Volume 35, Number 21 & 22 · January 19, 1989
The War of Southern Aggression
By James M. McPherson
John C. Calhoun and the Price of Union: A Biography
by John Niven
Louisiana State University Press, 367 pp., $24.95
Secret and Sacred: The Diaries of James Henry Hammond, a Southern Slaveholder
edited by Carol Bleser
Oxford University Press, 342 pp., $22.95
Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1800–1860
by Lacy K. Ford Jr.
Oxford University Press, 414 pp., $39.95
'South Carolina,' wrote one of the state's few opponents of secession in 1860, 'is too small for a republic, but too large for an insane asylum.'[1] In earlier years most southerners outside the Palmetto State would have agreed. In 1832 no other state joined South Carolina in its 'nullification' of a national tariff law that Carolina planters viewed as discriminatory against plantation agriculture. On that occasion the Carolina planters and their allies backed down rather than face the wrath of President Andrew Jackson, who vowed to send in the army and hang the ringleaders of nullification. Again in 1851 they had to contain their zeal for a separate slaveholding republic when other southern states refused to secede in protest against the Compromise of 1850, which had admitted California as a free state. But on their third try, in 1860, South Carolina's Southern Rights radicals pulled ten other slave states into secession.
Review, 4167 words
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