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ROBERT E. BONNER Proslavery Calculations and the Value of Southern Disunion Early in 1859, as the upstart Republican Party consolidated its electoral base across the North, Alfred Iverson of Georgia offered fellow U.S. senators an enticing vision of the southern future. “Sir, there is one path of safety for the institution of slavery in the South,” he explained, forecasting how the secession of the cotton states should be the first step towards a new proslavery Confederacy. Iverson confidently predicted how this new alliance would contain within itself “elements of more political power, national prosperity, social security, and individual happiness, than any nation of ancient or modern times.” Speaking on behalf of a “large and growing party,” Iverson acknowledged that “scarcely a voice could be heard in all the South calculating the value of the Union” prior to 1850. Times had since changed, however, and “now their name is legion.” Iverson’s growing throng of prosecession calculators, coolly forecasting the disruption of one federation and the formation of another, contrasts with prevailing notions of a more frenzied process of southern disunion. Most accounts focus on “fire-eating” agitators who whipped up crowds with passionate harangues on the hustings and in the radical press. As other chapters in this volume demonstrate, a number of powerful arguments for proslavery separatism did follow William Yancey’s injunction to “stir the Southern heart.” Over the course of the antebellum period, proponents of disunion regularly appealed more to the brain stem than to the cortex, whether they compared their own circumstances to European examples of nationalist humiliation (as Paul Quigley explores), propounded an intoxicating form of antimodern nostalgia (as Frank Tower sketches), or stirred deeply rooted psychosexual anxieties (as Charles Dew notes). In retrospect, southern secession can be seen as a model in its stark emotionalism, anticipating the similarly heated cases of “political divorce” in our own day. [116] Robert E. Bonner Yet no less an agitator than William Yancey himself recognized a corresponding need to “instruct the Southern mind” and to establish through a dispassionate survey of facts and figures how slavery would benefit from the Union’s dismemberment . Neither Yancey nor Iverson did much of this calculating work themselves. They instead relied on those pamphleteers who in blending reams of statistics with a survey of broad geopolitical developments sought primarily to convince and assure rather than to foment or inspire. Their case for the efficacy of disunion was by no means self-evident, given that the slave regime had greatly prospered in a union over the course of the preceding six decades. Since the framing of the “compound republic” in the late 1780s, American masters had accumulated an enormous concentration of cotton-based wealth at the same time that slave regimes elsewhere were toppled by an emancipation process hemispheric in its extent. Lincoln’s election sparked enough alarm among proslavery southerners to convince a critical mass to withdraw from an arrangement that had worked remarkably well up to that point. Profound fears bolstered this newfound willingness to embrace radical action late in 1860. But comparatively sober voices within the separatist camp also played a role in having already calmly established that even greater opportunities lay on the horizon. This chapter addresses a select number of those who presented separatism as an intrinsic good prior to Lincoln’s election and who took a utilitarian approach to it, generating a set of miscalculations about the fate of slavery after secession. Only the broadest outlines of this persuasion and of its consequences can be sketched in a single essay. For that reason, my account focuses on those figures who raised the profile of a proslavery calculating tradition during the 1820s before it turns to those who most completely perfected this approach during the early 1850s. Rather than delve into the statistical dimensions of such computations, I pay more attention to how the most methodical disunionists attended to secession as an international phenomenon. To be persuasive, proslavery separatists had to explain how precisely secession would rearrange that mixture of geopolitical threats and opportunities they had experienced within the Union. Separatists of the 1850s were more inclined than their predecessors to attend to the continental and global contexts, and they were more likely as a result to frame their vision in such a way that it became an ironic echo of the Union’s spread-eagle imperialism. Their vision of expansionism anticipated the ethical concerns that prevailed during the early 1860s, when civil war prompted the first extended...

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