Politics, chess, hats: the microhistory of disunion in Charleston, South Carolina
McDonnell, Lawrence
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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/72787
Description
Title
Politics, chess, hats: the microhistory of disunion in Charleston, South Carolina
Author(s)
McDonnell, Lawrence
Issue Date
2015-01-21
Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)
Burton, Orville V.
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Burton, Orville Vernon
Committee Member(s)
Barrett, James R.
Levine, Bruce
Lynn, John A.
Department of Study
History
Discipline
History
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
Secession
South Carolina
US history
Southern history
Social movements
Abstract
This study examines the genesis of disunion at the Confederacy’s unlikely epicenter, Charleston South Carolina. Viewed from street level, through the words and actions of more than three hundred ordinary men—those who joined the radical Vigilant Rifles in 1860, and others who did not—the break-up of the Union appears unanticipated, largely undesired, yet wholly unavoidable. Southerners did not blunder into Civil War, I argue; they marched steadily, unwittingly, self-destructively into it because, at the end, fear, honor, and self-interest had invested them too heavily in the performance of that foolish act for them to choose any other course. Surprisingly, too, those who shouted loudest for secession in Charleston were not those most deeply implicated in slavery’s defense. They were small fry—young, single, unpropertied men mostly—clerks and accountants, volunteer firemen, chess club members, looking to stand tall with their fellows and get a leg up in the world. Too late they learned that bold promises, saber rattling, and street theater could not easily be disavowed. The consequence was disaster.
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