The Slaveholding Crisis: Fear of Insurrection and the Coming of the Civil War by Carl Lawrence Paulus (review)

When proslavery southerners evoked "the horrors of St. Domingo," they conjured images of a world turned upside down, in which blacks violated white bodies, seized white property, and demolished white supremacy. From 1791 through the secession winter, the Haitian Revolution shaped American slaveholders' memories of the past and expectations for the future. Carl Lawrence Paulus persuasively shows that fears of slave rebellion—darkened by Haiti's shadow; quickened by the thwarted conspiracies of Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner; and intensified by the transatlantic abolitionist movement—decisively shaped American proslavery politics. Southern statesmen first responded by seeking to dominate the federal government, using its legal and military might to defend slavery against home-grown abolitionists and foreign, especially British, meddlers. Simultaneously, they conducted a broader political and cultural campaign to define abolitionism as a dangerously un-American movement and to make slavery's preservation an overriding national priority. Only upon the failure of this two-pronged effort to embed slavery in notions of America's national purpose and exceptional nature did slavery's champions resort to secession. By exploring the interrelated politics of fear and exceptionalism, Paulus contributes to a broader shift in historians' understanding of slavery, nationalism, and sectionalism in the nineteenth-century United States.

Paulus covers events and issues that will be familiar to specialists. Based mainly on published primary sources, his narrative flows from Haiti to the major U.S. insurrection plots and thence to British West Indian emancipation, debates over abolitionist mailings and petitions, and the escalating conflict over slavery's expansion, particularly concerning Texas annexation and the Wilmot Proviso. But Paulus's steady focus on the political implications of slave rebellion invigorates his analysis of well-known issues. By foregrounding the specter of revolt, Paulus avoids overemphasizing the legal and constitutional abstractions which can obscure what precisely was at stake in the sectional struggle. Thus, the Wilmot Proviso controversy highlighted slaveholders' dread that a bottled-up slave population would someday explode into a Haitian-style inferno. Similarly, proslavery politicians' determination to gag abolitionist petitions represented a brazen attempt to co-opt the federal government, and seduce northern support, by branding antislavery activism as treason. From this useful vantage point, proslavery politics appears aggressive, not defensive, and national in ambition rather than purely regional. Paulus joins scholars such as Matthew Karp and Robert E. Bonner in documenting proslavery leaders' often successful efforts to make slavery a cornerstone of American national identity and its protection a centerpiece of federal policy. Implicitly, he also reinforces recent studies that demonstrate how slave agency fomented sectional strife.

Contests over American exceptionalism provide a second, if less robust, narrative thread. In several chapters this theme sharpens Paulus's analysis, as when he shows how southern (and northern) critics denounced abolitionists as fanatical Anglophiles who conspired against the ostensibly proslavery American Union. Antislavery agitation, they argued, threatened to destroy America's unique republican experiment. But elsewhere, particularly when fear of revolt offers the most compelling explanation for slaveholders' political demands, the exceptionalism theme seems somewhat forced. A clearer definition of the concept would have strengthened the overall argument for its influence. Paulus associates exceptionalism variously with patriotism, nationalism, republicanism, federalism, collective destiny, national security, and territorial policy. In modern usage, "exceptionalism" is certainly a malleable term, and here it becomes even more plastic because antebellum Americans did not use it. Exceptionalism may not offer the best lens through which to examine each and every one of the diverse political disputes covered in this book. At its best, however, Paulus's analysis demonstrates that the tactic of claiming "real" Americanism has a very long, and equally troubled, history.