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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Insightful lectures on the Antebellum South,
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This review is from: Sectional Crisis and Southern Constitutionalism (Paperback)
The late Don E. Fehrenbacher, probably the greatest historian of American Law, Politics, and sectionalism in the 19th century, presents a thin volume of two series of lectures he gave in the late 1970s.The first of these 'The South and Three Sectional Crises', details the Missouri controversy, the 1846-1850 arguments about the Wilmot Provido, and the Kansas-Nebraska fights. The second, 'Constitutions and Constitutionalism in the Slaveholding South' deals with constitutions in Southern states, the South's views of the US constitution, and finally, the Confederate constitution and its applications during the short life span of the Confederacy. Both essays, and especially the second, suffer from the shortness of the lecture format. Fehrenbacher can only barely touch upon the issues he raise here, particularly in the second essay, which deals with three separate issues. Although Fehrenbacher has written often about the sectional crises, he always manages to look at the issues from a new perspective. Here, Fehrenbacher focuses on the South's perspective. He shows that the Missouri crisis was not a secession crisis, but that it played a large part in developing Southern strategies for dealing with future conflicts. The South has learned that the North could be pressured with threats of secession, and used the threat to have its way in the following crisis. After winning the first two sectional crisis, the South lost the third. Unlike the previous secession crisis, the South finally seceded because of an occurrence in the executive rather then the legislative branch of government. Unlike Congress, where negotiations led naturally to some form of compromise or at least the appearance of compromise, the election of an anti-Slavery president was a clear signal, a black or white issue, and the most logical and natural basis for secession. The second essay, less coherent, is nonetheless interesting. The Southern state constitutions, because they reflected little conflict with antislavery feelings, proved to be remarkably similar to Northern state constitution. In the relationship with the constitution, the South engaged on two parallel, somewhat contradictory strategies. On the One hand, it advocated a form of a weak Union, unable to coerce its will on States. One the other hand, the South used the lesser unity of the Northern states to form Southern dominated bi-sectional parties - both the Jeffersonian Republicans and later the Democrats in the 1840s and 50s - which led the South to be the dominating section in the union. After secession, the Confederate constitution formed was very similar to the US one, although it reflected the South's commitment to Slavery, and its distrust of Politics. So similar was the Southern legal framework to the Federal one, that Confederate prosecutors, judges and juries continued legal proceedings from before secession, as if it has never occurred. In an interesting and perceptive introduction. Fehrenbacher notices that all Post-CW histories of the South are also histories of secession. Although brief, this, like all of Fehrenbacher's writings, is a significant contribution to the effort to understand the roots of the American Civil War.
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