The slaveholding crisis : fear of insurrection and the coming of the Civil War / Carl Lawrence Paulus.
2017
E440.5 .P35 2017 (Mapit)
Available at General Collection
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Details
Title
The slaveholding crisis : fear of insurrection and the coming of the Civil War / Carl Lawrence Paulus.
ISBN
9780807164358 (hardcover)
0807164356 (hardcover)
9780807164365 (electronic book)
0807164356 (hardcover)
9780807164365 (electronic book)
Published
Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, [2017]
Language
English
Description
xi, 311 pages ; 24 cm.
Call Number
E440.5 .P35 2017
Dewey Decimal Classification
326/.80973
Summary
In December 1860, South Carolinians voted to abandon the Union, sparking the deadliest war in American history. Led by a proslavery movement that viewed Abraham Lincoln's place at the helm of the federal government as a real and present danger to the security of the South, southerners--both slaveholders and nonslaveholders--willingly risked civil war by seceding from the United States. Radical proslavery activists contended that without defending slavery's westward expansion American planters would, like their former counterparts in the West Indies, become greatly outnumbered by those they enslaved. The result would transform the South into a mere colony within the federal government and make white southerners reliant on antislavery outsiders for protection of their personal safety and wealth. Faith in American exceptionalism played an important role in the reasoning of the antebellum American public, shaping how those in both the free and slave states viewed the world. Questions about who might share the bounty of the exceptional nature of the country became the battleground over which Americans fought, first with words, then with guns. Carl Lawrence Paulus's The Slaveholding Crisis examines how, due to the fear of insurrection by the enslaved, southerners created their own version of American exceptionalism--one that placed the perpetuation of slavery at its forefront. Feeling a loss of power in the years before the Civil War, the planter elite no longer saw the Union, as a whole, fulfilling that vision of exceptionalism. As a result, Paulus contends, slaveholders and nonslaveholding southerners believed that the white South could anticipate racial conflict and brutal warfare. This narrative postulated that limiting slavery's expansion within the Union was a riskier proposition than fighting a war of secession. In the end, Paulus argues, by insisting that the new party in control of the federal government promoted this very insurrection, the planter elite gained enough popular support to create the Confederate States of America. In doing so, they established a thoroughly proslavery, modern state with the military capability to quell massive resistance by the enslaved, expand its territorial borders, and war against the forces of the Atlantic antislavery movement. -- Inside jacket flaps.
Bibliography, etc. Note
Includes bibliographical references (pages 241-301) and index.
Series
Conflicting worlds.
Record Appears in
On-Campus Resources > Books
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Table of Contents
Introduction: expectations and exceptionalism
The Haitian Revolution and slaveholding anxiety
"Fanaticism" and southern fears of black rebellion
Atlantic abolitionism and American exceptionalism
Proslavery fear and the rise of the abolitionist power
Texas annexation and the proslavery promise
Wilmot's Proviso and the slaveholding crisis
The proslavery turn against American exceptionalism
Epilogue: Fighting over exceptionalism.
The Haitian Revolution and slaveholding anxiety
"Fanaticism" and southern fears of black rebellion
Atlantic abolitionism and American exceptionalism
Proslavery fear and the rise of the abolitionist power
Texas annexation and the proslavery promise
Wilmot's Proviso and the slaveholding crisis
The proslavery turn against American exceptionalism
Epilogue: Fighting over exceptionalism.