The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (review)

The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina. By Manisha Sinha. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Pp. xiii, 362. $55.00 cloth; $19.95 paper.)

Taking issue with Lacy K. Ford, The Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry (1988), Manisha Sinha argues that South Carolina's hair-trigger extremism was not so much a product of the state's peculiar political history as it was "part of the tide of reaction that followed the Revolutionary era in the Atlantic world" (7). Under the leadership of John C. Calhoun, she contends, the state's political system fell under control of low country slaveholders who shared a self-destructive and self-fulfilling prophetic ideology of proslavery and "separatism" from the American nation.

Lucidly and often brilliantly written and based on extensive research in antebellum South Carolina sources--manuscript personal papers, newspapers, official documents, and especially published oratory--Sinha's book narrates and interprets South Carolina's proslavery politics from nullification to secession. What was previously available piecemeal in William W. Freehling, Prelude to Civil War (1965), John Barnwell, Love of Order (1982), and Steven Channing, Crisis of Fear (1970), is now available in one book which is as complex as Freehling, as sensitive to racial paranoia as Channing, and, in some respects, as alert to continuity as Barnwell. Her brilliant chapters on "The Carolinian Movement to Reopen the African Slave Trade" and "Judicial Nullification" demonstrate how the slave power conspiracy intended to perpetuate slavery by internationalizing it and asserting the economic and political rights of slaveholders to participate unfettered in the Cuban and West Indies market of slaves.

The lynchpin of Sinha's argument is her evidence of clandestine sea-borne importation of human cargo into South Carolina in the late 1850s and the willingness of federal courts to shield that traffic from the law. Her depiction of the slave ship 0 captured in South Carolina waters in 1858 and adjudicated in federal district court in Columbia, has all the horror and drama of Amistad. Precisely because Sinha's argument is bold and provocative, The Counterrevolution of Slavery must be approached with caution. Her putative thesis that early-nineteenth-century reactionary thought, and not the conservative and patriarchal implications of republicanism, undergirded proslavery ideology is not systematically argued. To be sure, she does find support for it in a letter Karl Marx wrote to Abraham Lincoln in 1861 which associated secession with the "counter-revolution" against the French Revolution, in George Fitzhugh's bizarre repudiation of every expression of human liberty and dignity from Plato to the Enlightenment, and in Calhoun's speech on the annexation of Oregon which linked abolition to the Dorr Rebellion, Chartism, and the revolutions of 1848. These bits and pieces of evidence have literary power, but they do not justify the conclusion that Joseph de Maistre figuratively supplanted Edmund Burke among literate white South Carolina males as the conservative philosopher of choice. No other proslavery writer took up Fitzhugh's war with the Western humanist tradition.

Nor does Sinha convincingly refute Lacy Ford. She cites hundreds of debating points and denunciations of unionism and ambivalence about slavery as evidence of "racialist" hegemony. That same evidence may well demonstrate that Calhoun and his allies had their hands full, that they argued for white supremacy and separatism on republican grounds, and that while they won great victories they never extirpated white dissent--just as Calhoun's Machiavellian pessimism predicted.

Whenever a clergyman delivered an obligatory proslavery sermon, Sinha interprets it as craven submission to the reigning ideology. She overlooks Jack Maddex's article on "Proslavery Millennialism" (American Quarterly, 1979), which detected a camouflaged antislavery turn among Presbyterian clergy like James Henley Thornwell in the 1850s. Maddex would have alerted her to multiple meanings of her final Thornwell quote, in which he admonished South Carolina whites that "we . . . lost our freedom in...