The Counterrevolution of Slavery Quotes

“Secessionist propaganda revealed the difficulties of accommodating the nonslaveholding yeomanry within a southern nationalist discourse that derived its prime justification from slavery and the ideals of slave-holding.”
― Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina

“The log cabin myth scarcely endeared “Abram Lincoln” to South Carolina’s slaveholding aristocracy.”
― Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina

“Ironically, secessionists laid as much stress on the fact that Lincoln had been a “rail splitter” as his Republican Party managers in the North, obviously with opposite effect.”
― Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina

“Fitzhugh felt that the establishment of a hereditary aristocracy by reinstituting primogeniture and entail would check the democratic tendencies of the age.”
― Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina

“Slavery, they claimed, had an indispensable role to play in the “progress” of “civilization”; it was to be a bulwark against communism, free lovism, and all the heresies of modernity that challenged traditional social and political relations.”
― Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina

“Slavery was more than a topical issue in the sectional conflict. It lay at the heart of southern nationalists’ understanding of their cause.”
― Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina

“The defense of slavery and the antidemocratic values of slave society formed the politics and ideology of secession.”
― Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina

“Southern nationalists argued, “We will be a compact people, made homogenous by a great similarity of interests, and one principle of cohesion above all others—slavery.”54”
― Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina

“we would re-open the African slave trade that every white man might have a chance to make himself owner of one or more negroes, and go with them and his household go[o]ds wherever opportunity beckoned enterprise….”
― Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina

“The attempt to revive the African slave trade marked the coming of age of the politics of slavery and separatism.”
― Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina

“reopen the African slave trade. The growth of this movement was not only the logical outcome of the premises of proslavery thought but also an integral phase of the sectional conflict over slavery expansion.”
― Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina

“Southern nationalism found its first home in those states that had the greatest stakes in slavery.”
― Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina

“Proslavery ideology provided secessionists with an alternative political identity and successfully challenged their fealty to the American republic and the principles on which it was founded.”
― Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina

“invested.” Hammond predicted that antislavery would ultimately challenge northern capital after vanquishing slaveholders and he emphasized the threat to all property relations embodied in it.”
― Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina

“proslavery thinkers developed a systematic critique of the Declaration of Independence and natural rights theory.”
― Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina

“Proslavery ideology in South Carolina reflected the deeply reactionary values of a slave society and departed fundamentally from both the revolutionary heritage and contemporary notions of democracy.”
― Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina

“The Charleston Mercury approvingly quoted the abolitionist National Era’s description of Calhoun as “denying the doctrines of the Declaration of Independence” and maintaining that slavery “is the rightful condition of the laboring man, irrespective of color.”
― Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina

“Calhoun used and deviated from American political traditions. That is what made him an original thinker on the problem of slavery and democracy.”
― Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina

“Not just formal constitutional and political arguments, but the vindication of slavery as a superior way of ordering society and of a separate southern identity based on slavery would constitute the discourse of southern nationalism.”
― Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina

“The election campaign of 1832 was the bloodiest in the state’s history. Duels, which were usually personal affairs of honor, became the stuff of politics”
― Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina

“Certainly various right-wing movements reveal that populism cannot be equated with democracy.”
― Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina

“the spirit of Jacksonian democracy was alien to South Carolina’s political culture.”
― Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina

“Slavery, according to Carolinian slaveholders’ construction, was well on its way to becoming the wellspring of southern thought.”
― Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina

“However, I do insist that the political ideology of slavery be seen as developing in opposition to rather than as a variant of political liberalism.”
― Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina

“The distinctiveness of southern nationalist discourse in South Carolina lay in the fact that the vindication of racial slavery led to the questioning of the ideals of universal liberty, equality, and democracy that lay at the heart of the antebellum American republic and, in the end, of the republic itself.”
― Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina

“Secession represented the overthrow rather than the fulfillment of Jacksonian democracy”
― Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina

“The age of democratic revolutions inaugurated by the American revolution made the existence of slavery and servile labor questionable for the first time in western history”
― Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina

“majority of the men who held political office and led the movement for a separate southern nation were planters or substantial slaveholders,”
― Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina

“It should come as no surprise that the defense of racial slavery gave rise to a profoundly reactionary worldview.”
― Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina