| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Christopher J. Olsen. Political Culture and Secession in Mississippi: Masculinity, Honor, and the Antiparty Tradition, 1830–1860. New York: Oxford University Press. 2000. Pp. viii, 266. $45.00.

Christopher J. Olsen's book on the political culture of antebellum Mississippi presents us with a compelling social history of politics. According to Olsen, the ideal of personal honor and violence among white men, born in frontier conditions, continued to hold sway in nineteenth-century Mississippi with the emergence of a slave society and a black majority. Fears of slave rebellions and the policing of slaves further inured white men to brutal violence. His description of violence-prone southern men is reminiscent of John Hope Franklin's classic The Militant South, 1800–1861 (1956). Olsen argues that a "culture of masculinity" (p. 21) based on honor created a hierarchical society. 1

White Mississippians reconciled this hierarchical social ethic with democratic political forms at the level of local politics. Mississippi, which had frequent local elections throughout the antebellum period unlike older southern states such as Virginia and South Carolina, is a good test case for Olsen's argument. In the most well-researched and analyzed part of the book, he illustrates the deferential and ritualistic nature of local elections and planter influence on a democratic political exercise. Men of property, slaveholders, and planters dominated certain offices such as the boards of police and the crucial position of election inspectors. His study of local politics is an original contribution to southern historiography and offers a corrective to the view that despite the existence of slavery, the southwestern states possessed an unalloyed white democracy. . . .

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