| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Charles J. Holden. In the Great Maelstrom: Conservatives in Post-Civil War South Carolina. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. 2002. Pp. 164. $29.95.
Charles J. Holden's intellectual history examines selected members of the conservative elite in post-Civil War South Carolina who valued the state's conservative tradition, rooted in antebellum slavery, and fashioned it to fit changing economic, social, and political circumstances that followed emancipation. By exploring the ideas of four men of elite conservative pedigree, Holden's study loosely spans the late antebellum era to World War II. In his succinct monograph, Holden analyzes letters, speeches, lectures, novels, diaries, and editorials written by Frederick A. Porcher, Edward McCrady, Jr., Theodore D. Jervey, Jr., and William Watts Ball, concluding that these four intellectuals constructed a shared set of conservative ideals that influenced South Carolina's other conservative leaders. Collectively, Holden contends, these conservatives shared a commitment to white supremacy, openly opposed democracy while insisting on local elite rule, and crafted historical interpretations of the past to inform the present.	1
Holden uses Porcher, history professor at the College of Charleston, as a bridge between antebellum and postbellum South Carolina conservatism. Born into a wealthy lowcountry family in 1809, Porcher, like other proslavery intellectuals, became a harsh critic of free-labor capitalism and bourgeois democracy by the 1850s. After the Civil War, Porcher grappled with the implications of emancipation. Holden contends that Porcher's postwar writings continually extolled the value of white political rule and drew on history's authority to justify elite rule. Porcher successfully adopted some laissez-faire principles, viewing them as inevitable, but he continued to rail against democracy. Porcher lived to see conservatives restored to power in 1877.	. . .

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