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Book Review
A School for Politics: Commercial Lobbying and Political Culture in Early South Carolina. By Rebecca Starr. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. xii, 218 pp. $45.00, ISBN 0-8018-5832-1.)
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Historians have long wrestled with the "problem of South Carolina" in order to understand the state's peculiar political behavior in the three decades between the nullification crisis and its solitary act of secession in December of 1860. Most scholars have placed the blame for the Palmetto State's crankiness upon the effect that the promise of slave-created wealth and independence and the fear of slave revolt had on the minds of its white male residents. Rebecca Starr suggests, to the contrary, that the roots of early-nineteenth-century South Carolina's pugnacious political culture may instead lie in lessons and practices developed in the colonial era to defend the colony's right to trade. While not entirely convinced by her argument (I still think slavery played a far larger role than Starr allows), I found her book to be a contribution to the subject both original and valuable. |
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