Thursday, October 20, 2016

Disunion!

Elizabeth R. Varon. Disunion! The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789-1859. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008.

Elizabeth Veron argues "that 'disunion' was once the most provocative and potent word in the political vocabulary of Americans." (1) She goes to great pains to distinguish between 'disunion' and 'secession'; while the latter is a political, if not constitutional, process, the former was a broader and somewhat more abstract concept as well as a rhetorical device. It contained a wide spectrum of meanings and purposes: prophecy, threat, accusation, process, and program. From the founding of the Republic through the final secession crisis which led to the Civil War, the notion of 'disunion' haunted the polity and served as both warning and weapon for actors on all sides of the most fundamental conflicts of the early Republic.

'Disunion' was such a potent rhetorical trope because it spoke to existential anxieties about the fundamental nature of the Republic and the Constitutional order--"it suggested that the beloved Union might be contingent". (5)  The Constitution itself instituionalized hard-won, carefully calculated compromises on several foundational issues, most notably that of slavery--an issue so delicate the document declined to name it.

Therefore, threats of disunion could cow opponents, even as accusations of the same could paint the target as a threat to stability and, of course, union. Early discourse on disunion centered on issues of sectional conflict or partisan discord; early examples include the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions in response to the perceived threat of Federalist dominance, as well as the Hartford Convention. However, it was slavery which most often provoked charges and accusations of disunion. Both Southern Fire-Eaters and Northern Abolitionists (particularly Garrisonian immediatists) resorted to the language of disunion, as both sides sought to portray the Union as being fundamentally unsound.

However, it was slavery which most often evoked the language of disunion, and as sectional tensions rose the language of disunion became a fixed feature of the associated discord. Varon quotes Edward Ayres regarding the dichotomy between those "fundamentalists" who believed slavery was the "cause" of the Civil War, and those "revisionists" who believed that slavery was an aspect of antebellum society intertwined with other issues, and that the war was the product of an avoidable political crisis. Ayres wanted to find a way out of this bind, and Varon proposes her book as an answer to his plea.

The degree to which she succeeds is a mixed bag. She is at her best when arguing most strenuously that 'disunion' was a perennial and deeply coded facet of American political culture for decades. Yet, despite her (correct, in my reading) insistence that disunion and secession are separate issues, as the Civil War approaches much of the book ends up as yet another recounting of the secession crisis. Perhaps this is unavoidable, and in fairness the narrative ends with a provocative argument that the language of disunion fed into the secession crisis because it spoke to so many aspects of white Southern anxiety--not just the constitutional issues of slavery but also racial anxieties, "class and gender disorder, foreign intervention, moral decline, and economic decay." (338) At it's strongest, Varon's book adds complexity, nuance, and historical continuity to the otherwise sometime jarring accounts of the success of secession in 1860 and the war which followed.

No comments:

Post a Comment