The Slaveholding Crisis: Fear Of Insurrection And The Coming Of The Civil War

Abstract

Press, 2010), Carl L. Paulus's new book broadens the specter of servile insurrection in America, particularly in the slaveholding South. Planters and intellectuals in the South such as Edmund Ruffin linked territorial expansion of slavery with the avoidance of slave uprising and feared that Republicans would force slaves to abandon masters and flock to Republican "invaders" (p. 3), laying the groundwork for another Santo Domingo. Fear of black insurrection merged in the minds of these planters with the image of Republicans transforming northern states through insurrectionary slaves, and, with a sympathetic president from the North, refused to send troops and thereby encourage black rebels to burn down plantations and destroy the white racial hierarchy in the South across social spectrums. Thomas Jefferson's longing for an empire of liberty and territorial expansion that enslaved millions of blacks required dependence upon non-slaveholders. Even in the North, slavery in white South was at stake; therefore, whites across most of the South readily prepared for war rather than real or perceived abolitionism.