal, the economic development of the area moved many farmers into a dependence on regional and world markets. In other words, Ford argues that prosperity produced anxiety for the men of the upcountry. First they moved from self-sufficient isolation into shortstaple cotton production during the early nineteenth century. But it was not until the 185Os that they faced the most serious problems of prosperity. During the economic boom of the last antebellum decade upcountry farmers traveled even further away from self-sufficiency, became surrounded by banks and railroads, and moved into more intimate connections with a world market. On the eve of the Civil War these men found themselves living in the nightmare world they had been warned about in their most troubled republican dreams. But it was not anxiety alone which generated the radicalism of the South Carolina upcountry. Ford argues that the political institutions of the state also contributed to the volatility of its public life. Most importantly , antebellum South Carolina never developed a system of political parties. In a political universe with republican ideology as a central ideal, but...