American history, between the administrations of Jefferson and Lincoln, seems to exist only as a backdrop to the War Between the States. Antebellum history concentrates on a nation in search of itself. The major problem with most studies of antebellum southern politics is the subtle yet pervasive idea that the Civil War was a future memory in the minds of politicians. Such interpretation is best seen in the school of thought that castigates the South still today for almost consciously creating the necessary conditions for a civil war. Such arguments contend that slavery was essentially the only issue in southern politics in the 1850s and even earlier. These beliefs are largely a mimicry of nineteenth-century abolitionist charges against an "evil" Southern slaveholding society. This line of thought is more an interpretation of the Civil War than a product of serious analysis of antebellum politics.

Central to understanding the antebellum South are the themes of slavery, politics (at all levels), and economics. One cannot dismiss the Civil War as a fight over slavery per se, nor can one view the conflict in black and white terms (pun intended). Rash, unwise politicians (e.g., the Fire-eaters) cannot be blamed for the War. The key to understanding the secessionist movement rests on figuring out why a non-slaveholding and small slave-holding majority of the population took up arms on the side of slavery. This question has become more and more the focus of historical treatment in the past several decades. The historiography of the Civil War has indeed proven as much of a bloody battleground as that of Reconstruction, for, arguably, historians continue to fight the Civil War in modern scholarship.

At the forefront of Old South historiography has been Eugene Genovese. His The Political Economy of Slavery challenged traditional views of Southern society. He insisted that slavery, not concerns for the Union, lay behind secession. He went on--in Roll, Jordan, Roll and The Slaveholder's Dilemma--to espouse a paternalistic vision of the Old South, where planters and slaves developed a reciprocal, accomodationist relationship. Genovese argued that slavery essentially united all white men of the South by giving birth to a paternalism based on the relationship of mutual obligation between masters and slaves. This paternalistic ethos expressed itself throughout all aspects of Southern society, essentially unifying the white South and alienating the region from the North. When Southerners sought to expand their economic system--which was really their very way of life--by way of geographical expansion of slavery, they came directly at odds with a Northern society based on capitalist production, and this led to secession.

Many historians were not satisfied with Genovese's thesis, especially regarding the white yeoman majority. One prominent voice in the debate has been James Oakes. In The Ruling Race, Oakes finds that small planters were in fact acquisitive, even capitalistic, that they themselves were connected to the larger cotton market. He describes a middle class of small planters present in the South, and he stresses notions of liberal capitalism with relation to slavery. Oakes seeks to tie slavery to the movement of the market in the South, differing with Genovese over the definition of capitalism.

There is no agreement as to what exactly did hold all Southern whites together. Racism, while present, was not the one thing around which white solidarity formed; racism was also prevalent in the North. Stephen Hahn, in The Roots of Southern Populism, found in Georgia a society built around the local community. Here, yeomen owned property in common and shared their wares with one another. He argued that these yeoman communities functioned outside of the market and did not support the secessionist movement. Frank Owsley, in Plain Folks of the Old South, had earlier found yeomen living independent lives away from the market. Yeomen and small slaveholders were held together, he contended, by kinship and folk relations; for them, slavery--compared to local realities--was not a dominating issue.

The stability of Southern families and communities was breaking down by the 1850s, though, especially on the southwester frontier. Joan Cashin's A Family Venture, while concentrating on changing gender relations, shows the divisions developing in Southern society. Many male migrants left the eastern seaboard in an effort to escape the intricate kinship networks that had sprouted there. On the frontier, communities broke down in time, women lost power, and patriarchy defined society's roles. Cashin's findings echo those of John Faragher, who found that creeping commercialism and eventual land competition destroyed kinship networks and polarized the nascent economic classes. Economic pressures, more than anything else, led to heightened individualism and patriarchy on the Southern frontier. The market interposition into community life, especially via the railroads, led to a distaste for slavery; the men in Sugar Creek, for example, came to see slavery as an economic threat. In the process, a Whig majority soon gave way to a Stephen Douglas brand of Democracy in the 1850s. Such a political phenomena fits well with Charles Seller's argument in The Market Revolution that the market worked to undermine, or at least radically change, political democracy. Obviously, slavery was not directly responsible for such phenomenal change. It is precisely these small revolutions in social life during the hectic 1850s that all historians, including Sellers, have trouble understanding. As Ronald Formisano points out in The Transformation of Political Culture, the transportation and communications revolutions were strong determinants in the rise and fall of the second party system.

Unquestionably, the market's impact on Southern society is crucial in explaining the causes of the Civil War. Whether or not planters were true capitalists, the market was an external factor in Southern socioeconomics and, necessarily, politics. Gavin Wright, in The Political Economy of the Cotton South, has argued that a "safety first" agriculture was employed by yeomen and small planters in the South. As a result, this majority of the white population, he finds, was homogeneous, self-sufficient, and hooked into the cotton market. Slavery, he judges, was a rational economic system; it was a workable system for all whites. Rather than being exploited by aristocratic planters, the yeoman majority was compatible with slavery. There were not two classes with opposing interests in the South, this indicates, and planters did not dominate their less successful neighbors. On the downside of such thinking, though, is the fact that such a view of the whites being united on the basis of the agrarian economy makes the South seem to be a middle-class society, with slaveholders a definite minority. Clearly, this was not a middle class such as that of the antebellum North.

Even though J. William Harris (Plain Folk and Gentry in a Slave Society) finds the white South to have shared certain fundamental traits--the common experience of owning land, participation in the market, racism, etc.--he stresses the fact that this white "unity" was tenuous and often ambivalent. The South's republican white society equated liberty with black slavery, but external forces (e.g., abolitionism) threatened to destroy the shaky bridge that spanned the ranks of white society. Secession, Harris argues, was an attempt by planters to secure the liberties they enjoyed, especially that of holding slaves. To their chagrin, the white consensus, in the face of the external threat of the Union army, was torn apart by internal divisions that had always lain just below the surface of the society. The Confederate collapse was largely internally fueled.

As David Potter points out in The Impending Crisis, the Republicans' agenda of perpetuating the Union was achieved by keeping abolitionism and devotion to the Union cause in separate contexts. In contrast, by 1862 the Confederate war effort began to show weaknesses due to internal strains; three years later, as Frank Owsley expressed, the Confederacy would die of states' rights. Clearly, the basis of white solidarity had been largely psychological, transformed into war fever momentarily by the emotions of the secessionist movement. William Freehling dealt with these issues in Road to Disunion by stressing the existence of perpetual tension between democracy and despotism in the South. Just as there was not a United States before 1865, neither was there ever a South. An east-west dichotomy existed between the old seacoast lands and the fresh frontier areas, while Upper South-Lower South differences played heavily on the minds of secessionists. The Republican threat in 1860, Freehling feels, was the catalyst for a secessionist counter-revolution, a pre-emptive strike engineered to corral Upper South slaveholders solidly to the South's cause; the Fire-eating radicals feared that their moderate cousins just below the Mason-Dixon line would soon fall prey to abolitionist propaganda. Jeffersonian thought, he argues, was actually a barrier to Southern sectionalist aims; not until 1860, following abortive movements in 1830-31 and 1850-52, led by South Carolina, were the radicals able to assert their hegemony over the white majority by constricting egalitarianism at home.

Stephen Channing, in Crisis of Fear, ascribed the secessionist movement of 1860 in South Carolina to a "crisis of fear." South Carolinians, ever conscious of the black majority in their state, worried continuously about controlling the Negro in the absence of slavery. This fear, according to Channing, was crystallized into rife paranoia in the wake of John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry. Internal tensions, such as the perpetual contest between upcountry and lowcountry planters for primacy in state government, were eclipsed by this terrible fear. Moderates, who had opposed secession or, at the least, the secession of the Palmetto state on its own, essentially handed over the reins of leadership to the radicals. At the time, it appeared that the dire warnings long spewed forth by the Fire-eaters were becoming reality. Channing implies that Southern culture differed from that of the North to such a degree that secession was inevitable, and he contends that slavery was at the core of the mindset that animated the Civil War.

A myriad of factors influenced political thought throughout the South, many of them essentially local in nature. National politics, as J. Mills Thornton points out in Politics and Power in a Slave Society, is subject to the manipulation of individual leaders. Expounding upon the theme of American federalism, Thornton contends that the state government of Alabama was more directly influential in the life of the average citizen than was national government. Following this logic, citizens of the South identified more with their state parties, that these state parties gave form to national issues of debate. This is a political world where perceptions define what is taken to be reality. Along these lines of argument, he seeks not to explain secession outright, but rather to explain the conditions that allowed for secession.

Thornton employs a republican interpretation of Southern society, claiming that slavery came to underlie all political issues in Alabama, as well as the whole South. This thinking essentially was expressed in the fanatical concern for autonomy and independence. The existence of slavery allowed white men to remain autonomous in the society, and so slavery became a basic tenet of southern republicanism and southern nationalism. The fear of outside interference in southern society by Northerners, especially abolitionists, compelled Alabamians to adopt the ideology of states' rights. The Democratic party had come to dominate state politics by the 1850s, and the fire-eaters came to control it by 1860, bringing on secession and war. Thornton essentially blames the Jacksonian legacy of American politics for the Civil War. He characterizes this war as an outgrowth "not merely of the direct sectional encounters, but also of many of the episodes and concerns of the antebellum period which did not have any explicitly sectional content." Fire-eating demagogues were able, in 1860, to convert the masses to the cause of secession. In this sense, he argues that the Alabama experience typified the American experience that resulted in sectional warfare.

William Barney, however, in The Secessionist Impulse, found evidence in Alabama and Mississippi of a generation gap. Whigs, found especially in urban areas and agricultural regions with worn-out soil, were generally older than their secessionist counterparts. A crisis of fear, he charges, was manufactured by radical leaders operating on the basis of their personal commitment to the geographical expansion of slavery. Southern political thinking was, at best, a very complex issue.

The intricacies of Southern political and social thought are developed especially well by Michael P. Johnson's study of secession in Georgia. Johnson rejects the traditional explanations of Georgian secession (which, granted, is a somewhat unique case): that Georgians misinterpreted the threat posed by Lincoln's election and fell victim to Fire-eater rhetoric or that the electorate, allowed a new role in determining state policy in the wake of the collapse of political parties in 1860, led Georgia out of the Union in a wave of passion. He follows up on Genovese's view that slavery's ascension to a priority greater than that of the Union's preservation led to secession, and that the movement was led by the planter elite. Working on the basis of contemporary explanations of the crisis, Johnson argues that secession was a rational decision made by state leaders. Significantly, though, he identifies the threat behind secession as being not the external threat posed by abolitionism so much as the internal threat within Georgian society itself. He stresses the fact that deep divisions manifested themselves in the debates over secession, in Georgia and across the South. The planter elite, he suggests, saw the crisis as a test of their hegemony in the state; they supposedly worried that their fellow slaveholders would be won over by Republican rhetoric eventually, especially if it manifested itself in the form of patronage enticements. Because slaveholders were unsure as to the faithfulness to slavery by members of their own circle, they seceded in order to forestall the penetration of the Republican party within Georgia. There was no ideological consensus.

Johnson describes a double revolution in Georgia. The first revolution was one for home rule; this involved eliminating the external threat to Southern society, and it was achieved by the secessionist decision. Attention was then turned to a revolution that was internal in nature, the struggle for who would rule at home. This problem was addressed by drafting a new state constitution one guaranteeing power to the planter elite. He concludes that "secession was driven by political conflict not only between the South and the North but also between the black belt and the upcountry, slaveholders and nonslaveholders, and those who feared democracy and those who valued it." In the battle for who would rule at home, Johnson describes how the elite created a "patriarchal republic," the characteristics of which were designed so as to mollify internal discord within society. This "patriarchal republic," free of the potential excesses of democracy, would soon be destroyed by the Civil War.

William J. Cooper goes to great lengths to reinforce the stereotype that southern politics before the Civil War was centered around the issue of slavery; local issues were unimportant compared to it. In The South and the Politics of Slavery, 1828-1856, Cooper is especially explicit in announcing slavery to be the "fulcrum" of southern politics; Whigs as well as Democrats defended slavery against the abolitionists. The book covers the period of the second American party system, from 1828 and the advent of Jacksonianism to the disintegration of the Whig party in 1856. In explaining why Whigs as well as Democrats spoke "constantly" about slavery-related issues, Cooper argues that only the slavery issue afforded political stability to any party position. He insists that the white South was of a unified, proslavery mind. He is not completely successful at explaining why this should be so. Basically, Cooper utilizes a "republican" definition of liberty to say that slavery represented the very fundamental components of Southern society--honor, independence, equality within the nation. He does succeed in describing slavery as a national issue, pointing out that only the national government could officially recognize the peculiar institution's legitimacy in America. In the process of explication, Cooper seems to imply that the parties were utilized by southern politicians to gain national power, which could be harnessed to protect southern rights. Since the second party system first emerged in 1828, he seems to date the birth of the southern rights crusade even before the Nullification crisis.

Cooper identifies four factors that animated the "politics of slavery": the institution of slavery itself, southern parties and politicians, the political structure of the South, and the values of white southern society. Cooper would certainly agree that the North and South were culturally different in the antebellum era. He describes this sectional difference in political terms: local issues predominated in northern politics, whereas slavery dominated southern political discourse. Conditionally, southerners viewed parties' roles differently than did their northern counterparts--southerners relied on the national parties to work for the preservation of southern rights within the nation. Local issues were irrelevant, Cooper argues, compared to the indomitable politics of slavery. He rejects emphatically the common belief that economic matters defined party politics in the era of the second party system. Cooper dismisses the crucial significance of economic and diverse social issues at the local and state level by placing over each such issue a mask of proslavery; slavery took many forms in political discourse, he says. Specific issues emerged and faded, but slavery remained always at the core of each one. He does not seek to understand just who became Whigs or who became Democrats or the reasons why, for he sees in the South a unified system of political thought. Cooper's argument is almost circular: the drive for southern rights shaped the national party structure, but this selfsame party system fostered sectionalism within the parties and essentially destroyed the second party system. Cooper insists that the Democrats enjoyed political hegemony in the South in the late 1850s because no new party could replace the Whigs under the unspoken rules of the southern political system; the existence of anti-Democratic voters--who were a large minority of the southern population--and the existence of local issues could not subsume the slavery issue in politics. Cooper relies mainly on data from Presidential elections, ignoring nonpresidential contests at the state and local level. This approach prevents him from acknowledging the lack of unity and order in southern politics. He refuses to admit the existence of discord not only between but within parties; he is blind to any evidence that the South was anything but unified in proslavery ideology by the 1850s.

The intellectual base of the unified Southern white mind that Cooper insists existed is expounded upon in Liberty and Slavery. This "mind" required liberty and slavery to exist as symbiotic social organisms. Liberty in the context of a slaveholding society, Cooper tells us, is essentially the ability to hold slaves free of outside interference of any kind. Cooper works to prove the conservatism of southern thought; by tracing the southern notion of liberty back to Jeffersonian agrarianism, he seeks to prove that the North and South were culturally different long before the sectional crisis. Echoing the abolitionist argument, he lends support to the notion that the Civil War was an inevitable conflict and that the North fought a glorious campaign against a monolithic, reactionary Southern proslavery ideology.

Many historians have pushed aside the Cooper thesis of a monolithic, white, proslavery mind of the South to explore state and local politics in the Old South. Ralph Wooster has produced surveys of state and county government in both the Upper South and the Lower South. Wooster first examined the Lower South in The People in Power: Courthouse and Statehouse in the Lower South, 1850-1860. Wooster found a significant degree of democracy in state and local government--nineteenth-century democracy. The 1850s was especially marked by a large degree of progressive reform in government; barriers to voting and holding office were being demolished. Wooster devoted most of his attention to state legislatures. Individual legislators were generally middle-aged farmers, planters, and lawyers. Significantly, the number of slaveholders in legislatures increased during the 1850s to the point that they were a majority in all the state legislatures in 1860. Interestingly, though, the number of large planters in legislative office declined during this decade. The most marked discovery Wooster made was the prevalence of turnover in office. Since most legislators served only one term, power lay only with those men able to gain reelection over a number of years and thus gain leadership positions on legislative committees. The electorate was a very important part of politics, given enough strength by the political reforms of the 1850s to compel legislators to follow public opinion in their votes. Furthermore, Wooster contends that party divisions were not rigid in the 1850s; no socioeconomic barriers existed to forbid individuals from changing party affiliation. Wooster summarized his findings in three statements: legislators and public officials were largely agrarian in their sympathies; planters as well as "plain folk" were very active in government at the state and county level; and more planters and slaveholders held public office in 1860 than in 1850. This mass political participation more than anything else accounted for Wooster's conclusion that there was a significant degree of democracy in the antebellum politics of the Lower South.

Wooster applied the same analysis to the states of the Upper South in Politicians, Planters, and Plain Folks: Courthouse and Statehouse in the Upper South, 1850-1860. While legislatures dominated Upper South politics, the makeup of legislators differed from those of the Lower South: total property holding was less, and planters played a lesser role in the legislatures. Political parties were generally like those of the Deep South, but there was less correlation between Whig legislators and black-belt counties. As in the Deep South, Wooster argues that there were no major economic differences between Whig and Democratic legislators. Perhaps the most important difference from the Lower South was the smaller frequency of turnover among legislators. Wooster hesitates to judge the extent of influence by the plantation aristocracy in the South. For the most part, though, democratization was clearly sweeping over the South in the 1850s and early 1860s. Wooster's most controversial conclusion is that the South experienced more east-west differences than Upper-Lower South division. This conclusion reflects his finding of a greater level of democratization in the south-western cotton states than in the established eastern seaboard states.

Harry Watson offers a look at the formation of parties at a local level in Jacksonian Politics and Community Conflict. Watson wishes to explore the possibilities of economic and social fragmentation in Southern politics, granting the fact that slavery tied southerners closely to national political concerns. He examines what Cooper dismisses--the composition of parties at the local level, how political rhetoric and discourse reflected social reality, and what kind of men led local party branches. The book is an attempt to link the culture of the community to the politics of slavery.

At the core of Watson's argument is his theory that parties were created to contain community conflict, to defuse existing social instabilities. Although successful in this regard, the parties could not contain growing sectional tensions between the North and South. Ultimately, this sectional rift, encapsulated in the slavery issue, dominated southern politics and destroyed the second party system. In this study, parties were seemingly built from the bottom up by local leaders, not imposed upon the citizens from an outside source. Leaders worked to establish links between local issues and national ones after they built the parties. Seemingly, Watson argues that politics influenced the culture of the South more than southern culture shaped southern politics.

Historians must realize that the Civil War was never by any means a certainty. Even on the eve of secession, there were men who felt that an armed conflict could be avoided. A study of antebellum politics should not even bring the Civil War to bear in its exposition. Clearly, though, the burning urge to understand and explain the War Between the States influences historians' judgments concerning the years of emerging sectional conflict. Political history such as the Cooper thesis cannot explain the Southern course; southern culture's complexities cannot be revealed by a look at how men voted in the presidential elections of the mid-nineteenth century. Social history can illuminate the nature of southern culture, but it cannot solely explain why the South and North fought a war. Only an understanding of how national, state, and local politics impinged on each other, working through the vehicle of the two-party system, can allow us to understand the basic nature of the political crisis of the 1850s. I would agree with Thornton, though, that even at best, we can understand only how the preconditions for war came about, not why 600,000 men fought and died.