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

One of the paradoxes of antebellum southern history is the manner in which proslavery politicians sought to protect the South's peculiar institution. On one hand, they deployed a strict-constructionist states' rights ideology to thwart federal interference with slavery. Yet they could also embrace an expansive conception of federal authority when it suited their purposes. Despite accusations of hypocrisy from abolitionists and the northern public, proslavery ideologues insisted they were being consistent. Was that self-assessment accurate? How can historians resolve what appears to be barefaced prevarication? Carl Lawrence Paulus offers an intriguing answer to this dilemma. Proslavery southerners, Paulus asserts, clung tenaciously to a well-articulated and logically coherent vision of "American exceptionalism" (p. 5). It is not news that Americans of this era saw themselves and the United States as exceptional, destined for great things because of their great qualities. But what slaveholders saw as the sine qua non of American exceptionalism, Paulus argues, was the preservation—and extension—of slavery. By 1860, these slaveholders had come to believe that the Union and the Constitution could no longer preserve this exceptional polity. In electing Abraham Lincoln, northern free-soilers and abolitionists had ensured that the American state was no longer a reliable protection against the omnipresent danger of rebellion by the enslaved peoples of the South. Rebellion would bring race war and inexorable emancipation. For slaveholders, if that nightmare scenario came to pass there would be nothing exceptional about America and indeed nothing worth saving at all.

The strength of Paulus's argument is in its breadth. There have been several notable studies that unpack slaveholders' fear of insurrection. John Hope Franklin's classic The Militant South, 1800–1861(Cambridge, Mass., 1956) saw it as part of white southerners' larger culture of violence. Discussions of John Brown's 1859 raid and its aftershocks, particularly Steven A. Channing's Crisis of Fear: Secession in South Carolina(New York, 1970), feature these events prominently in describing how southern fire-eaters mobilized secessionist sentiment. Treatments of southern anti-abolitionism point to the fear of slave rebellion as a primary motivation. But Paulus integrates what are usually addressed as discrete eruptions of this fear into a larger narrative. With the Haitian Revolution, he argues, slaveholders' fears of insurrection began to metastasize. Even before Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner, white southerners saw Haiti as a mortal threat to North American slavery. The near-hysterical refusal to countenance even a discussion of the new Caribbean state, much less diplomatic recognition, must be read within this fear, which was becoming a pervasive element of white southern political discourse.

Paulus shows this Haitian panic was no temporary spasm; it became the lens through which slaveholders and their allies viewed the U.S. North and its growing antislavery movement. In the immediate aftermath of Haiti, slave-holders took comfort in the North's presence as a barrier to Haitian-style insurrection. But with the Missouri debates, British emancipation, and the militancy fostered among U.S. abolitionists, that comfort evaporated. With the Wilmot Proviso and the emergence of free-soilism as a political movement, slaveholders' fears became a general phenomenon among white southerners. We cannot fully understand the political history of the sectional crisis without accounting for this climate, Paulus contends.

Paulus challenges us to view seemingly familiar events and ideals differently. Political issues readily acquired emotional weight, especially when they had the existential stakes that white southerners attached to slavery's perpetuation. Paulus's analysis embraces the vicissitudes of the slavery debate as it raged in the United States and throughout the larger Atlantic world, thus integrating what are too often disparate narratives. By placing fear at the center of the antebellum political crisis and by taking it seriously as a political and cultural...