Southern Pamphlets on Secession, November 1860-April 1861 (review)

244CIVIL WAR HISTORY But as Slagle makes clear, Phelps was a man who not only drove himself to perfection, he also demanded it in others. He was candid to a fault. When he felt aggrieved, he said so; when he perceived inefficiency in others (including his superiors), he pointed it out. Phelps was particularly outspoken when officers whom he believed less deserving than he won credit or promotion. Finally, he was not averse to calling on his friends to apply political pressure on his behalf. Not surprisingly, none of these traits endeared him to Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, who told Davis pointedly to "check his ambition" (294). As a result, it was David Dixon Porter and not Seth Phelps who got the command and historical immortality. The rest of Phelps's Civil War career was an anticlimax. Assigned to command the Eastport, the newest and largest river ironclad, he found it an unlucky vessel. He missed the climactic Vicksburg campaign because the Eastport was unready for sea, and during the Red River campaign of 1 864 the Eastport struck a mine and was so badly damaged it had to be destroyed. Subsequently passed over for major commands, and disgusted by the promotion of some whom he felt were less qualified, Phelps resigned from the navy in October 1864. Slagle's book is a significant contribution to the literature on the war in the western theater and one of the best books on the navy's role in the Civil War to come out in many years. Craig L. Symonds U.S. Naval Academy Southern Pamphlets on Secession, November 1860-April 1861. Edited by Jon L. Wakelyn. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Pp. xxix, 418. $45.00.) This outstanding and unusually useful collection introduces all of the major lines of argument developed by Southerners during the secession crisis. Historians will reflect upon its contents, mine material from it for lectures, and assign portions of it to undergraduate and graduate students in courses on the Old South and the Civil War. Jon Wakelyn's succinct introduction discusses the importance of pamphlets as a means of political communication in antebellum America and sketches the history of pamphleteering in 1860-61. Headnotes and footnotes for each selection present brief biographies of the authors and details of pamphlet publication. Two appendixes contain, respectively, Wakelyn's summaries ofother secession pamphlets andthe bestavailableversionofAlexanderH. Stephens's "cornerstone" speech. Wakelyn's overall assessment ofthe pamphlets is perceptive and stimulating. He does not laud them as great works of literature or political thought; he stresses that they were prepared for persuasiveness at the moment, usually lacked polish , and mainly relied on highly unoriginal points—abundant quotation, including self-quotation, was common—to carry arguments. Wakelyn correctly book reviews245 emphasizes secessionist arguments about white unity, especially the contention that the social relations of Southern slave society fostered equality among white men. His conclusion that "all of the slave state pamphleteers, however they disagreed over what to do, claimed that slavery was central to their culture, its past definition, and its future life" (xxix) directly challenges scholars who have linked secession to existing or impending conflicts between white Southerners over slavery itself. The pamphlets from the lower South are most compelling. South Carolinian William Henry Trescot's 1 850 essay analyzes the antagonism between Southern slave and Northern free society in terms not unlike those found in Eugene D. Genovese's influential interpretations. Clergymen unsurprisingly published many pamphlets; the best ofthe lot printedhere, a sermon by Benjamin Morgan Palmer, examines the special place of the South in God's design and denounces abolitionism as atheism. James D. B. DeBow's famous "The Interest in Slavery of the Southern Non-Slaveholder," in contrast, focuses on the maintenance of economic opportunity and white racial supremacy as the main reason for upholding slavery. The lower South pamphlets, taken together, make a strong case for a distinctive South made distinctive by slavery. Upper South pamphleteers were more conflicted. Indeed, the complex, sometimes contradictory, thinking of these men in the middle defies easy summarization . Many of them expressed outrage at extremists, Northern and Southern; some even declared that their states and slavery...