Political Culture and Secession in Mississippi: Masculinity, Honor, and the Antiparty Tradition, 1830-1860 (review)

According to Olsen, an antiparty political culture conditioned white men in Mississippi to interpret Abraham Lincoln's election to the presidency in 1860 as a threat to their manhood and a challenge to their honor, causing them to secede from the Union. By scrutinizing returns from thousands of elections during the 1840s and 1850s, Olsen demonstrates conclusively that party labels had negligible influence on elections for the numerous and powerful county and precinct offices. What mattered instead were personal loyalties to neighbors and friends. These loyalties were not just reflected in political decisions but also created by political activities.

Each of the state's many counties was divided into five police districts with multiple precincts served in every election by seven paid election officials. These men, plus all those running for local office, comprised a major fraction of eligible voters, ranging from about 15 percent in densely settled regions to as many as 66 percent in less populous areas. The local electoral administration incorporated this sizable group of white men into a hierarchy of offices that neatly meshed with the hierarchy of wealth and status. The result was a local administrative apparatus that emerged from, and reinforced, private power and privilege.

Olsen's thoroughly researched analysis of the operation of this local power structure is the highlight of the book. By probing beneath the level of party ideology and state and federal election campaigns, Olsen sketches an unsurpassed portrait of ground-level politics in the antebellum era that should cause historians to reconsider time-worn assumptions about the relationship between parties and the practices of grassroots politics.

Outside Mississippi and other states of the deep south, Olsen argues, parties mediated between electoral levels and encouraged open, partisan competition that ultimately institutionalized and moderated political conflict. In Mississippi, however, parties were denigrated as sources of corruption, inefficiency, and unwarranted privilege. This antiparty tradition kept parties weak and left the face-to-face practices and assumptions of local politics unmediated by institutional counter-pressures.

Although Olsen presents ample evidence of antiparty rhetoric, his interpretation of it is open to at least three challenges. First, it is not clear that the strength of antiparty rhetoric was correlated with the weakness of parties. It seems likely that plenty of antiparty rhetoric could be found in states with strong parties, such as Ohio and New York, undermining the case for a distinctive Mississippi tradition of hostility to parties. Second, Mississippi Whigs might have been amazed to learn that the state had a deep-seated antipathy toward parties. The Democratic party dominated Mississippi to such an extent that what Olsen attributes to an antiparty culture might have emerged instead from entrenched one-party rule. Third, that antiparty rhetoric often came from party spokesmen Olsen leaves largely unexamined. Perhaps arguments about corruption and unqualified officeholders represented ways for party supporters to express discontent with the local political power structures.

Whether stronger parties would have moderated Mississippi white men's instinctive response to the election of a Republican president as an assault on their masculine code of honor seems even more debatable. Olsen asserts a gradient of party strength that coincided with the timing of secession: Mississippi and the deep south that seceded first had weak parties; the border slave states that seceded after Fort Sumter had stronger parties, but not as strong as the free states and the border slave states that stayed in the Union. As a hypothesis, this claim merits investigation, but whether parties anywhere had the influences that Olsen attributes to them is open to question. At least in the antebellum United States, parties may be better understood not as the Weberian institutions Olsen seems to assume but as distinctive forms of the face-to-face local political regimes that he so effectively documents.