The Idea of a Southern Nation: Southern Nationalists and Southern Nationalism, 1830-1860. By John McCardell. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1979.
John McCardell served as President of Middlebury College for a twelve-year period. After taking a leave of absence in June 2004, he returned as a professor to teach courses on American history specializing in the period between 1861-1960. A graduate of Washington and Lee University, McCardell gained a Ph.D. from Harvard and was awarded the Allan Nevins Prize for the most outstanding dissertation on an American subject.
John McCardell’s study evaluates the origins and impact that the idea of a separate Southern nation had on the American people. According to the author, Northerners and Southerners shared extremely similar intellectual, political, social, and economic beliefs, but the issue of slavery “gave such an ideological charge” to all other aspects of Southern culture that the nation inevitably found itself on the verge of civil war (3). McCardell suggests that the ideology of Southern nationalism first emerged during the tariff crisis in South Carolina. The author reviews the period under discussion in chronological fashion in order to demonstrate the cumulative nature of Southern discontent and to gauge the impact that aggrieved individuals had on shaping Southern partisanship.
McCardell focuses a significant portion of his study on South Carolina. He contends that geography and climate determined that South Carolina would emerge as the most dominant state in the slaveholding South. The ascendancy of cotton, the “omnipotence” of its legislature, and the intermarriage between powerful families all contributed towards the emergence of a fiercely independent clan-based elite. The Nullification crisis forged a deep unity of purpose amongst the ruling-class who eschewed the mercenary commercial ambitions of Northerners. Yet McCardell suggests that plantation-owning Southerners were themselves a group of entrepreneurial businessmen whose own “minute attention to dollars and cents” undermined their conviction that “continuation with the Union was no longer possible” (48).
The author echoes the arguments of many other historians that by 1860, while not all agreed with the institution of slavery, virtually every Southern nationalist accepted the racial argument. McCardell illustrates this point by reviewing the career of Thomas R. Dew, who argued that slavery enabled the best men to rule while it also inspired the black with “the principles, the sentiments, and feelings of the white” (55).
The remainder of the book includes chapters on topics such as schools and churches, Southern literature and Manifest Destiny. McCardell does infuse his text with lively descriptions of some notable individuals who influenced various sections of Southern society, and he successfully utilizes the methodology of anthropologists Clifford Geertz to provide a more nuanced interpretation of his findings. Yet his narrative generally seems familiar and lacks any peculiarly original insight into the mindset of the South.
The Idea of a Southern Nation includes a clear description of McCardell’s methodology in addition to a useful commentary on the most valuable primary and secondary sources consulted. While McCardell successfully presents a highly readable and accessible synthesis of this subject, his dependency upon the books of other historians, such as Clement Eaton, leaves the reader a trifle perplexed. Time and again one reads the same brief quotations previously included in Eaton’s work, The Mind of the Old South, published some twelve years earlier. This repetition proves a minor irritant but not a fatal flaw.
Claire Phelan