Member Review Madness Rules The Hour

[CMWinkler]

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/21/...es-the-hour-civil-war-paul-starobin.html?_r=0

 

[KansasFreestater]

Looks interesting.

From the review:

[T]he itch to leave the Union was hardly a widely shared view elsewhere in the South, neither on those earlier occasions nor even in 1860. [emphasis mine]​

How a relatively small elite managed to generate a mass hysteria sufficient to break up a country and nearly destroy it is as mystifying as it is sobering. Even after reading a whole book about it -- David Potter's magisterial The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861 -- I'm still stumped every time I try to get my head around it. Perhaps this new book will help. Thanks for letting us know about it.

 

[Nathanb1]

Just say "Louis T. Wigfall" three times and click your heels together.

 

[Bruce Vail]

Madness Rules the Hour -- great title!

 

[Bruce Vail]

KIRKUS REVIEW

It was 1860 in Charleston, South Carolina, the political epicenter of the Old South, at a time of polarized partisanship. Things did not turn out well at all.

Journalist Starobin (After America: Narratives for the Next Global Age, 2009) describes the year before the Civil War officially began with the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor. The Southern economy and its way of life depended on cotton and the labor provided by slavery to support it. As many of Charleston's prominent men argued, if there was agitation to break away from the federal Union, that was the fault of the North, with its increasing reluctance to sanction slavery. The Democratic National Convention in Charleston was riven. Yankee delegates named one presidential candidate; secessionists named another. The city's gentry imagined a confederacy of states standing alone. Starobin artfully depicts the few townsmen who were more cautious and the many publishers, planters, lawyers, and others who led the secessionists. As sentiment for rebellion increased, so did restrictions on the city's free blacks, and a diverse selection of uniformed militia—e.g., the Washington Light Infantry and the Charleston Light Dragoons—paraded around town. As the election countdown proceeded with jingoist crowds, meetings, and bombast, Southern blood heated up, ready to be spilled. There was no turning back. A Secession Convention proclaimed the state's departure from the Union, followed by a great celebration. Throughout, Starobin's narrative pulses with partisan agitation. With speeches and letters of the period, the author demonstrates that the fight was less about states' rights than what many Southerners believed were their rights to own human chattel. His story of the fraught year ends before the firing on besieged Sumter, and his final chapter describes utterly destroyed Charleston after Appomattox.

A dramatic and engaging addition to Civil War studies that serves as a fitting bookend paired with Jay Winik's account of the end of the war, April 1865 (2001).

 

[Bruce Vail]

On the same theme:

South Carolina Fire-Eater
The Life of Laurence Massillon Keitt, 1824–1864

Holt Merchant

The first book-length biography of the controversial congressman, secessionist, and Confederate colonel

South Carolina Fire-Eater is the first book-length biography of Laurence Massillon Keitt, one of South Carolina's most notorious advocates of secession and apologists for African American slavery. A politician who wanted to be a statesman, a Hotspur who wanted to be a distinguished military leader, Keitt was a U. S. congressman in the 1850s, signed the Ordinance of Secession, and represented his rebellious state in the Confederate Congress in 1861. Through this thoroughly researched volume, Holt Merchant offers a comprehensive history of an important South Carolina figure.

As a congressman Keitt was not responsible for any significant legislation, but he was in the midst of every Southern crusade to assert its "rights": to make Kansas a slave state, to annex Cuba, and to enact a territorial slave code. In a generation of politicians famous for fiery rhetoric, Keitt was among the most provocative Southerners. His speeches in Congress and on the stump vituperated "Black Republicans" and were filled with references to medieval knight errantry, "lance couched, helmet on, visor down," and threats to "split the Federal temple from turret to foundation stone."

His conception of personal honor and his hot temper frequently landed him in trouble in and out of public view. He acted as "fender off" in May 1856, when his fellow representative Preston Brooks caned Charles Sumner on the Senate floor. In 1858 he instigated a brawl on the floor of the House of Representatives that involved some three dozen congressmen. Amid the chaos of his personal brand of politics, Keitt found time to woo and wed a beautiful, intelligent, and politically astute plantation belle who after his death restored the family fortune and worked to embellish her late husband's place in history.

After Abraham Lincoln was elected president, Keitt and the rest of the South Carolina delegation resigned their seats in Congress. He then negotiated unsuccessfully the surrender of Fort Sumter with lame-duck president James Buchanan and played a major role in the December 1860 Secession Convention that led his state out of the Union and a lesser role in the convention that formed the Confederacy. Bored with his position as a member of the Confederate Congress, Keitt resigned his seat and raised the 20th South Carolina Infantry.

Keitt spent most of the war defending Charleston Harbor, sometime commanding Battery Wagner, the site of the July 18, 1863, assault by the 54th Massachusetts Regiment of African American troops, made famous by the movie Glory. Keitt took command the day after that battle and was the last man out of the battery when his troops abandoned it in September 1863. In May 1864 his regiment joined the Army of Northern Virginia, and Keitt took command of Kershaw's Brigade. Inexperienced in leading troops on the battlefield, he launched a head-long attack on entrenched Federal troops in the June 1, 1864, Battle of Cold Harbor. Keitt was mortally wounded advancing in the vanguard of his brigade. With that last act of bravado, Keitt distinguished himself. He was among the few fire-eater politicians to serve in the military and was likely the only one to perish in combat defending the Confederacy.

Holt Merchant, until he retired in 2013, was a professor and chair of the history department at Washington & Lee University in Lexington, Virginia.

"Perhaps the purest of the fire-eaters, Keitt fought earnestly for secession and won. He then fought with equal vigor for the Confederacy and died. Merchant's path-breaking biography is deeply researched and skillfully presented. A must-read for anyone interested in the breakup of the young union."—James I. Robertson, Jr., author of Stonewall Jackson

"Holt Merchant's biography of the South Carolina secessionist is as brisk and fast-paced as the life of Laurence Keitt himself. The author's dogged research does justice to this complex and critically important historical figure. Readers of this important study will find important new evidence of Keitt's congressional career, his sense of honor, his part in the Sumner-Brooks affair, his role during the secession winter and the creation of the Confederacy, and his military record, as well as a fascinating and touching treatment of Keitt's marriage and family. The biographer and his subject have finally met."—Eric H. Walther, professor of history, University of Houston

 

[KansasFreestater]

serves as a fitting bookend paired with Jay Winik's account of the end of the war, April 1865 (2001).

April 1865 is a wonderful book.