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Reviewed by:
  • The Stormy Present: Conservatism and the Problem of Slavery in Northern Politics, 1846–1865 by Adam I. P. Smith, and: A Union Indivisible: Secession and the Politics of Slavery in the Border South by Michael D. Robinson
  • Christopher J. Olsen (bio)
The Stormy Present: Conservatism and the Problem of Slavery in Northern Politics, 1846–1865. By Adam I. P. Smith. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. 331. Cloth, $45.00.)
A Union Indivisible: Secession and the Politics of Slavery in the Border South. By Michael D. Robinson. ( Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. 294. Cloth, $34.95.)

These new entries in the Civil War America series address some familiar, overlapping themes in mid-nineteenth-century political history. Both authors consider broadly the attitudes among northern and border-state voters toward the tradition of political compromise, the Republican Party, slavery, and secession, among other historians' favorites. Each is interested in how this group reacted to the crises of sectionalism and secession, in particular, and how voters weighed the relative value of Union and slavery as they navigated the country's greatest political dispute and, ultimately, failure. Collectively these two books prompt readers to reexamine some frequently studied but critical themes in the period.

Adam I. P. Smith's The Stormy Present is the more ambitious and wide-ranging of the two books. He considers northern voters' attitudes, and specifically why they "made the political choices that led to war and the destruction of slavery—objectives that few sought but that most, in the end, supported" (2). Familiar terrain, certainly, but Smith proceeds from a slightly different point, arguing that Whigs, Democrats, and later Republicans expressed common beliefs that many historians have undervalued as important shared ideals. Chief among these was a basic and fundamental commitment to what they saw as "conservative" values. Smith wants to understand how fundamentally conservative people—white men in an age of extreme white male privilege—were "drawn to act in fundamentally revolutionary ways" (4). The vast majority of antebellum voters, regardless of party, declared themselves conservatives and sought to win elections on that basis. Conservatism signified a "state of balancing opposing forces," "a disposition, a way of signaling a measured, mature approach to the problems of the world." Conservatives were also "innately anti-ideological" and determined to protect what white men saw as hard-earned freedoms (5). They articulated faith in institutions and the tradition of political compromise, and claimed to [End Page 817] represent the "ordinary folks" who had made the United States what it was; they feared crisis but spent the 1850s and Civil War dealing with the country's greatest crisis.

Smith concludes that the outcome of these years resulted largely from northern voters' deep commitment to a free-labor society and, ultimately, a deep suspicion of slavery. This widespread "antislavery consensus," he argues, declared slavery to be fundamentally and morally wrong, and it needed to be kept on the path to extinction where the Founders had consigned it. It represented, he argues, a basic foundation of their conservatism. This view was sharpened as southerners more often blurred the line between racial slavery and slavery generally, and the author notes how deeply affected northern voters were by reports of "light-skinned" slaves (a critical point that could be elaborated with effect, particularly in the context of political culture). Lincoln, in many places, becomes the northern exemplar, as he often is for historians. His deft appeals to equality rather than emancipation, of course, are well understood—the debates with Douglas or the Gettysburg Address being just two examples. These ideals, Smith contends, transcended Republicans and explain the general northern response to sectionalism, secession, and the Civil War.

Smith's narrative is characterized by careful attention to ambiguity as he tries to unpack the emotions and motives of northern voters. For instance, in 1860 he notes that northern voters "oscillated among a number of overlapping impulses: indignation at the behavior of slaveholders; a genuine dislike of slavery on principle but also a deeply ingrained feeling that it was an intractable problem; a high moral disgust at the political corruption that seemed to flow both from slaveholders' selfishness...

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