Antebellum South Carolina Reconsidered: The Libertarian World of Robert J. Turnbull

Writing about the history of Antebellum South Carolina is an active enterprise. Because of the state’s rich, and no less radical, political past, its colorful public leaders, and its seemingly exceptional political culture, it is not surprising that South Carolina remains a perennial favorite among historians. In their efforts to reach a better understanding of the conditions, events, ideas, and impulses that contributed to Palmetto State extremism—in matters of states’ rights, nullification, proslavery ideology,and secession—scholars have resorted to various interpretive frameworks.Amid the multiplicity of tropes available (honor, manhood, patriarchy, and gender relations, for example), republicanism has exercised over the past few decades an immense and sometimes paradigmatic influence over academic inquiry. Positive federal governance elicited from Carolinian firebrands an aggressive reaction because economic and political centralization provoked fears for the sanctity of liberty and the security of state sovereignty. Ever alert to tyranny and corruption, and fully committed to the system of slavery and to the social order that it helped create and preserve, Palmetto politicians from the nullification controversy to the secession crisis protested along traditional, if not nostalgic guidelines—“looking backward,” in Lacy K. Ford’s words, “to the Revolution, the Constitution, and the Age of Jefferson.”