John M. McCardell

John McCardell's The Idea of a Southern Nation analyzes the growing sectionalist spirit in the antebellum American South as "southern nationalism." The book offers a wide-ranging narrative of the three decades from the Nullification Crisis, the event McCardell represents as the birth of southern nationalism, to the secession conventions of late 1860. There were many sides to the assertion of southern nationalism, including religious separatism (with major Christian denominations splitting into northern and southern divisions), the founding of distinctly southern colleges and universities, efforts to promote economic self-sufficiency in agriculture and industry, and self-conscious efforts like those of William Gilmore Simms toward a southern literature and high culture. Above all, there is the defense of slavery. Gradually the holding of orthodox pro-slavery views became the touchstone for testing southern identity, as for example in the career of George Frederick Holmes, the foreign-born chancellor of the University of Mississippi, who built his successful southern career on the eloquent defense of slavery. McCardell also deals extensively with paramilitary "filibustering" schemes intended to expand the domain of southern slavery into Mexico or the Caribbean.

McCardell's subject is very broad and often treated in broad strokes. At the outset he raises anthropologist Clifford Geertz's concept of ideology as "a response to social, cultural, or ideological strain," a tool for imposing meaning on otherwise incomprehensible events. As such, ideology is "highly figurative" and, once accepted, is normally clung to with determination. The model is useful, but McCardell only applies it to the tariff crisis in South Carolina in the 1830s. For the most part the book is a series of well written portraits of prominent southerners that add richness and complexity to the reader's understanding of the period. If its concepts, including southern nationalism, are not always consistently defined, the book makes up for this by providing a broad perspective on many simultaneous tendencies in southern culture. This book is also exceptional for taking a serious approach to antebellum southern intellectual life.… (mere)