| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Manisha Sinha. The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2000. Pp. xiii, 362. Cloth $55.00, paper $19.95.

In this engaging book, Manisha Sinha places slavery at the center of southern political distinctiveness in the antebellum era and South Carolina at the forefront of southern nationalism. Sinha depicts Carolinian planter-politicians as ahead of, rather than distinctive from, other states in their commitment to southern sovereignty. Sinha argues convincingly that planter elites directed South Carolina politics and that slavery governed their political behavior. Beginning with the nullification crisis, proceeding through the controversy of 1850, the debates about reopening the African slave trade, and episodes of judicial nullification in the late antebellum era, and culminating in secession in 1860, Sinha demonstrates that slavery and South Carolina led the South toward its challenge to democracy and abandonment of the Union. 1

As South Carolina assumed the mantle of southern leadership once held by Virginia, southern politics became increasingly, if intermittently, radicalized—and racialized. Challenging historians who argue that the course the South pursed after the 1820s represented a differing variant of republicanism or of liberalism, Sinha shows that protecting slavery and overturning the constitutional bases for challenging slaveholding drove South Carolina's antidemocratic counterrevolution. . . .

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