Secessionist Impulse

William L. Barney is Professor of History at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and author or editor of several books on American history, including Passage of the Republic and The Civil War and Reconstruction.

Barney outlines an economic crisis in the South based on declining yields, increasing class stratification, and higher slave prices. He then supplies us with detailed data on the property holdings and occupations of the elected representatives and finds the secessionists to be young, probably lawyers... ambitious and confident. Because the economic dislocation of the 1850s made people receptive to a rhetoric that emphasized conspiratorial abolitionists and almost paranold fear of blacks and strangers, the politicians were able to persuade their constituents that a real crisis did exist and that secession was the only remedy. - Virginia Quarterly Review