Now, author, journalist, and former editor of The American Conservative Robert W. Merry brings bothsidesism into the past with a vengeance in his Decade of Disunion: How Massachusetts and South Carolina Led the Way to Civil War, 1849-1861 [2024], a well-written if deeply flawed account of the antebellum that cherry-picks data in support of his questionable thesis that Massachusetts and South Carolina were equally responsible for the course of events that led to secession and war. That, in fact, without agitations from Charleston and Boston, there might not even have been a Civil War. There are so many things wrong with these contentions that it is difficult to know exactly where to start.
So let’s start with a Reader’s Digest version of the actual events. From the dawn of the Republic, the slave south had dominated the national government, not least through the Constitution’s infamous three-fifths clause that for purposes of representation counted the enslaved as fractional (if disenfranchised) human beings, granting slave states outsize political power in Congress and tipping the scales for electoral votes. There was also the successive string of Virginia aristocrats who (other than in John Adams’ single term) served as Chief Executive for the nation’s first three and a half decades. Then, with rare exception, the antebellum presidents who followed were either slaveowners or so-called “doughface” northern men of southern sympathies. The rudder of the Republic was steered from due south. Yet, despite that commanding role, the slave power elite ever insisted upon more: eschewing compromise, wielding political brinksmanship, forcing concessions to meet their demands. Their nearly unbroken record of success was interrupted by Lincoln’s 1860 election, which promised the vast territories seized in the Mexican War to antislavery free soil advocates rather than to those determined to transplant plantation slavery to new environs. The slave south could not abide that verdict. Over a matter of months, eleven southern states seceded and formed the Confederacy. South Carolina was the first.
Merry, a gifted writer, is at his best as he takes a deep dive into the arcane avenues of politics in the Palmetto State, which had long led the vanguard for secession, defining and shaping the very concept of such a thing philosophically and ideologically—even actively promoting what we would today tag the “vibe” for it in popular culture. South Carolinian John C. Calhoun was the most prominent voice below the Mason-Dixon extolling white supremacy, championing slavery as an institution both essential and positive, and defending state’s rights. These positions were always linked and often interchangeable. Many trace Calhoun’s clash with Andrew Jackson over tariffs in the “nullification crisis”—when Calhoun himself was serving as Jackson’s vice president—to the moment that notions of secession gained currency and legitimacy. Calhoun never wavered from his conviction in absolute state sovereignty, as well as the right to own human property, stances he considered nonnegotiable. Calhoun opposed the Compromise of 1850, although he died before its eventual passage. But his ideals lived on.
With a talented pen, Merry brings focus upon three characters who were heirs to Calhoun’s legacy—Robert Barnwell Rhett, James Henry Hammond, and Andrew Pickens Butler—whom he identifies as central to what he terms the states’ “struggles against northern antislavery pressures.” We know today, of course, that much of the fears that drove these so-called struggles—here and across the slave south—could be said to be hyperbolic at best, perhaps even paranoid, as the belief grew that the north was hell bent for abolition, a fringe movement too often confused with the politics of antislavery. But no matter. It was, as Civil War historian Gary Gallagher has underscored, the perception that mattered. And perhaps it mattered most in South Carolina. In his careful analysis, Merry reveals that the two chief political factions in South Carolina at the time, the secessionists and the cooperationists, while sometimes mischaracterized from afar, actually shared the same goal of separation; the only difference was that the latter would hold off until the move could be made in tandem with other southern states, while the former lobbied for going it alone. When the time came, secession was controversial across the south, but not here, where it enjoyed near unanimity.
But why? This is a component to a fascinating backstory the author fails to explore. South Carolina was remarkably unlike every other state, south and north, and that merits some discussion. Perhaps not quite as different as, say, Sparta was to the other poleis in fifth century Greece, but that could serve as a useful analogy, because while there was a shared culture, there was also a distinct peculiarity. The roots of “the why” lay centuries earlier; South Carolina’s founders did not hail from Europe proper, as those in the other colonies, but were expatriates from Barbados: wealthy Anglo Barbadian planters who—pressured by land scarcity on the island and chasing new opportunities—transplanted the brutal Caribbean slave plantation model to the continent. Sugar plantations in Barbados were notoriously inhumane, with mortality rates that approached one hundred percent! During settlement, the Barbadians brought the enslaved along with them, as well a lack of empathy for their human property.
South Carolina remained among the worst places in the south to be enslaved, with whites generally indifferent to the suffering of blacks. In 1858, British consul Robert Bunch reported with a mix of horror and incredulity that locals, largely unfazed by the pitiable appearance of the skeletal human cargo that was offloaded in Charlston harbor from an illegal slave ship interdicted by the Navy, were instead outraged that the vessel’s captain and crew were paraded through town upon their capture! The moral dilemma over slavery that informed ethical discussion beyond its borders, even in states where the practice was deeply entrenched, was conspicuous in its absence there. Calhoun’s concept of slavery as a positive good—which stood at odds with the more widely accepted notion in the south of it as a “necessary evil”—deeply informed the zeitgeist. Later, elites even lobbied for reopening the African slave trade, which turned out to be less popular in other parts of the Confederacy—especially in the Chesapeake, where breeding was big business; new imports would likely drive prices downward.
But while South Carolina stood alone in much, it would be misleading to suggest that the deep grievances—imagined or not—that eventually united the south in embracing disunion would not have existed had Charleston not led the way to separation in 1860. No serious Civil War historian would advance that argument. Still, Merry tries to make it so. He mentions the “F Street Mess” in passing—the name attached to a cabal of lawmakers who helped rewrite the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which came to deepen the coming crisis—but does not dwell on the fact that only one of them, Pickens Butler, represented South Carolina. (The others were from Missouri and Virginia.) Another key player in antebellum politics, Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, receives little attention. There were many more, also overlooked. And it is a much, much bigger story. A coalition of slave power interests across the lower and upper south came to collectively embrace secession. South Carolina may have been the loudest and most fervent, but, at the end of the day, it was only one of eleven to sever ties with the United States. The central cause of the Civil War was always slavery, and that cause existed well outside the boundaries of South Carolina. I would urge Merry—and others interested in the complexity and nuance in the road to secession—to read Sidney Blumenthal’s recent series on Abraham Lincoln (especially volumes two and three), which, far more than a traditional biography, renders a detailed, compelling narrative of the crosscurrents that would come to deliver disunion and war.
The author, as expected, also looks north in the title’s blame game. The case could be made that there were no two states more diametrically opposed in ideology and outlook than South Carolina and Massachusetts, but to suggest that Boston—which indeed played host to a vocal abolitionist sentiment, and openly resisted the Fugitive Slave Act—was somehow a prime mover in sparking the rebellion leaps beyond overstatement into the realm of distortion. Merry, like antebellum southerners perhaps, too often confuses abolition with antislavery. New England was in fact a hotbed of abolition, but that still represented a tiny minority. It was even more minuscule elsewhere in the north. For the most part, northern free soil forces were no less champions of white supremacy than their southern kin. Rather than ideological zeal, their brand of antislavery was largely driven by a desire to exploit opportunities for settlement in the new territories for white men. This vision, by the way, did not include free blacks, Native Americans, or former Mexican nationals who resided there. It was not until much later, when emancipation became a Union war aim, that to be characterized as an “abolitionist” was no longer taken as a pejorative across most of the north.
That Merry never dwells on the foundation of cruelty that framed the institution of human bondage, nor the widespread sufferings of its victims, makes the reader wonder whether the author truly comprehends the inevitable polarization that came to define the core of the conflict. Lincoln was committed to noninterference with slavery where it existed, but southerners—per Dred Scott—demanded the right to transport their slave property anywhere, meaning that there simply would no longer be any such thing as a “free state.” Shelby Foote once simplistically styled the war as a “failure to compromise,” but by 1860 there simply were no concessions that would satisfy the south other than a complete capitulation of northern interests. While there is no doubt that South Carolina was a key instigator for secession, and the rhetoric of antislavery Massachusetts exacerbated sectional tensions, to hold each equally responsible for the outcome is a wildly inaccurate appraisal. Moreover, absent either state, civil war yet remained likely; it would have just looked a bit different.
In the end, despite extensive research and some truly fine writing, Merry’s work falls short, and that’s too bad. It could be because the author is a journalist rather than a trained historian, although there are plenty of non-historians who write outstanding works in the field, such as Candice Millard and Angela Saini. But certainly a deeper familiarity with Civil War historiography would have been helpful for him. As I read through his book, I kept wondering what could have inspired the author’s bizarre thesis. The answer awaited me at the end! I do not commonly read the “Acknowledgements” section, but this time I did, and there it was: Merry cites Paul Johnson in his A History of the American People asserting that “Only two states wanted a civil war—Massachusetts and South Carolina.” For those unfamiliar with Johnson, he was a British conservative popular historian whose politics at least occasionally compromised his scholarship. I would contend that Johnson was wrong, and so is Merry. While there are certain merits to his book, most notably his analysis of South Carolina’s politics, in general I would urge the student of this era to look elsewhere.
NOTE: I read an ARC edition of this book which I received as part of an Early Reviewer’s program
Recommended Reading:
Blumenthal’s Lincoln … Review of: Wrestling With His Angel: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln Vol. II, 1849-1856, and All the Powers of Earth: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln Vol. III, 1856-1860, by Sidney Blumenthal
More on Robert Bunch … Review of: Our Man in Charleston: Britain’s Secret Agent in the Civil War South, by Christopher Dickey
Other Authors Referenced in this Review:
Candice Millard … Review of: Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President, by Candice Millard
Angela Saini … Review of: The Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality, by Angela Saini
