In this comprehensive analysis of politics and ideology in antebellum
South Carolina, Manisha Sinha offers a provocative new look at the
roots of southern separatism and the causes of the Civil War.
Challenging works that portray secession as a fight for white
liberty, she argues instead that it was a conservative,
antidemocratic movement to protect and perpetuate racial slavery.
Sinha discusses some
of the major sectional crises of the antebellum era--including
nullification, the conflict over the expansion of slavery into
western territories, and secession--and offers an important
reevaluation of the movement to reopen the African slave trade in the
1850s. In the process she reveals the central role played by South
Carolina planter politicians in developing proslavery ideology and
the use of states' rights and constitutional theory for the defense
of slavery.
Sinha's work
underscores the necessity of integrating the history of slavery with
the traditional narrative of southern politics. Only by taking into
account the political importance of slavery, she insists, can we
arrive at a complete understanding of southern politics and the
enormity of the issues confronting both northerners and southerners
on the eve of the Civil War.