Christian Esh

Ayers, L. Diane Barnes, Steven Deyle, Marc Egnal, Andrew Frank, Craig T. Friend, Larry Hudson, James L. Huston, Charles Irons, Matthew Mason, Michael O’Brien, Peter Onuf, Brian Schoen, William G. Thomas, and Frank Towers, all experts in the subject area about which they write. Earlier interpretations of the pre-Civil War South, Marxist or otherwise, focused on its agrarian, backward-looking, unchanging, nonurban, noncapitalist orientation, effectively allowing American historians to sideline the South as a nonmainstream, non-Northern cul-desac in American history before the Civil War. As the editors make clear, “this volume recasts the Old South not as the anti-North or as a region stuck in time, but on its own terms and as an active participant in, and even promoter of, change and progress” (3). The contributors to The Old South’s Modern Worlds each attack a different aspect of Southern history to demonstrate that the South was more capitalist and more urban, and undergoing more change, than had been presumed previously (and therefore, that the traditional storyline of American history is in need of some serious rethinking). With the exception of Marc Egnal, who writes against the dominant theme of the book, each essayist contributes to this important revisionist approach, following in the footsteps of earlier histories by Mark Smith, Jennifer Green, and Jonathan Wells, who have also suggested that our general understanding of the South requires a rewrite. This collection draws together various strands of this emerging interpretation and puts them in the same place, making the volume a valuable starting point from which to re-evaluate Southern history on everything from moral reform to industry and from banking to the internal slave trade to even slavery itself. This volume lets professors and graduate students interested in one-stop shopping read the latest scholarship on the antebellum South’s modernity in all its variety. The volume’s essays are grouped into two areas, national and global. In considering the national approach, essayists such as Charles Irons, William G. Thomas, and Steven Deyle show how Southerners contributed to national narratives (eschewing regionalism) by focusing on evangelism and missionary appeals, railroad expansion, the slave trade, and national marketing. Their essays are highly persuasive and suggest that the South was neither behind the North nor retrograde in adopting modern methods. The globalizing elements woven into several of the essays suggest that the South’s contributions to America’s national identity need to be reassessed: Peter Onuf, Matthew Mason, and Frank Towers’s essays particularly indicate that antebellum Southerners were neither insular nor withdrawn when it came to considerations about America as a nation or to taking part in world affairs. Onuf makes clear that “it was precisely because of their exalted conception of themselves as American patriots that righteously aggrieved Southerners bolted the union” (27). Their patriotism made them leave, rather than stay, in order to protect the legacy of Manifest Destiny and revolutionaryera rhetoric. Likewise, Mason revisits proslavery arguments to demonstrate that they reveal a strong commitment to progress and modernity. Free labor was a failure when contrasted with slave labor, proslavery theorists argued: “Slavery was the bloom, not the thorn, in the garden of progress.” Proslavery intellectuals expressed themselves with confidence when debating British abolitionists such as Harriet Martineau, stressing that slavery fit well not only with the “advance of civilization” but also with the “scientific aspect of modernity” (55). If Egnal’s essay seems to let the air out of the South modernity balloon, he does it by getting the reader to revisit Eugene Genovese’s argument that the South was essentially premodern, being careful to emphasize that the Deep South was resistant to change, while residents of the border regions and urban centers were more receptive to innovation. Ultimately, planters’ ability to impose their will politically at the state level meant that they resisted modernity and were “more determined to defend their traditional view of society” (283). Essayists in the volume probably will not disagree with Egnal’s conclusion, though they might not accept the reasons he uses to get there. This built-in disagreement means that more studies on the Old South and modernity are sure to be published, which will have to acknowledge The Old South’s Modern Worlds as an important book in this growing area.

Title of Document: THE SACRED CAUSE OF STATE RIGHTS: THEORIES OF UNION AND SOVEREIGNTY IN THE ANTEBELLUM NORTH Christian R. Esh, Doctor of Philosophy, 2006. Directed By: Professor Herman Belz Department of History “The Sacred Cause of State Rights” examines the problem of federalism as the central issue in U.S. constitutional history before the Civil War. Drawing on Keith Whittington’s insight into the political construction of the Constitution, the argument focuses on the role of state legislatures and courts, particularly in the North, relative to their claims of co-equal authority to the national government in the struggle to determine constitutional meaning. The project seeks to rescue the political history of federalism from the post-Civil War view that the Union had been polarized into patriotic nationalists and traitorous defenders of state rights. In fact, most Northerners occupied a middle ground between the arch-nationalism of Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun’s expositio...