Дискуссия о причинах Гражданской войны в США (1861–1865): периодизация историографии

The Causes of the American Civil WarRecent Interpretations and New Directions (1974 Reprint) Eric Foner In 1960, as Americans prepared to observe the centennial of the Civil War, one of the foremost historians of that conflict published a brief article entitled, “American Historians and the Causes of the Civil War.”1 Most readers probably expected another survey of the changing course of civil war interpretation. Instead the author announced that as a subject of serious historical analysis, Civil War causation was “dead.” Looking back over the decade and a half since David Donald wrote, it would appear that he somewhat exaggerated the death of this field of inquiry. In the 1950’s, historians were concerned with investigating periods of consensus in America’s past. But in the 1960’s, as the issues of race and war came to the forefront of national life, earlier times of civil strife in American history attracted renewed attention. The 1960’s, for example, witnessed a renascence of the study of slavery. It is now no longer possible to view the peculiar institution as some kind of accident or aberration, existing outside the mainstream of national development. Rather, slavery was absolutely central to the American experience, intimately [End Page 41] bound up with the settlement of the western hemisphere, the American Revolution and industrial expansion. It was what defined the Old South and drew southern society along a path of development which set it increasingly apart from the rest of the nation.2 At the same time, a striking reversal of interpretations of the abolitionists took place.3 In fact, there was a paradoxical double reversal. On the one hand the abolitionists, previously castigated as fanatics and agitators, suddenly emerged as the conscience of a sinning nation—much as the Garrisons and Welds had portrayed themselves a century earlier. At the same time, a number of writers argued that not only were the friends of the slave not immune from racism, but, far from being truly “radical,” they seemed to accept the middle-class values of northern society.4 The flood of studies of slavery, abolitionism, and the race issue does not seem, however, to have brought historians much closer to a generally accepted interpretation of the coming of the Civil War than they were fifteen years ago. As the late David Potter pointed out, the irony is that disagreements of interpretation persist in the face of a greatly increased body of historical knowledge.5 This is partially because the Civil War raised so many still unresolved [End Page 42] issues. Perhaps, however, there is another reason. Historians’ methodologies and value judgments have changed considerably over the past fifteen years, but the questions historians have asked of their data have remained relatively static. Like the debate over slavery before the appearance of Stanley Elkins’ study in 1959, discussion of the causes of the Civil War continues to be locked into an antiquated interpretive framework. Historians of the Civil War era seem to be in greater need of new models of interpretation and new questions than of an additional accumulation of data. There have, however, been a number of works in the past fifteen years which have attempted to develop entirely new ways of looking at ante-bellum America and the origins of the Civil War. One of the most striking developments of these years has been the emergence of the “new political historians,” who have attempted to recast our understanding of ante-bellum political alignments. They have de-emphasized “national” issues like slavery and the tariff, and substituted ethno-cultural conflicts between Protestants and Catholics, or between pietistic and ritualistic religious groups, as the major determinants of voting behavior. These works have broadened our understanding of antebellum political culture, and demonstrated the inevitable failure of any “monistic interpretation” of political conflict. And they should force historians to abandon whatever economic determinism still persists in the writing of political history. Perhaps most important, they have demonstrated the virtues of viewing voters not as isolated individuals, but as men and women embedded in a complex network of social and cultural relationships.6 The “new political history” involves both a new methodology—the statistical analysis of quantitative...

SPHERES OF INTERVENTION: FOREIGN POLICY AND THE COLLAPSE OF LEBANON, 1967-1976 James R. Stocker Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016 (vii + 296 pages, notes, index, illustrations, maps) $45.00 (cloth)Reviewed by Jeffrey G. KaramIn Spheres of Intervention: Foreign Policy and the Collapse of Lebanon, 1967-1976, James R. Stocker reconsiders the role of the United States in Lebanon's path to the civil war that erupted in 1975. Combining declassified documents from the National Archives and various American presidential libraries, as well as some Arabic and French sources, Stocker advances two main arguments. The first is that US policy toward Lebanon was subordinated to strategies toward the Cold War and the broader Middle East; the second is that the US played a role in the process of Lebanese state collapse (4, 5). Both arguments are meant to convince the reader that rather than focus on one set of factors, a proper study of involvement in Lebanon between 1967 and 1976 should incorporate the different domestic, regional, and international factors that shaped policy at the time. Stocker considers Lebanon's slide into mayhem alongside other regional and international events, such as the October War of 1973, the detente between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the various disengagement agreements and disagreements between a number of Arab states and Israel during the 1970s, making his account of the underlying factors that ignited the Lebanese Civil War among the most comprehensive.Spheres of Intervention consists of an introduction, eight chapters, and an epilogue. In the introduction, Stocker discusses interests in Lebanon and surveys existing literature on the causes of the civil war, which include the fragility of Lebanon's political system, foreign meddling in Lebanon's internal affairs, the effects of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and poor socioeconomic development. The first three chapters deal with important junctures between the Arab-Israeli War of 1967 and the Jordanian Civil War of 1970, known as Black September. Chapters four and five focus on the heightened tension and subsequent skirmishes between Palestinian militants and the Lebanese government leading up to the October War of 1973, as well as the state of sociopolitical affairs in Lebanon before the outbreak of the civil war. The last three chapters examine the first two years of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-76) and the intense negotiations between various Arab states, the United States, and Israel to broker temporary peace between the warring factions. More specifically, chapters six and seven demonstrate that Lebanon became a battleground for regional contestation between Syria and Israel, as well as between Syria and different Arab states. The epilogue fast-forwards through Lebanon's civil war and ends with the United States calling on the Lebanese government to implement UN resolutions, particularly regarding the disarmament of Hizballah's armed forces and other militas on Lebanese soil and, in the wake of the assassination of Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri in 2005, the creation of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon.As the product of serious research drawing on multiple sources, Spheres of Intervention is unique in the way it approaches policy and the beginning of Lebanon's civil war. Parts of the book's analysis, however, prompt concerns about the interpretation of sources and linkages (or lack thereof) between important events in the time period covered. The first concern relates to the author's extreme reluctance to connect the dots between the various archival materials. It is understandable that Stocker refrains from making grandiose assertions that cannot be properly substantiated. Nevertheless, the author's analysis of military and financial support to right-wing Christian militias is very limited and troubling. As a matter of fact, Stocker vacillates between implicating the United States in taking sides, particularly by supporting Christian militias in the build-up to the Lebanese Civil War (18, 63-64, 131-32), and dismissing this partisanship by claiming that the United States refrained from actively fueling civil conflict (63-64, 144, 166, 224). …

book reviews265 North, Foner has made an invaluable addition to our knowledge of the antebellum period. Michael F. Holt Yale University Race and Politics: "Bleeding Kansas" and the Coming of the Civil War. By James A. Rawley. (Philadelphia and New York: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1969. Pp. vü, 304. $5.95.) Professor Rawley has written a very important and useful book. He provides much more than simply an excellent overview of the complex issues and events surrounding "bleeding Kansas," and the coming of the Civil War. Although he believes traditional interpretations of those factors as causes of the Civil War must be considered, the question of race was of paramount importance. The Civil War was, in his view, an irrepressible conflict brought on by a blundering generation. It was a blundering generation essentially because it was a "flawed generation," flawed by its belief in Negro inferiority. More specifically, he emphasizes the variety of responses to the long standing racial prejudice in America as the crucial element in the controversy over slavery in the territories during the decade before Sumter. Other historians have dealt with racialism as a cause of the Civil War, but Rawley is the first to apply the concept to the Kansas controversy, and he does it convincingly . With regard to Kansas, men who supported slavery opposed antiextension as a menace to stable race relations. Antislavery advocates viewed extension mainly as a barrier to white opportunity, not primarily as a detriment to Negroes. The questions raised by whites on this issue involved whether the black man in the territories would remain a slave, a second-class citizen, or be excluded entirely. Virtually no one advocated equal rights for him there. The national "folk belief" that the Negro was inherently inferior, that he represented an economic danger, and that race mixing must be prevented drastically limited the political choices open to the northern and southern politicians of the 1850s. This, more than anything else, destroyed any opportunity for successfully settling the slavery question short of war. "Race," says Rawley, "is the one thing that has defied the genius of the American people. If there had been no color bar, the United States probably could have coped with the issue of slavery." Rawley expresses disdain for the role played by most of the people, institutions, and proposed solutions connected with the Kansas controversy . Regardless of section, party, or political office, almost without fail, the American people and their leaders evaded, misunderstood, or misrepresented their responsibility for finding a just and lasting settlement in Kansas. Trapped by politicai philosophies inadequate to meet 266civil war history the needs of the era, hungry, in most cases, for political power, and above all, riddled with a gnawing race prejudice, they stumbled on from disaster to catastrophe. The Dred Scott decision, for example, drew from Douglas and Lincoln almost immediate racialist responses. Douglas used his belief in Negro inferiority to defend slavery, popular sovereignty , and opposition to what he described as the Republican tenet of Negro equality. He asserted that racial amalgamation would be the disastrous result of Republican policy. Lincoln, in turn, denied that Republicans desired social equality for Negroes, and used his belief in black inferiority to justify opposition to slavery, the necessity of containing the institution, and declared that Democratic policy would foster amalgamation. As the decade wore on, each of these men and their parties escalated their efforts, through word and deed, to convince the voters that they, rather than their opponents, represented the doctrine of white supremacy. During the debates over the Lecompton Constitution , southern congressmen and several of their northern colleagues found themselves agreeing that "slavery was the best arrangement for the inferior Negro." Border state Republican, Frank Blair Jr., introduced a resolution to colonize the Negro as the best solution to the race problem . Free soilers continued to argue with growing enthusiasm that exclusion of black men from the territories would provide increased economic opportunity for white men in a growing nation. It was essentially this hardening of racialism in America, expressed in a multitude of ways in the wake of "bleeding Kansas," that made the slavery problem so difficult to solve, and set the stage for civil...

While largely ignored by the historical profession when published in 1935, W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America has come to be regarded as a landmark of historical scholarship and essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the era of Civil War and Reconstruction. Du Bois irrefutably exposed the racism underlying the prevailing Dunning school of interpretation of Reconstruction. In its place he advanced ideas, radical for the time, that have become commonplace in historical writing—among them that slavery was the fundamental cause of the Civil War, that blacks were active agents of historical change, that the struggle over control of black labor was central to the era’s politics, that Reconstruction was a time of enormous promise and numerous accomplishments, that to understand it one must examine the entire nation, not just the South, and all the classes, from Northern industrialists and workers to Southern freedpeople, planters, and poor whites, and that the overthrow of Reconstruction was a tragic defeat for democratic ideals, both within the United States and across the globe.

The relevance of the research lies in the fact that in linguistics, the study of concepts is an urgent direction that allows us to consider words in their cultural, cognitive and communicative contexts. The purpose of the study is to characterize the evaluation zone of the concept of "Civil War" in A. Fadeev's novel "The Rout". The description of the concept "Civil War" allows us to clarify the peculiarity of the individual experience of cognition of this social concept. The variety of interpretative fields is caused by the peculiarity of the conceptualization of the world in the individual consciousness. In the structure of the concept, the interpretative field of the concept "Civil War" as a periphery, its irreplaceable role in conceptual analysis is determined. The main content of the study is the analysis of the evaluative zone of the interpretative field, in which the characteristics and properties inherent in the concept of "Civil War" are always interpreted in a new way. In this study, the author used the method of conceptual analysis, the method of contextual analysis and logical-semantic analysis. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the fact that the study of the novel "The Rout" by A. A. Fadeev has practically not received enough attention, despite the fact that it is one of the most representative works of the twenties of the last century. There are very few scientific papers devoted to the concept of "Civil War". The analytical algorithm of concept research can be applied to the conceptual analysis of similar works of art. Being a direct witness of the war, A. A. Fadeev evaluates it based on the impressions of eyewitnesses, and the study demonstrates his generalized view and understanding of the struggle between the reds and whites, which is manifested in a number of moments through the main components of the assessment of the war by different classes of the novel's heroes, which in general constitute the essence of the Civil War. The results of the study allow us to conclude that in the interpretative field, assessments are mostly negative, which reflects the brutality of the war and the fact that class struggle was an integral cause of the Civil War.

Religion is once more regarded by historians as a direct cause of the Civil War. It is the Arminians and their leader, William Laud, who are now portrayed as the revolutionary element, not the puritans. By means of the support of their royal sponsor, Charles I, this clique of theological innovators was able to stage an ecclesiastical coup after 1625, the success of which outlawed Calvinist theology, the previous orthodoxy, and paved the way for a wholesale reorientation of the liturgy and ecclesiology of the Church of England in the 1630s. This 'revolution' provoked a conservative, puritan backlash in the 1640s which resulted in the disestablishment of the Church altogether. The impression received from such accounts is that the religious causes of the Civil War can be traced back only as far as the beginning of Charles I's reign. In contrast, James I's reign is portrayed as a period of consensus on Calvinist predestinarian theology and of relative ecclesiastical peace, largely free of the controversies which were to occur in his son's reign. The outbreak of these disputes is explained solely in terms of Charles's political decision to support Arminianism. The prehistory of Arminianism remains rather obscure, which might lead to the conclusion that Arminian views appeared from nowhere in the 1620s after being previously held only by one or two bishops and university dons.1

Historians trying to understand the causes of the civil war, one of the most complex and contested issues in English historiography, face dilemmas inevitable in any historical analysis, but here particularly pressing. The desire for clarity and intelligibility comes into conflict with the need to offer a subtle, nuanced account, taking account of a potentially enormous range of relevant material from structural constraints and collective habits to individual actions, both willed and inadvertent. The most sophisticated analyses indeed would need to be sceptical of the possibility of distinguishing individual perceptions and decisions from general or structural frameworks. One of the ways we make the past explicable is by making it familiar, relevant to our own preoccupations. The seventeenth century is probably the most studied period in English history and the period that arouses most passion and controversy beyond as well as within academic circles. The civil war, in particular, still matters to us. We take sides and the views we take of the nature and origins of the civil war are often connected to our stances in the modern world. The first edition of this book was written under the influence of the contrasting celebrations of the anniversaries of 1688 in Britain and 1789 in France, and in part in response to the consciously right-wing revisionism of J. C. D. Clark.1 This 'present-centredness' is both a strength and a weakness. As Jonathon Scott has noted, we risk missing, or lacking respect for the 'strangeness' of the past; specifically for the seventeenth century, we may be led to assume that religious beliefs are always a 'cloak' for other interests, or that desires for unity are always disingenuous.2 On the other hand, it is clear that modern concerns have often stimulated productive new approaches to understanding the civil war. A variety of present-day anxieties about the integrity and autonomy of the nation state have helped to inspire the current stress on British and European contexts for the civil war: the instability of the 'United Kingdom', most obviously in Ulster but revealed also in the resurgence of nationalist movements in Wales and Scotland; the resentments and ambiguities in Britain's links with continental Europe; the constraints on national governments within a global economy and the tragedies of national conflict in central and eastern Europe. J. G. A. Pocock, a New Zealander, has written of how Britain's entry into the European Community, which seemed unilaterally to deny the Britishness of the old commonwealth, helped prompt his influential reflections on the British and Atlantic dimensions to English developments.3

This article seeks to answer two questions. Firstly, why did Miguel de Unamuno support the Nationlist coup that started the Spanish Civil War? Secondly, how can the re-reading of Shakespeare that he undertook in his final months of life help us to understand his thinking at that time? Based on archival research carried out in the Casa-Museo Unamuno in Salamanca, this article traces the presence of Shakespearean references in Unamuno's final writings—unpublished journalist articles, letters and most importantly El resentimiento trágico de la vida. Through comparisons between the annotations on Unamuno's personal copies of Shakespeare's plays and the references to the bard in his final writings, the article builds a picture of how Unamuno's understanding of the causes of the Civil War were informed by his reflections on Shakespeare's drama. In particular, Unamuno read the King Henry VI plays, as well as King Richard II and King Richard III, plays about fratricidal struggles for power, good governance and atavistic hatred. Unamuno's reading of King Lear and The Tempest, plays in part about old men who rue their failure to wield power judiciously, evidently also provoked reflections on his own role as a public intellectual and contributor to contemporary debate.

Reviewed by: The Revolution of 1861: The American Civil War in the Age of Nationalist Conflict by Andre Fleche Christopher Childers The Revolution of 1861: The American Civil War in the Age of Nationalist Conflict. Andre Fleche. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. ISBN 978-0-8078-3523-4, 224 pp., cloth, $39.95. Andre Fleche has written a book that truly delivers on its promise to enhance our understanding of the Civil War in an international context of revolution, nationalism, and nationhood. He compares America's second revolution—a concept Charles and Mary Beard first posited—to the revolutions of Europe, illustrating how northerners and southerners drew inspiration from the legacy of 1848. As Fleche points out, with the massive influx of European immigrants arriving on American shores in the 1850s came the ideas that had driven the cause of Old World democratic revolution. Historians have recognized how the North and South drew legitimacy for their respective causes from the contested meanings of the American Revolution. The United States and the Confederate States found inspiration in the War for Independence, but they applied different lessons from that conflict thanks to competing notions of nationalism. Fleche adds to this body of scholarship by tracing the development and manifestation of American nationalism—in its northern and southern versions—alongside the European impetus for self-government. According to Fleche, the Confederacy located its right to revolution and the rationale for a new union in the European nationalist legacy. The Union, however, drew a far different lesson from the revolutions of 1848; they portrayed the Confederates as aristocratic slaveholders seeking to halt human moral progress, much like the aristocratic rulers who crushed the spirit of progressive revolution in Europe. The northerners' Civil War drew from the wellspring of European [End Page 390] resistance to privilege and overweening power to repel the specter of the slave power. Accordingly, German and Irish immigrants, among others, faced a choice in 1861: support the Confederacy's struggle to "affirm the rights of self-determination for all peoples" or oppose a "slaveholding aristocracy dangerous to the civil liberties of all mankind" (38). Fleche persuasively argues that northerners and southerners developed competing notions of nationalism in an international context. Though he does not explicitly state as much, questions of nationalism and states' rights that had lingered in Americans' minds since the Confederation era, and that the Constitution had left unanswered, remained and led to discord by the eve of the Civil War. Long before 1861, northern intellectuals had looked toward creating a consolidated nationalist state, whereas southerners looked at consolidation as a Yankee leviathan that would consume the genius of American politics—state sovereignty. Fleche adds immeasurably to our understanding of the nationalist debate by explaining how both sides found legitimacy for their beliefs in the history of European revolution. Northerners believed that without consolidation the United States would descend into a confederation of petty states. Southerners, however, embraced the confederation model as a safeguard for their peculiar institution, which had facilitated the rise of King Cotton and by the 1850s had become tightly woven into the social, cultural, and economic fabric of the South itself. Whereas northern consolidationists saw confederation as a weak and outmoded form of American nationalism, southern states' rights proponents saw consolidation as an attack on liberty, racial unity, and class harmony. Fleche makes perhaps his greatest contribution to a deeper understanding of Civil War causation and nationalism by showing how North and South legitimized their opinions in the context of European consolidation versus decentralization. Fleche's most tenuous link between American and European revolutionary thought rests in his discussion of race. He takes care to note that unionists who called for an end to slavery rarely championed civil rights for African Americans. Unionists may well have "believed that the defeat of the 'slave-holding aristocracy' would enable the world's free workers to prosper as small landholders," but would African Americans join the proletariat's westward march? (5). Fleche notes throughout his book that northerners—whether recent immigrants or multi-generational Americans—sought the defeat of an elite white adversary rather than black equality, but the question of where African Americans as...

The article discusses the interpretation of national history in the Rwandan history schoolbooks and curricula of the mid-2000s — late 2010s. The author analyses the way of describing the causes of the civil war of 1990—1994, a key issue in the twenty-five year debates about the main culprits of the 1994 genocide. The study shows that despite the joint US-Rwandan research team’s attempt in 2006 to develop a conceptual framework for interpreting national history in secondary schools, based on a critical evaluation of past events, the further history curriculum development was subordinated to the Rwandan politics of memory, to the RPF government’s desire to impose its version of national history on society in order to achieve “national reconciliation”.

Representations of history (i.e., books, museums, monuments) tend to favor the creators of those representations. I review research on articulations of the difficult histories connected with slavery, including the war over slavery in the United States (i.e., the Civil War, 1861–1865). I find that the lopsided portrayal of these histories is evident in how Blacks and Whites are portrayed in addition to which aspects of history receive the most attention. Black perspectives are minimized and are often shown through positions of powerlessness. Whites are shown as the primary actors, yet there is a glaring omission of the advantages Whites gained through slavery and their active role in dehumanizing people of African origins. This dynamic extends to how White southerners chose to represent the US Civil War. The legacy of slavery – i.e., a structural racism that supports White advantage and exploits Blacks – supports and is evident in the ways history is represented. When considering how to address the consequences of slavery through reparations, I suggest a broader perspective that links symbols to material inequalities. Adjustments to the public landscape are necessary throughout the world. However, those changes need to be made thoughtfully; otherwise there is a risk of repeating past mistakes.

The desperation experienced during the Social War forced the Romans to turn to drastic remedies for their cheerless condition. At some point before the elections for 88, the Senate decided to make the war against Mithridates of Pontus, who had invaded Asia, a consular province. Asconius insists that the conflict between Caesar and Sulpicius was one of the causes of the civil war of 88, an exaggeration, but he must be right that this episode led others to see the tribune in a new light. Just as Sulla had been alienated by Sulpicius's violence during the canvassing in 89, although he had benefited from it, so, and all the more, were the Romans, even those who benefited from Sulla's legislation, appalled by his conduct. Sulla's nephew failed to win election to the tribunate and his preferred candidate for the consulship, P. Servilius Isauricus, who had just celebrated a triumph, went down in defeat.

In the article, the author tracks the dynamics of the views on history of the well-known seventeenth-century English politician and philosopher James Harrington, considering and analysing them in the broad context of changing attitudes to history in Europe during the Renaissance and Early Modern period. The author maintains that in Harrington's texts one can find a combination of traditional approaches, characterised by an attitude to history as a set of historical arguments in favour of different political positions, and new approaches, associated with an awareness of the differences between the past and the present and the impossibility of direct application of historical models to the present. He examines a number of discussions between Harrington and his contemporaries devoted to analysing various historical events and processes. In particular, the author examines the different assessments of the political structure of Greek Sparta and ancient Israel. He demonstrates the influence these assessments had on the complex formation of Harrington's and his contemporaries' attitudes towards different models of political government, such as the republic. The author examined the novelty of Harrington's position in terms of analysing the causes of the Civil War in seventeenth-century England. New interpretations of the dynamics of societies' political development proposed by Harrington are largely related to his vision of the interaction between economic conditions (balance of land ownership) and political power in its various forms (monarchy, aristocracy, republic). A key conclusion of the study is that Harrington's historical approaches combine, in an intriguing and imaginative way, mere historical description as a narrative practice with a desire to create and develop a political theory that claims to analyse the dynamics of historical events and to elaborate the various political positions associated with the republican tradition.

The ability to claim an eminent right over property was central to the parliamentary war effort. Relying on a narrative of necessity that jurists in both England and in western Europe had increasingly used since the end of the sixteenth century, MPs gave the English political public a narrative parallel to that of a beggar in extreme duress: in order for it to survive, the property rights of English subjects needed to give way. Scholars have noted the Long parliament's use of necessity in the past in order to disassociate the causes of the Civil War from a ‘rule of law’ ideology or to make a claim that Parliament made a novel political theory of emergency. Yet the Long parliament was not abandoning English law nor was it generating a novel theory of emergency. Instead, it was relying on legal concepts that jurists and Crown officials commonly used to advance the power of the state. This law of necessity was controversial, however, and the Long parliament's continued use of it generated conflict even as it also enabled MPs to seize control over England's armed forces.

The “Dismal Science of Union” combines environmental and intellectual history to explain the causes of the Civil War by documenting white Southerners’ vision for land use and national development. This project begins in the Early Republic and proceeds to characterize the ways white Southerners in the antebellum period used political economy to defend slavery and their unique second nature vision for man, society, and resources. The political economy adopted by the slaveholding class ideologically captured them in their pursuit of vindication. Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo’s economic theories, according to the proslavery elite, provided a scientific – indeed, environmentally sustainable – framework which seemingly validated their perspectives on slavery, progress, and national development. However, their dedication to these theories placed them in an ideological trap of their own creation. While it fostered in them a sense of confidence in their own developmental vision, it also heightened their anxiety as they saw Malthusian-Ricardian specters around every corner. The pro-slavery environmentalism of the South’s antebellum leaders gave their regional plans great coherence but brought them into fundamental conflict with a North devoted to an entirely different developmental model. This conflict undergirded the sectional debates over slavery and expansion, and it ultimately gave the South dismal answers about their future in the Union. To better understand the proslavery South’s vision under these constraints, it is therefore necessary to critically assess the ecological language they used with respect to political economy.