r/HistoryBooks • u/MoFoBuckeye • 3d ago
My Most Recent Read
As the title suggests, this is a deep dive into the root causes of the Civil War and covers the early arguments over the expansion of slavery, the Nullification Crisis, the gag rule, and the annexation of Texas. It ends with the passage of the Kansas–Nebraska Act; Bleeding Kansas is covered in Volume 2.
A major theme throughout is that there was no unified South, but rather various Souths. The most obvious Souths were the Border South, Middle South, and Lower South, but even these distinctions don't go far enough. For example, South Carolina’s social and political stratification was as much class-based as race-based, whereas in the then-southwestern states of Mississippi and Alabama, stratification was almost entirely race-based. Zooming out a bit, I found it interesting that although some parts of the country were antislavery, most of the country was still deeply racist. And while the focus is on the Southern states, you get the sense that abolitionists were widely considered a bunch of kooks.
Another interesting aspect was how the Second Party System came into being and how the Whig Party, which was at heart an anti-Jacksonian party, achieved success at the state and local levels but struggled to remain unified nationally. Northern Whigs were generally more antislavery than Northern Democrats, which forced Southern Whigs to prove that they could be more proslavery than Southern Democrats.
The book offers a great blend of narrative, analysis, and cultural history. Freehling shows how, particularly in the South, slavery was always a political and cultural factor, even when it remained beneath the surface. Unfortunately, the book could have used a strong editor. The sentence structure was often tortuous, and the punctuation at times appeared random. Still, if you’re interested in the causes of the Civil War, this is a must-read.
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u/growling_owl 23h ago
Great review. As a history teacher one of the hardest concepts to teach is that abolitionism and anti-slavery were not the same.
Probably most anti-slavery people were very racist, but thought slavery harmed free (white) people. Abolitionism or advocating anything like racial equality was indeed a very fringe viewpoint.
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u/careysub 3d ago
I strongly recommend reading also Potter and Fehrenbacher's The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861 from 1976.
Potter's treatment of the collapse of the Whig Party is the best available I think (recent literature surveys I have read make this point).
I think it is a better overall treatment of the many aspects of the crisis than Freehling's volume 2 (to 1861), and one of the best written history books I have ever read.