Your search for: subjects:"Secession"

Political Culture and Secession in Mississippi explores the connections between gender, honour, and electoral politics, and argues that secession resulted from the demands and implications of masculinity within the state's antiparty political culture. Using evidence from local election returns ...

Political Culture and Secession in Mississippi explores the connections between gender, honour, and electoral politics, and argues that secession resulted from the demands and implications of masculinity within the state's antiparty political culture. Using evidence from local election returns, rural newspapers, manuscripts, and numerous county records, the work sketches a new picture of the varied and colourful world of local politics. It also advances a model of political culture that draws from several disciplines, mixing social science and traditional political history with anthropology and gender and ritual studies. Mississippi's political culture evolved as a system that relied on face-to-face relationships and personal reputation, organized around neighbourhood networks of friends and extended kin. The intimate, public nature of this local setting allowed voters to assess each candidate's individual status and fitness for public leadership. Above all other masculine virtues, men valued independence and physical courage, but also reliability and loyalty to community. The political culture offered numerous chances to demonstrate all of these (sometimes contradictory) qualities, and like duelling and other male rituals, voting and running for office helped set the boundaries of class and power. It mediated between the conflicting values of nineteenth-century American egalitarianism and democracy and the South's exaggerated patriarchal hierarchy, which was sustained by honour and slavery. But the political system functioned effectively only as long as it remained a personal exercise between individuals, divorced from the bureaucratic anonymity of institutional parties. Therefore, the state's dominant political culture was its local, fiercely loyal antiparty tradition that conflated the distinction between men as individuals and as public leaders or representatives. This turned all political conflict into a personal exchange, and explains why Mississippians assessed rhetoric in any public context as a real or potential insult. The political culture, then, dictated men's visceral reaction to the Republicans' anti-Southern free soil programme. Although Republicanism violated their sense of home, the exaggeration and violence of their reaction sprang from their non-institutional political culture. The sectional controversy engaged men where they measured themselves, in public, with and against their peers, and linked their understanding of masculinity with formal politics, through which the voters actually brought about secession.

Secessionist activity has been increasing in the developing world, in Western liberal democracies, and especially in the former Communist states of Eastern Europe. This timely book offers a general explanation for the occurrence of the phenomenon, arising from a comparative study of numerous ...

Secessionist activity has been increasing in the developing world, in Western liberal democracies, and especially in the former Communist states of Eastern Europe. This timely book offers a general explanation for the occurrence of the phenomenon, arising from a comparative study of numerous historical examples of secession and separatist conflict. The book develops a comprehensive framework, specifying the elements necessary for a secession crisis, and discussing the moral issues underpinning it.

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 ...

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.