Featured White Papers
- Enterprise PBX buyer's guide (VoIP-News)
- Enterprise PBX comparison guide (VoIP-News)
- Hosted CRM comparison guide (Inside CRM)
Content provided in partnership with
Southern Nationalism - United States Civil War
Reason, August, 2001 by Charles Oliver
Well, Adams says in effect, Stephens was lying. Southern leaders knew that people couldn't be roused to fight over something so unappealing as tariffs. So they whipped up a fear that slavery was at stake. "Men will not willingly, and with zeal, die for an economic purpose, but they will die for some 'cause' that has a noble purpose," writes Adams, neglecting to lay out precisely why slavery was so noble. Indeed, Adams' thesis is a completely unsatisfying one. Even if true, he can't answer an important question: Given that most Southerners didn't own slaves, why was this a more attractive issue for raising fighting passions than tariffs? Why would so many die with "zeal" for a "noble" purpose from which they were excluded? After all, less than one third of Southerners owned slaves.
Manisha Sinha, a historian at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, shows how slavery did in fact became the rallying cry for the South. In The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina, Sinha traces the growth of Southern "nationalism"--that is, a sense of the South as a distinct region with a common culture and set of political priorities that were in conflict with the rest of the U.S.--in the decades leading up to the Civil War. At the heart of that nationalism was slavery. Earlier Southerners such as Thomas Jefferson and George Washington had seen slavery as an evil, albeit one they could not or would not abolish. Their descendants, Sinha writes, articulated defenses of "slavery as a benevolent and harmonious system that allayed the conflict between capital and labor, as a guarantor of social and political stability, as the engine of economic prosperity, as a result of the allegedly natural racial differences, and as a divinely sanctioned institution."
This "Southern thought" was antagonistic to classical liberalism, capitalism, industrialism, and democracy. Indeed, it saw itself in opposition to the very ideals of the American Revolution. Hence, Southern apologist George Fitzhugh said the "Southern Revolution of 1861" was a "solemn protest against the doctrines of natural liberty, human equality and the social contracts as taught by Locke and the American sages of 1776, and an equally solemn protest against the doctrines of Adam Smith, Franklin, Say and Tom Paine and the rest of the infidel, political economists, who maintain that the world is too much governed." Fitzhugh was hardly alone: Journalists, ministers, politicians, and academics from across the South contributed to this body of thought.
Southern thinkers savaged the Declaration of Independence. All men are not created equal, they said. And natural rights were just a myth. "Nothing can be more unfounded and false," said John C. Calhoun. Southern nationalists didn't just believe that blacks were unequal to whites. Many Southern ideologues argued for a hierarchical polity-with the big plantation owners at the top, slaves at the bottom and other whites in between. Society is superior to the individual, they said. Sinha doesn't say much about how Southerners who weren't at the top of the ladder felt about the system. But clearly, they jealously guarded their rank and privileges against those below them, even if they chafed at the dominance of those above.
Find Research Guides for:
Find Featured Titles for: Reference
- Academe
- African American Review
- African Arts
- African Studies Review
- Afro-Americans in New York Life and History
- Alabama Heritage
- Alabama Review
- American Mathematical Monthly, The
- Anglican Theological Review
- Annals of Dyslexia
- Arab Studies Quarterly (ASQ)
- Auk, The
- Australian Journal of Anthropology, The
- Christian Century
- Natural History