Emotional and Sectional Conflict in the Antebellum United States by Michael E. Woods (review)

No one will be surprised to hear that emotions figured centrally in the antebellum sectional conflict. The standard account of the coming of the Civil War features stock characters displaying stock emotions: fearful white southerners, angry abolitionists, slaves desirous of freedom, and northern voters anxious about the slave power menace. Clearly, Civil War–era historians have not entirely overlooked the power of emotion. But what was largely missing, until Michael E. Woods came along, was sustained and theoretically informed attention to emotion as a concept—as a distinctive category of analysis that, when deployed in the right way, can unlock genuinely new dimensions of familiar stories.

There was, of course, a previous generation of historians—the revisionists of the 1930s and after—who depicted the coming of the Civil War in highly emotional terms, decrying the impassioned fears and petty resentments of the “blundering generation” that brought on a “needless war.” Woods is careful to distinguish his own approach from the revisionists’ oversimplifications. For Woods, emotions ought to be analyzed and contextualized rather than derided. They ought to be seen not as the fundamental cause of the war, but rather as a means by which Americans converted underlying socioeconomic differences into highly charged northern and southern sectional identities. Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship, Woods makes a strong case that emotions can help us better understand the formation of these competing identities.

Woods has most to say about three particularly salient emotions: happiness, jealousy, and indignation. All three took on different meanings in the North and the South, and all three drove the sections further apart. Northerners and white southerners disagreed, for example, over whether free labor or slavery was better able to secure workers’ happiness. The South’s “political economy of contentment” rested on the assumption that supposedly docile slaves were content, while the North’s “political economy of hope” emphasized the long-term advantages of free labor. Likewise, prevailing notions of jealousy differed in the two regions. Jealousy—not envy, as we think of it today, but the defensive fear of “loss of property, privilege, status, or liberty”—had once been a core component of masculinity across the nation, but it declined in the antebellum North (96). Thus when white southern men expressed their jealousy, northerners recoiled. While jealousy underpinned a growing sense of distinctiveness in the South, northern indignation at slave power despotism helped cement a shared northern identity. “Indignation meetings,” called in response to events such as the caning of Charles Sumner, were a distinctly northern phenomenon and solidified attachment to the new Republican Party. Emotions, as Woods demonstrates so persuasively, helped forge distinctive group identities in the North and South, in a process driven to no small degree by an escalating dynamic of mutual hostility.

The book’s greatest payoff comes in the final chapter, “Mourning and the Mobilization of Reluctant Secessionists, 1860–1861.” Here Woods does three very valuable things. First, he draws attention to the sorrow that pervaded the Unionist South in 1860–61, a sorrow traditionally sidelined by emphasis on the noisy euphoria of secessionists. Second, he advances a persuasive argument that expressions of mourning for the lost Union somewhat paradoxically smoothed conditional Unionists’ acceptance of secession and the Confederacy. Third, he supports this argument by looking back into the mourning culture of the antebellum period—which, he shows, had accustomed Americans to using mourning to come to terms with loss and to achieve new hope for the future. Thus, for conditional Unionists, the process of mourning the Union helped them accept the end of the old regime and allowed them to embrace the Confederacy. This is a brilliant example of how the careful study of emotions can allow us to see old topics in new ways.

Woods is most interested in exploring how emotions influenced the political arena. Some readers will wish he had probed more deeply into the emotions that Americans experienced in their daily lives, rather...