Va-Hist subscribers may find this review of William H. Freehling's new
book on the origins of the Civil War of interest.
Please respect the letter and spirit of the copyright statement at the
end of the review.
Brent Tarter
The Library of Virginia
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H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by [log in to unmask] (August 2007)
William W. Freehling. _The Road to Disunion: Volume 2: Secessionists
Triumphant, 1854-1861_. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. xx +
586 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN
978-0-10-505815-4.
Reviewed for H-CivWar by James Marten, Department of History, Marquette
University
The Neurotic Generation
The sectional conflict has long been one of those fields in which the
top practitioners often collect years of scholarship into sweeping
accounts of the causes of the great conflagration. This has given rise
to the great schools of thought familiar even to undergraduate history
majors, with advocates of the "irrepressible conflict" and of the
"blundering generation," to name two, sparring about the inevitably or
the foolishness of the war. _Secessionists Triumphant_, the second
volume of William W. Freehling's extraordinarily detailed interpretation
of the forces driving the South toward secession, is the most recent
example of this genre of grand histories of the coming of the Civil War.
Although they differ in many ways, Freehling's newest work resembles
another big book on the war's origins: David M. Potter's Pulitzer
Prize-winning _The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861_ (1976). Both demonstrate
their authors' complete command of the pertinent secondary scholarship
and primary sources. Both make shrewd connections between the private
ambitions and public activities of the major actors. Both imbue their
books with a highly personal tone and celebrate the use of narrative in
making sense of the spiral toward war. Yet they can be distinguished in
several ways, not the least of which is that Potter's work still retains
a hint of the old Revisionist notion that the war was brought on by a
"blundering generation" of politicians; his application of irony to the
events of the 1850s provides insight as well as entertainment.
Freehling, on the other hand, suggests that slavery was, indeed, an
important and divisive enough issue to lead to a nearly irrepressible
conflict. He also tends to emphasize a different literary approach than
Potter by looking at tragic flaws in the character of the dozens of
hard, ambitious, and sometimes delusional men who appear in two or three
page biographies throughout the text.
Several elements of Freehling's book stand out. First of all, he never
hesitates to argue that slavery was the number one issue dividing the
North and South. He shows that all other conflicts flowed from the
peculiar institution, whose maintenance required a despotism that
undermined the democratic principles of the nation and whose support
inspired intellectual gymnastics that ultimately, if temporarily, pulled
most southerners into the Secessionists' camp. Secondly, he stresses the
role played by the border states, as their resistance to radical
sectionalism ultimately led the radical sectionalists to forsake
cooperation and push for separate state secession. Thirdly, he loves to
find meaningful coincidences in the course of events. For instance, the
celebration of the completion of the railroad between Charleston and
Savannah occurred just as South Carolinians wavered on the secession
issue in December 1860; the banquet and speeches provided a very public
and effective venue for the Radicals and proved to be a turning point in
the debate in South Carolina. Fourthly, given his earlier work, he
somewhat predictably--but not unfairly--features the role of South
Carolina in the story of secession. But the Palmetto State's path to
revolution is not simply a matter of extremists seizing control of a
power vacuum; nothing is that simple in this complex society of class
divisions, in which any slight or future threat to its bedrock
institution, slavery, sent shivers of fear through the collective spine
of the elite low country planters who controlled the state. South
Carolina provides the most powerful example of the fifth distinctive
feature of the book, namely Freehling's emphasis on internal divisions
within the slave states: between the Border South, the Old South, and
the Southwest; between upcountry and low country; between slave owners
and non-slave owners; between rich and poor. At different times these
divisions both impeded and propelled the activists' efforts to stir in
their fellow southerners the right mix of fear, outrage, and backbone.
The book is organized into many, rather short chapters, each providing a
sharp narrative of a specific event or a capsule biography of a key
figure. Many of the incidents and people are familiar to everyone;
others appear far less often in typical histories of the period. For
instance, in a section that begins with the oft-told tale of John
Brown's ill-fated Harpers Ferry raid and his ironic martyrdom, Freehling
includes chapters on "Three Other Men Coincidentally Named John," who
all had different, less violent plans for bringing free soil
sensibilities to the border South: John Fee, John Underwood, and John
Clark (p. 203). Although these men do not normally appear in histories
of the sectional conflict, they are examples of the detail Freehling
packs into the narrative, showing the complexities of the issues and
attitudes that alarmed and inspired southerners.
Freehling makes it clear that he purposefully rejected "academic
historians' tendency to maximize abstract analysis and to minimize
dramatic writing." "Where many academic historians dismiss epic stories
as old-fashioned fluff," he writes somewhat defensively, "I believe that
classic tales of headline events, when retold from fresh angles, help
sort out the culture's underlying forces" (p. xvi). Although the writing
style is striking and the narrative is ultimately persuasive,
Freehling's tone can become a little gossipy and he sometimes
inappropriately applies modern terms to 1850s politics. (Without the
technology to record sound, can politicians really speak in "sound
bites?") Readers may also tire of his excessive use of adjectives and
other modifiers, which occasionally make the narrative a little
hyperactive. Yet _Secessionists Triumphant_ is, at its best, an epic
story grandly told. Freehling offers paragraph-long prE9cis of his
arguments at the beginning of each section and effectively summarizes
the story so far at crucial intervals. Big issues are debated by men
with bigger personalities and although this is one of the most detailed
and sprawling accounts of the road to secession published in
generations, Freehling is generally successful in cutting through the
always interesting mounds of facts with incisive comments and confident
judgments.
Perhaps the most appealing--and most quirky, in some ways--feature of
the book is Freehling's insistence that the inner lives of the men
involved in these great controversies matter. These range from the
sexual issues that helped to shape James Henry Hammond's brilliance,
ambition, and indecisiveness; to the inferiority complex of Albert
Gallatin Brown, Mississippi's less well-know U.S. Senator; to James
Buchanan's pandering to Southerners at least partly because he enjoyed
their cheery conviviality at the White Sulphur Springs resort; to Hinton
Rowan Helper's rage at the unfairness of his economic failure in
California. To Freehling, this generation of politicians, activists, and
provocateurs are less a "blundering generation" than a "neurotic
generation." This will appear superficial to some readers, who may
conclude that the Civil War was caused by narcissistic sectionalists
acting on impulses nurtured by private, even subconscious
disappointments, resentments, and ambitions. But there is a ring of
truth to the amateur but sophisticated psychology the author uses to
explain the road to civil war.
Indeed, Freehling's last few pages are a "Coda," as he calls it, on how
slavery caused the Civil War. In his mind, "_That_ slavery above all
else caused this historic war ... seems indisputable." But only by
exploring "personality, accidents, timing--in a word, contingency," can
that abstract notion be converted into a concrete explanation of "how"
slavery caused the war (p. 531). His focus on how the personal became
the political generally works; it certainly lends a unique tone to this
wide-ranging and convincing account of the South's many paths to
secession.
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