Conservative Americanism - (New Studies in Southern History) by Jesse George-Nichol (Hardcover)

About the Book

In Conservative Americanism, the author traces Conservative Americanist ideology between 1854 to 1861 and argues that Border Southerners who joined the American or Know Nothing Party were nativists who believed that foreigners and foreign ideas threatened the institution of slavery and the stability of the Union.

Book Synopsis

Conservative Americanism: Nativism, Unionism, and Slavery in Border South Politics, 1854-1861 explores the rise of Conservative Americanism-an ideology that linked the worsening sectional crisis of the 1850s to the country's growing immigrant population-among former Whigs in the Border South. Jesse George-Nichol challenges the prevailing wisdom that Unionism, rather than genuine nativism, drove these Southerners to join the nativist Know Nothing or American Party. She argues that Southern nativism and Unionism were inextricably linked, bound by a conviction that foreigners and foreign ideas posed a threat to slavery. Southern moderates understood that immigrants were responsible for the growing political imbalance between the free and slave states, and after the Kansas-Nebraska crisis, they came to believe that foreign radicalism was central to the mounting animus against slavery in the North and West. These Southerners increasingly saw the sectional conflict as one that not only pitted Northerners against Southerners and freedom against slavery, but also as a collision between native American moderation and foreign fanaticism. This perception continued to motivate Southern Know Nothings through the election of 1860, the secession crisis, and beyond. This book sheds new light on the relationships between conservatism, nativism, Unionism, and slavery in Border South politics before the Civil War. George-Nichol thus argues that understanding Southern nativism is essential to understanding Southern Unionism in the Civil War-era.

Review Quotes

"Conservative Americanism proves to be an excellent work, documenting the role of nativist arguments in the pursuit of compromise during the tumultuous period of the sectional crisis." --Emerging Civil War

"With its in-depth coverage of the border South's search for a middle ground in a time of mounting catastrophe, Conservative Americanism is first-class political history on a subject too little done, written with clarity, a fair amount of verve, and the most prodigious research." --Mark Summers, University of Kentucky

"George-Nichol's tight chronological and regional focus pays multiple dividends, helping make this a strong contribution to the growing literature on late antebellum conservatism. Her organizing concept of Conservative Americanism also lends a welcome precision to her discussion of a terribly important but often underrated group, Border South Unionists." --Matthew Mason, Brigham Young University

"This welcome book by a promising young scholar breathes life into a heretofore overlooked political movement that surfaced during the mid-1850s. Alarmed by the increasingly fractious North-South impasse and by the surge of foreign immigration, promoters of 'Conservative Americanism' decided that radical refugees from the failed European revolutions of 1848 threatened to intensify the dangerous antislavery movement. The Conservative American political coalition showed promise in the Upper South, but never commanded enough support to become a national force. Kentucky Senator John J. Crittenden emerges as the most memorable character in Jesse George-Nichol's resurrection of an alternate universe, where reason and compromise prevailed over the passionate polarization that led to the Civil War." --Daniel W. Crofts, The College of New Jersey

"In our current political crisis over minoritarian extremism, Jesse George-Nichol has offered a timely window into an earlier American reckoning, when moderate proslavery 'conservatives' from the Border South proved unable to convince other proslavery Americans, southern and northern, to compromise in defense of the Union against what they believed was the nation's greatest threat: egalitarian radicalism. As both irony and cautionary tale, Conservative Americanism is the best kind of political history." --Christopher Phillips, University of Cincinnati

"In this engrossing and much-needed study of Southern Unionism in the Civil War era, Jesse George-Nichol shows the close connections between nineteenth-century conservatism and fears of foreign influence. Key to this history is the Know Nothing Party, typically seen as a northern phenomenon, that attracted Southern moderates who defined American democracy in opposition to the tumultuous politics of Europe. Told through compelling portraits of six prominent slave-state Unionists, Conservative Americanism provides fresh insights into the South's troubled path to secession and the civil war." --Frank Towers, University of Calgary

About the Author

Jesse George-Nichol is postdoctoral fellow at the John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History at the University of Virginia.