Bloody Flag of Anarchy: Unionism in South Carolina during the Nullification Crisis by Brian C. Neumann (review)

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• Bloody Flag of Anarchy: Unionism in South Carolina during the Nullification Crisis by Brian C. Neumann
• Michael E. Woods (bio)

Bloody Flag of Anarchy: Unionism in South Carolina during the Nullification Crisis. Brian C. Neumann. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2022. ISBN: 978-0-8071-8790-0. 216 pp., cloth, $45.00.

When historian James M. Banner Jr. tackled “The Problem of South Carolina” nearly half a century ago, he focused on extremism: why was it that “South Carolina nullified alone and seceded first”? (James M. Banner Jr., “The Problem of South Carolina,” in The Hofstadter Aegis: A Memorial, ed. Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974], 60). Antebellum South Carolina certainly demands explanation. But Brian C. Neumann takes a different and fruitful approach to the task by concentrating on the four in ten Palmetto State voters who rallied to the Union Party and steeled themselves for a bloody showdown with their Nullifier neighbors. This study, the first book-length treatment of the subject, adds much to the literature on Nullification, South Carolina politics, and the coming of the Civil War, though there is undoubtedly more to say about the unionists and their world.

Neumann uses newspaper editorials, private correspondence, and published speeches and pamphlets to reconstruct unionists’ worldview. Convinced that Nullification threatened the cohesion of the United States and the fate of liberty worldwide, they resisted their state’s movement down a path toward chaos, violence, and disunion. Confident that slavery was safe within the Union—and determined to keep it that way—they rejected Nullifiers’ claims that protective tariffs were an entering wedge for abolitionism. Committed to what Neumann aptly terms “southern proslavery Unionism,” unionists thwarted Nullifers’ effort to forge white unity and thus facilitated the resolution of the 1832–33 crisis (4). Soon, however, whites’ broad-based devotion to slavery undermined unionists’ position amid the onslaught of abolitionist petitions and mailings in the mid-1830s. Bitterness over Nullification-era battles persisted, but the American Anti-Slavery Society did what Nullifiers could not: convince an overwhelming number of white South Carolinians to close ranks against a serious threat to slavery. [End Page 92]

Along with improving our understanding of the Nullification Crisis, Neumann offers four historiographical interventions. One is to reevaluate the Civil War’s timing by exploring how white southern unionism, conditional and proslavery though it was, helped hold the Union together before 1860. Second, the book traces the meanings attached to “Union” back into the antebellum period, highlighting ideas and episodes that shaped later appeals to unionism during the Civil War. The third and perhaps most intriguing contribution is to investigate the gendered dimensions of this fierce conflict among white male Carolinians. Nullifiers and unionists alike, of course, demeaned their foes’ manhood while exhorting their brethren to fulfil masculine roles as citizens, masters, and protectors. But Nullification did not pit two monolithic masculinities against each other. Neumann shows that notions of manhood divided unionists and at times undermined their effectiveness, as when martial unionists pressed for paramilitary organization, while moderates sought compromise via political bargaining. Fourth, the book periodically situates the Nullification controversy in an international context, showing how memories of the 1789 French Revolution, as well as the wave of European liberal revolutions in 1830, provided fodder for pro- and anti-Nullification polemicists.

Rooted in extensive archival research and written in a crisp, concise style, this book hopefully will revitalize scholarly interest in the Nullification Crisis. Future historians would do well to follow Neumann’s lead in seriously considering the unionists, but they might pursue lines of inquiry that are left somewhat underdeveloped here. One is to flesh out who exactly the union-ists were, and the social and political setting in which they acted. Building on William Freehling’s work, Neumann notes that the Union Party was a rather unwieldly coalition with particular strength in northern upcountry districts and in Charleston, along with a smattering of lowcountry planters and the stalwart souls in Horry District. But more sustained assessment of unionists—in terms of demographics, wealth, ownership of enslaved people, and past and future political affiliation—would be useful. Particularly interesting is Neumann’s point that unionists...