The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina.

By Manisha Sinha. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, c. 2000. Pp. xvi, 362. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-4884-0; cloth, $55.00, ISBN 0-8078-2571-9.)

As Manisha Sinha implies, the well-known "problem of South Carolina" has intrigued historians of disparate interests for many decades. First (and alone) in nullification, first in secession, and last in the hearts of her countrymen, antebellum South Carolina earned a well-deserved reputation as the Hotspur state. Proslavery southern-rights radicalism held greater sway among Palmetto politicians than among those of any other slaveholding state from the era of nullification through the secession crisis of 1860-61. Modern historians who have written about South Carolina's unique antebellum radicalism have agreed that the state's distinctiveness hinged, somehow, on the influence of slavery, though they have often disagreed on precisely how and why slavery caused the political blood of antebellum Carolinians to run so hot.

Seeking answers to these questions, recent scholars have focused on topics such as republicanism, honor, sovereignty, and gender relations, among others, with considerable success. Manisha Sinha's new book seeks to return the focus of historical inquiry into the "problem" of South Carolina back to its essentials: the centrality of slavery and its preservation in the minds of "Carolinian planter politicians" (p. 1), a group she depicts, with considerable if not perfect accuracy, as "reactionary and antidemocratic" defenders of the institution of human bondage (p. 7). According to Sinha, the actions of this slaveholding elite--beginning with their aggressive affirmation of state sovereignty in the forms of nullification and the test oath; continuing through their assertion of slaveholding as a constitutionally protected right during the debates over the territorial question prompted by the Wilmot Proviso and the subsequent movement toward the precipice of unilateral secession following the Compromise of 1850; and culminating in their vocal advocacy for reopening the African slave trade during the 1850s--served as rehearsals for the secession movement of 1860 that prepared South Carolina radicals for the leadership role Sinha assigns them in the creation of the southern Confederacy.

Sinha's book is generally well researched, clearly written, and forcefully argued. It offers a brisk narrative of the nullification controversy that essentially reaffirms William W. Freehling's earlier argument that concern over the future minority status of slaveholding states within the Union led John C. Calhoun and other hypersensitive slaveholders to assert the doctrine of state sovereignty as a vehicle for protecting slavery. Sinha rightly identifies the emergence of the abolitionists' concerted mail and petition campaign after 1835 as an even more important creator of unity among South Carolina's slaveholding elite than nullification had been. Her treatment of the "first secession crisis" (chap. 4) adeptly portrays the prominence of parish and other black-belt planters among the separatist leadership, but she falls to recognize the extent to which the Palmetto Cooperationists, who successfully turned back the radical movement in 1851, not only saw separate state secession as tactical suicide but also sincerely believed that slavery was better defended within the Union than outside it.

The most original section of this book lies in its two chapters on radical efforts to revive the African slave trade during the 1850s. Sinha's detailed analysis of this too-long overlooked movement gives it new and deserved prominence in our efforts to understand the South Carolina (and southern) fire-eaters. She links support for reopening the foreign slave trade directly to separatists committed to the creation of a slaveholding nation. In the end, Sinha concedes, advocates of reopening the African slave trade enjoyed little political success, even in the deepest South, though their efforts prompted opponents to abandon moral denunciation of the trade in favor of arguments emphasizing its impracticality and the divisive nature of debate over the issue. In a provocative chapter Sinha suggests that southern-rights radicals successfully encouraged "judicial nullification" (chap. 6) in late antebellum South Carolina cases involving violations of laws against the foreign slave trade. No southern jury should punish international traders, radicals argued, while many southerners remained actively engaged in a legal domestic slave trade seen as essential to the functioning of antebellum southern economy.

Sinha's concluding chapters on the secession crisis of 1860 provide a coherent if familiar narrative of events, highlighted by her insistence that the South Carolina secession movement represented a "counterrevolution of slavery." Sinha extends her argument on this point through a largely unexamined assertion that the Palmetto State led the broader southern secession movement and that South Carolina radicals played a large role in convincing the rest of the South to secede. Substantiating this claim obviously lay beyond the scope of Sinha's book, but the assertion runs counter to the conventional wisdom presented by a number of historians, whose studies of the secession movement in other states and regionwide have concluded that South Carolina's long history of radicalism actually minimized its influence; in other words, other states seceded and joined the Confederacy despite South Carolina's radicalism rather than because of it.

Ultimately, while Sinha's book rightly emphasizes the centrality of defending slavery for the separatist radicals who led the secessionist crusades, her interpretive framework accounts less well for the reluctance of many South Carolinians and other southerners to secede. Even within South Carolina, and to a larger extent in other parts of the South, substantial opposition to southern-rights radicalism flourished right up until the moment of secession and even beyond. With a few isolated exceptions, these opponents of southern-rights radicalism (with James L. Orr offering perhaps the best South Carolina example) worked resourcefully to prevent secession as long as they had any reasonable prospect for success. These opponents of secession were no less devoted to slavery than were the radicals, but they thought slavery was best protected, as it had been for over three generations, within the federal union--a union in which slaveholders often enjoyed considerable influence, even if they seldom spoke with one voice. Thus, to the extent that important questions remain--like the timing of succession, the support of enough yeomen to sustain a planter-led revolution (or "counterrevolution," if you will), and how this movement led to the sacrifice of 250,000 Confederates to a doomed cause--this book offers comparatively little new insight on these matters. However, to the extent that twenty-first-century historians need reminding that without slavery, there likely would have been no secession, no Confederacy, and no Civil War, Sinha presents a convincing brief on point.

LACY K. FORD
University of South Carolina