The two states were long on a collision course. South Carolina’s planters demanded stronger protections for Black slavery until they finally split the Democratic Party, thereby throwing the 1860 election to Abraham Lincoln, after which the state tried to secede from the Union. Massachusetts gave refuge to escapees from Southern bondage and helped birth the Republican Party, the first anti-slavery coalition in world history. A climax came in 1856, when South Carolina Rep. Preston Brooks beat Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts to a bloody pulp on the Senate floor — a gruesome harbinger of the greater violence to come.
This framing sheds new and interesting light on a story more often told at a national or even continental scale. Merry, a master of the two-page pen portrait, shows how clashes between politicians within the states were often as fierce as the larger struggle between North and South, and he gives a fresh introduction to the characters at the heart of the story, some well-known and others more obscure. “His mind alighted heavily upon big conclusions, with little regard for nuance or subtlety,” he writes of Robert Barnwell Rhett, a pro-secession South Carolinian, “and once a conclusion was formed it became instantly impregnable from any troublesome self-doubt or counterarguments.” There’s no shortage of Rhetts walking the halls of Congress today.
It’s only regrettable that the book doesn’t stick to this two-state approach more closely. Too much of it is devoted to rehashing the general political history of the period through a slow, grim march through the years — something that has been done by many others before. Intently focused on high politics, “Decade of Disunion” rarely escapes the confines of Washington and the obligatory recitation of speech after eloquent speech. Must we know the names of every vice-presidential candidate on every party ticket, major and minor? Particularly when we get little more than a cursory sketch of the economic, social and cultural histories of the two states in the book’s subtitle.
While Merry is clear that slavery caused the conflict, he mostly avoids discussion of bondage itself. The practice is described early on as “long a portentous dilemma simmering over the flames of politics” — a remarkably abstract way of putting it. When we do hear in passing about “the plight of American blacks caught in the vise of bondage, with all the pain, anguish, and inhumanity of that experience,” it’s Merry summarizing “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Sumner considered his wounds from the Brooks assault nothing “compared with that tale of woe which is perpetually coming to us from the house of bondage!” That tale may be familiar to readers, but so are the Lincoln-Douglas debates, which get 10 pages, despite having nothing to do with Massachusetts or South Carolina.
Merry recently argued in the American Conservative that another civil war may indeed be in the offing. “History suggests that political adjudication becomes extremely difficult, sometimes even impossible, when the central issues of the day are viewed in moral terms,” he warned. That was the mistake the abolitionists made, and it is now being repeated by “the nation’s knowledge-sector elites,” who “embrace an ethos of globalism,” as seen in the “morality-based crusade of transgender rights.” The plight of marginalized people apparently still isn’t something to get all worked up over.
Yet the very neat symmetry that Merry highlights in the 1850s — with radicals in both South Carolina and Massachusetts rejecting compromise and opting for disunion or even war — is precisely what’s missing today. Many Republicans deploy violent rhetoric and deny the legitimacy of elections, while Democrats refuse to entertain hardball remedies like court-packing and even gamely help to save the GOP House speaker from being ousted by fellow extremists in his own party. No single issue divides the nation. We have nothing so clear as the Mason-Dixon to conceivably split along. Even so, it may again be the case, as Lincoln predicted in 1858, that “a crisis” must be “reached and passed” before the country can return to anything resembling peace.
Decade of Disunion
How Massachusetts and South Carolina Led the Way to Civil War, 1849-1861
By Robert W. Merry
Simon & Schuster. 514 pp. $35
