Reluctant Confederates: Upper South Unionists in the Secession Crisis (review)

76CTVTL WAR HISTORY Besides, a white man might one day acquire slaves of his own. Hence, these men saw a threat to slavery as a threat to their liberty and independence. The men of the upcountry seceded not because they loved or were dominated by a planter elite but because they were devoted to their own special form of republicanism. The central strength of this book rests in Ford's ability to connect South Carolina's economic growth, the local politics of the state, and its movement for secession. But it is precisely because he has so successfully collapsed the boundaries around these categories that his adherence to other artificial boundaries is highlighted. It seems hard to believe that the style of politics engaged in by white men in their relations with each other was totally unconnected to the political style of these men in their relations with white women and slaves. At any rate, regardless of how these white men may have treated each other, it seems misleading to use the term "democratic" to describe a political universe which so consciously excluded so many people. Similarly, although the book recognizes the significance of both honor and evangelical Christianity as important sets of values in shaping upcountry life, Ford walls off these beliefs and loses sight of them as he concentrates so intently on republican ideology. Overall, Ford offers us a carefully researched, wellwritten analysis—but only of a segment of the political and economic life of a region of the South. Kenneth S. Greenberg Suffolk University Reluctant Confederates: Upper South Unionists in the Secession Crisis. By Daniel W. Crofts. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1989. Pp. xxvii, 502. $45.00.) Daniel W. Crofts's important book explores topics usually ignored and discovers cautionary lessons for presentist historians. Focusing on the period between secession and Lincoln's call for volunteers, he studies the Unionist impulse in Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee. He concentrates on the issues that dominated that time, place and electorate— which were Union and peace, not slavery—and insists that historians, overwhelmed by the antislavery results of the Civil War, have lost sight of the political realities and possibilities that existed before war and emancipation came. The heart of Crofts's argument is that, in the three states he studies, an integrative two-party system in which partisan loyalty cut across class and region survived in 1860. This fact, plus lower numbers of slaveholders and slaves, set the Upper South apart politically from the Lower South, enabling Unionism to weather the first wave of secessionist enthusiasm and winning the referenda of early 1861 on secession. Crofts's multiple BOOK REVIEWS77 regressions of county level voting statistics convincingly demonstrate that these elections separated nonslaveholders from the Democratic party, reduced the power of the planters, and made possible a new political coalition of Unionist Whigs and nonslaveholders. This Unionist party, while representing the first stages of a real shift in the social bases of politics, needed peace to survive—not least because most of its leaders were conditional Unionists who felt a sense of brotherhood with the rest of the South and, although they thought secession would be disastrous for the Upper South, rejected any Union based on force. They believed Southern Rights leaders were deluded and conspiratorial, but they still put the burden of compromise on the Republicans, demanding in a series of projected compromises that the Republicans guarantee the protection and even the potential expansion of slavery. The Confederacy, of course, ignored the proposed compromises, and Unionists could only hope that time, and a recognition of economic and political vulnerability, would lead the seceders back into the United States. If this did not happen, then peaceful separation would be politically better for the Union party than war. Lincoln and the Republicans, then, were being asked to acquiesce in the protection of slavery and in the destruction of both the country and themselves as a political force. Lincoln could not do that, and his call for volunteers to put down rebellion after the fall of Fort Sumter submerged the Unionist movement. For the conditional Unionists, regional ideology and emotion seemed stronger than the partisan and...