The Origins of the American Civil War (review)

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 would be safer in the Union than in a Southern confederacy. Men otherwise as different as John Pendleton Kennedy andAndrew Johnson could agree that the upper South states had more interests in common with Ohio or Illinois than with South Carolina. And yet, disputes over precise causes and prudent remedies could not mask the fact that most upper South writers concurred with lower South diagnoses of the underlying disease, Northern antislavery fever, that had sapped the strength ofthe Union. This collection, too rich to do justice to in a short review, is a gem, and Jon Wakelyn deserves great credit for assembling it. Anthony Gene Carey Auburn University The Origins oftheAmerican Civil War. By Brian Holden Reid. (London:Addison Wesley Longman, 1996. Pp. xv, 440. Cloth $50.95; paper $20.95.) Almost four decades ago, David Donald rather ruefully observed that historians ofthe CivilWarwere writing "surprisingly little" on the question ofthe war's causes (South Atlantic Quarterly [59]: 351-55). Although the intervening years have witnessed an enormous outpouring ofpublications dealing with the war, the situation appears not to have changed. "The study ofthe origins of the American Civil War [has been left] in a state of limbo," writes Brian Holden Reid in this substantial , closely argued volume, the fifteenth in Longman's ambitious series on 246CIVIL WAR HISTORY the "Origins ofModern Wars" (10). He finds a partial explanation in the current state of American historical writing. Historians have been too easily lured by methodological fads that have resulted in the fragmentation of Civil War study, too preoccupied with narrow treatments of political and social questions, and too willing "to embrace the charms of 'theory'" (14). From out of this "swelter of research" emerges the author's purpose "to attempt a fresh overview" that will "look at these much studied matters from a slightly different perspective"(i 1). In fact, Holden Reid, senior lecturer in War Studies at King's College, London , and resident historian at the BritishArmy Staff College, brings not one but two new and meaningful perspectives to his overview, that of a person writing from outside the United States, and therefore less likely to see his subject in parochial terms, and, secondly, that of a distinguished military historian whose expertise in the ways of war casts a new light on the time-worn landmarks of the sectional conflict. "The study of war origins," he insists, "cannot be divorced from the military factors that give wars their shape and finally precipitate them" (396). The political questions that define the sectional conflict must be conditioned by the broader context of what he perceives as "an American penchant for violence and violent solutions to political disputes" (12). The book naturally divides into two parts. In the first, the author deals with...