Chapter 2 recreates winter and spring 1860 in South Carolina, characterized by social calls and events, and demonstrates that while women noted when political events occurred, they quickly returned their thoughts to their daily lives as excessive commentary on electoral politics was improper. It explores a father’s and a daughter’s description of the same event to demonstrate that women’s political consciousnesses were not mere imitations of men’s. It then describes the Democratic National Convention of 1860, held in Charleston, which resulted in the walkout of southern representatives when Stephen Douglas was nominated as presidential candidate. As audience members, women shaped the political discussion and peer-pressured representatives into leaving the convention. Despite its importance in history, the convention quickly faded from women’s conversation, indicating that women did not immediately view this as a life-changing political event.

The final days of 1860 demonstrated a marked difference from the joys of secession just weeks before. Chapter 5 explains the relativity of time for South Carolinians as they rapidly approached secession and then spent the next several months waiting for action. The occupation of Fort Sumter caused women in South Carolina to feel constantly on edge and anticipate war. This chapter discusses melancholy Christmases, comparisons of weather to the state of the Union, and a restless energy that caused the most pacifist of women to long for action. Some women used writing to relieve their tensions, and others could not write. Those that did utilized popular conventions of the sentimental novel to express their political misgivings and describe their subdued holidays. Anxious women increasingly predicted a millenarian end of days and prayed for God to take them to heaven rather than allow them to exist in a world with freed African Americans. This chapter takes seriously these women’s frantic, religious pleas and explores the interrelation between emotions, politics, and religion. It ends on the eve of yet another moment of catharsis: the siege of Fort Sumter in April 1861.

Chapter 1 describes the lives of antebellum women and the forms of politics that were socially acceptable before the Civil War in order to demonstrate how 1860 was markedly different from 1859. It explains women’s defense of slavery as well as their reactions to South Carolina’s past slave rebellions, then describes how John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry was tied to and augmented this fear of insurrection. South Carolina women’s politics during the Nullification Crisis are explored to both make connections to women during secession and demonstrate how Nullifier women faced criticism for being political. The Nullification Crisis, slave rebellions, and John Brown’s raid eventually faded from women’s writings and they returned to antebellum life, an action they were not able to take in 1860.

Chapter 4 argues that the return of South Carolinian elites from their summer travels by October 1860 marks the end of the antebellum period for the state. By October, men and women alike were unable to avoid discussions of politics, a frenzy which sparked suddenly rather than grew over the summer. Almost all women in this study realized that Lincoln’s impending election brought about a point of no return. This chapter explores how women grappled with this all-consuming political atmosphere, both with religious reservation and wide-eyed patriotism, all within the constraints of political expression considered suitable for “ladies.” It argues that women were more likely to predict the devastating effects of war that disunion would bring and engages with masculinity studies in explaining why men could not, or would not, express similar worry. To make sense of their rapidly changing world, women wove political discussion into letters and diaries alongside social visits, chores, and the weather, and self-consciously defended their right to do so. The chapter closes with the cathartic events surrounding South Carolina’s secession on December 20, 1860.

This chapter recounts women’s reactions to the siege and subsequent fall of Fort Sumter and their short-lived hope that it would be the sole conflict that resulted from secession. Their cathartic moment of joy quickly evaporated when soldiers departed for Virginia, leaving them once again in a tormented state of lonely anticipation. Until the events of First Bull Run, men’s letters home expressed a jovial mood. This atmosphere changed drastically when loved ones began to die in combat. Thus, while Fort Sumter may be considered the first shot of the Civil War, it took First Bull Run for South Carolinians to realize the urgency of the conflict and finally, completely, enter the Civil War. The conclusion traces the lives of the elite white women profiled through the Civil War and its aftermath. Many of them earnestly subscribed to the Lost Cause myth after the war, writing rosy memoirs of antebellum days or joining Confederate memorial organizations. That their prewar predictions of doom and destruction do not line up with their postwar remembrances further proves that the Lost Cause mythology is divorced from the reality of the South after the Civil War.

Chapter 3 unpacks the “sickly season,” or the summer of 1860, characterized by the threat of mosquito-related diseases in the Lowcountry. It argues that South Carolinians’ insistence upon traveling to their usual vacation haunts, often ending their trips in New York City, reveals a still-uncertain political future. During this “season” (roughly late May to late October), South Carolinians felt time slow down, and talk of electoral politics faded to the background. South Carolina women continued to express political thoughts, however, revealing rivalries with Virginians that coexisted with desires to form social, and therefore economic and political, relations at Virginia’s healing and resort springs. The annoyance with Virginia reflects a tension between the two states of who is the true inheritor of the American Revolutionary spirit, and this chapter uses the Mount Vernon Ladies Association to explore shifting perceptions of a federalist and yet southern president. It also describes the increasing anxieties surrounding slave rebellion on the eve of secession, and to what extent enslaved women increased their day-to-day resistance as rumors of disunion spread.

Kaisha Esty demonstrates that during the American Civil War, laboring African American women and girls in Union-occupied territory embarked on their own war over the use of their bodies. As fugitives, “contraband,” and refugees, displaced Black women and girls of liminal status confronted gender violence in conditions that often resembled the systemic sexual violence of slavery. As this chapter argues, central to this gender violence was the assumption that Black women were always willing to negotiate sex as part of their (nonsexual) labor. The introduction of wartime legislation protecting women from sexual assault was pivotal. In race-neutral terms, such legislation created a powerful avenue for refugee Black women and girls not only to seek sexual justice but also to challenge and redefine existing cultural and legal understandings of sexual consent. Analysis of testimonies to wartime sexual violence in Tennessee and South Carolina uncovers how formerly enslaved African American women and girls located their violation in relation to their sense of virtue, respectability, and sexual sovereignty.

The dispute over the Tariff of 1828 marked a turning point for interposition. State legislatures passed resolutions declaring protective tariffs unconstitutional, increasingly using more threatening language that echoed the doctrine of nullification John C. Calhoun advanced in the South Carolina Exposition of 1828. Calhoun’s arguments distorted Madison’s views and transformed traditional sounding the alarm interposition into an option for each state to nullify acts of the national government that it considered unconstitutional. Nullification prompted a national discussion about the nature of the Union, notably in the Webster–Hayne debate in the United States Senate in 1830.Nullifiers quoted the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions and Madison’s Report of 1800 to justify their constitutional theory, but misunderstood Madison’s theoretical right of the people to interpose in the final resort and overlooked the sounding the alarm interposition of the resolutions. Madison rejected both nullification and secession and tried to explain what he meant by a complex federalism based on divided sovereignty, ultimately failing to correct misconceptions about his resolutions.

President Andrew Jackson’s Proclamation of 1832 rejected the South Carolina Ordinance of Nullification and rejected secession as a constitutional right. South Carolina’s legislature passed a Counter-Proclamation that citizens of states owed their chief allegiance to their sovereign state and not the national government and were duty-bound to maintain sovereign states’ rights. Increasingly, Americans failed to find common ground in their understanding of constitutional history. Enforcement of the Constitution’s Fugitive Slave Clause generated important Supreme Court cases such as Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842) and Ableman v. Booth (1859) as Southern states sought to enforce the Slave Clause through federal legislation such as the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Northern states responded by passing personal liberty laws to resist the enforcement of federal laws that would extend the authority of enslavers beyond the South. Southern states considered these personal liberty laws a nullification of federal law and as intended to eradicate slavery. The Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854 and the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 moved the nation beyond interposition towards secession and civil war.

draws attention to comparisons between California and other states in their provision of immigrant citizenship rights. The authors start with the border dividing California and Arizona, two states that lie on opposite ends of the spectrum with respect to progressive and regressive state citizenship, respectively. And yet, Arizona is not the only exclusionary state with respect to immigrant rights today. Indeed, the authors’ analysis reveals that Alabama is about as exclusionary as Arizona and that states like Georgia and Tennessee are close behind in their exclusionary laws on immigrant state citizenship. In this chapter, the authors situate various states along a continuum from the most inclusive to the most exclusionary with respect to each of five dimensions of citizenship rights. They also conduct a fifty-state quantitative analysis to identify the reasons why some states have proceeded farther than others in the development of progressive state citizenship.

Connecticut, Rhode Island, and South Carolina do not use any form of popular election in selecting state judges. Selection is (or was) through either election by the legislature or appointment by the governor. In each of the three states, one or more controversies surrounding either the selection process or serving judges provided the impetus for changes that required persons selected as judges to have been screened and either approved or recommended by a committee or commission. In Connecticut and Rhode Island, the screening body forwards a short list to the selecting authority; in South Carolina, the screening body reviews applications from persons who desire to be on a list of those eligible for appointment in the future. To the extent that partisanship influenced the change process, it was primarily focused on the composition of the screening body rather than on whether there should be such a body.

Of the eleven ex-Confederate states, the large majority saw Lily-Whites take control of the state party sometime in the late-Nineteenth or early-Twentieth Century. There were, however, three exceptions to this rule: South Carolina, Georgia, and Mississippi. While each of these states eventually saw some form of Lily-Whiteism gain control, the Black-and-Tan organizations managed to hang onto power longer than elsewhere in the South. South Carolina’s Black-and-Tans machine finally fell apart at the 1940 national convention. Georgia began to see a clear decline in black delegates in 1952. And, finally, the Mississippi GOP remained under Black-and-Tan control up to the 1960 national convention. Why did these three state organizations buck the trend? The histories presented in this chapter show that the party organization’s survival in each state relied upon on the ability of individual party leaders to withstand a series of major challenges to their control in the 1920s. Each of the leaders in these state parties – “Tieless Joe” Tolbert in South Carolina, Walter H. Johnson and Ben Davis in Georgia, and Perry Howard in Mississippi – faced considerable opposition, both locally and from national leaders like Harding and Hoover. Yet each leader managed to survive these challenges – at least for a while – through strategic choices, some element of luck, and (in the cases of Johnson, Davis, and Howard) support from black Republicans outside of the South.