Far from a monolithic block of diehard slave states, the South in
the eight decades before the Civil War was, in William Freehling's
words, "a world so lushly various as to be a storyteller's dream."
It was a world where Deep South cotton planters clashed with South
Carolina rice growers, where the egalitarian spirit sweeping the
North seeped down through border states already uncertain about
slavery, where even sections of the same state (for instance,
coastal and mountain Virginia) divided bitterly on key issues. It
was the world of Jefferson Davis, John C. Calhoun, Andrew Jackson,
and Thomas Jefferson, and also of Gullah Jack, Nat Turner, and
Frederick Douglass.
Now, in the first volume of his long awaited, monumental study of
the South's road to disunion, historian William Freehling offers a
sweeping political and social history of the antebellum South from
1776 to 1854. All the dramatic events leading to secession are
here: the Missouri Compromise, the Nullification Controversy, the
Gag Rule ("the Pearl Harbor of the slavery controversy"), the
Annexation of Texas, the Compromise of 1850, and the
Kansas-Nebraska Act. Freehling vividly recounts each crisis,
illuminating complex issues and sketching colorful portraits of
major figures. Along the way, he reveals the surprising extent to
which slavery influenced national politics before 1850, and he
provides important reinterpretations of American republicanism,
Jeffersonian states' rights, Jacksonian democracy, and the causes
of the American Civil War.
But for all Freehling's brilliant insight into American antebellum
politics, Secessionists at Bay is at bottom the saga of the rich
social tapestry of the pre-war South. He takes us to old
Charleston, Natchez, and Nashville, to the big house of a typical
plantation, and we feel anew the tensions between the slaveowner
and his family, the poor whites and the planters, the established
South and the newer South, and especially between the slave and his
master, "Cuffee" and "Massa." Freehling brings the Old South back
to life in all its color, cruelty, and diversity. It is a memorable
portrait, certain to be a key analysis of this crucial era in
American history.
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