The Old South: New Studies of Society and Culture Book

The life story of Professor Manisha Sinha is an interesting tale. A native of India, her father was a high-ranking general in the Indian Army. She earned her Ph. D. at Columbia University where the dissertation from this book came was nominated for the Bancroft Prize. Thought she holds an endowed chair at the University of Connecticut, I became aware of her scholarship through an interview about a more recent book, The Slave's Cause about abolitionism.

The present book, though now 20 years old, still stands out as a well-research, well-written, and tightly argued example of historical scholarship. Her argument is not entirely new, to my view, but does put a distinct focus on the nature of politics in antebellum South Carolina. Here, Dr. Sinha argues that South Carolina's planter politicians (her phrase and a good one) were acutely focused on their need to create a state-level and national-level political system protecting their central institution, racial slavery.

She argues South Carolina stood out against trends towards a broader franchise in voting, keeping planter control, in a way that was unlike the rest of the southern states. In this regards, her argument reminds me of other works focused on poorer whites that I read recently such as Poor Whites in the Antebellum South by Charles C. Bolton. She actually refers, at least implicitly, to all non-planters as subaltern classes, reflecting, I think, the influence of postcolonial studies and critical theory, which I think has most used this construct in regards to southeast Asian history.

Thus, Dr. Sinha argues, South Carolina developed a discourse or theory of government that was markedly anti-democratic and focused on the advancement of slavery. These ideas were developed by men such as John C. Calhoun and had pointed South Carolina towards a nascent southern nationalism and willingness to break away from the United States at least a generation before the guns sounded at Fort Sumter.

She does not develop as much as I might have liked the influence of South Carolina on the deep south cotton states. A substantial potion of this region's antebellum leaders hailed from South Carolina and had been schooled in these ideas at South Carolina College, later called the University of South Carolina.

Eventually, this brand of anti-majoritarianism and focus on the protection of slavery as a political and economic institution took hold throughout the South, argues Professor Sinha. In the end, this rejection of the American Revolution and its focus on human rights led South Carolina to lead its sister southern states out of the United States, and into the maw of war.