Reviews of Books

"The Problem of South Carolina"

Masters, Slaves, and Subjects: The Culture of Power in the South Carolina Low Country, 1740–1790. By Robert Olwell. (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998. Pp. xvii, 294. $52.50 cloth, $17.95 paper.)

John Laurens and the American Revolution. By Gregory D. Massey. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000. Pp. xxii, 327. $34.95.)

"The Problem of South Carolina" has long perplexed both historians and citizens of the state. "South Carolina has a crazy fit every thirty years," opined one critic (quoted in Lacy K. Ford, Jr., Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1800–1860 [New York, 1988], 99) in 1892. Thirty-two years earlier, just before Lincoln's election, Unionist James Louis Pettigrew had complained about "distempered" Carolinians who believed "anything that flatters their delusions or their vanity; and at the same time are credulous to every whisper of suspicion about insurgents or incendiaries" (p. 100). That picture of a people predisposed to extreme acts runs through the historiography of South Carolina and is amply supported by the three books under review.	1
"There is something undeniably attractive about South Carolina's history," writes Rebecca Starr in the opening sentence of A School for Politics. "Drawn to the state's dramatically disruptive role in the events of the antebellum period, scholars have repeatedly tried to unravel the 'problem' of South Carolina" (p. 1). What explains the petulance of the state's leaders, their uncompromising public stands, and, most famously, the brinkmanship that risked military confrontation with Andrew Jackson's government over "the Tariff of Abominations" and that precipitated the very real military confrontation at Fort Sumter and the ensuing tragedy of civil war?	2
While Starr does not carry her detailed analysis as far as the Civil War, her attempt to explain South Carolina's secession from the Union has led her to examine earlier acts of 'secession' by the colony and the state. In 1774, four of its five delegates walked out of the Continental Congress when it was about to adopt a nonexportation policy that did not exempt the colony's rice crop. They were willing "to destroy Congress rather than yield" (p. 91). Congress gave in, as did the Constitutional Convention in 1787 when South Carolina delegates threatened to withdraw if concessions were not made on the slave trade.	. . .