Mastering America: Southern Slaveholders and the Crisis of American Nationalism (review)

In this cogent and carefully argued volume, Robert Bonner has provided the best fresh analysis of the checkered career of southern nationalism since John McCardell's The Idea of a Southern Nation appeared in 1979. Sweeping in its scope and learned in its exploration of issues, Bonner's book undertakes a thorough reexamination of David Potter's observation that the North and South were two regions "divided by a common nationalism" (xvii). Elegant in its presentation and perceptive in its analysis, Bonner's book makes a major contribution to American as well as southern political and intellectual history and stands as a must read for historians of the antebellum South. In this volume, Bonner effectively probes the relationship between southern nationalism and American nationalism while also exploring the questions of why and when southern nationalism came to see the crusade for a separate southern nation as essential.

In his generally persuasive early chapters, Bonner examines how southern slaveholders, who possessed both wealth and political clout that far exceeded that merited by their numbers, shaped American nationalism in their own image for as long as they could. He rightly contends that southern slaveholders were hardly ideologues on any point other than defending slavery—and sometimes not even on that one. Southern masters proved aggressive nationalists when it came to territorial expansion—especially when that expansion included removing native Americans from valuable cotton land and in protecting their right to export profitable staples without foreign interference. As a general rule, southern slaveholders wanted a strong nation, as long as they were reasonably certain that the nation would use its power to sustain slavery and advance the interests of slaveholders. They grew eager to check and limit national power when it threatened those interests. Thus, as Bonner notes, slaveholders were far from united behind states' rights sentiment, noting that the idea gained strength chiefly as means of placing the future of slavery in the hands of the states where it existed as a protection against emerging national antislavery majorities. States' rights was valued as a political tactic, and sometimes as a full-blown strategy, but it hardly became a regional ideology—at least not until after the war and emancipation. In this vein, Bonner offers a perceptive brief analysis of the thought of John C. Calhoun, recasting him as the "Metternich of the Master Class," who sought not slaveholder domination but a balance of interests, among both classes and regions, that could produce and sustain an equipoise in the republican system and hence guarantee the preservation of republican liberty—and slavery.

Slaveholders, Bonner maintains, helped shape the idea that American national destiny lay in the advancement of civilization through expanding wealth and the moral uplift that followed such economic progress. Southern slaveholders, and their clerical defenders, also participated vigorously in the pursuit of these aims, imbuing American nationalism with a sense of religious mission. On this point, the slaveholders' efforts centered on arguing that the emergence and expansion of religious paternalism, arguing that such paternalism domesticated slavery and rendered the institution consistent with Christian values. Southern slaveholders also actively constructed both national and regional histories that could serve as a usable past—usually touting the large role of the South in creating the American republic and of slavery in generating American wealth.

During the 1850s, southern nationalists still committed to American nationalism sought allies among conservative and anti-antislavery northerners, who were neither abolitionist nor uncompromising free-soilers. While buoyed at times by temporary successes, southern nationalists were, on the whole, astonished by the speed at which the new Republican Party's "free soil, free labor" mantra gained popularity in the North. At the same time, southern nationalists did not hesitate to excoriate the North for its apostasy from founding values, particularly on its insistence on renegotiating the constitutional bargain on noninterference with slavery and the encouragement of a variety of radical "isms," including abolitionism. Increasingly, slaveholding intellectuals...