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Literary Cultures of the Civil War ed. by Timothy Sweet (review)

and impose an “acknowledgement of inferiority” (181). But Calhoun’s explanations fell short of asserting that the territories had intrinsic value for the South. And southern independence, even had it been maintained, would have forfeited any hope for new slave territory. The Slaveholding Crisis nicely complements Matthew Karp’s This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy (2016) and related studies that foreground the expansion issue. But it could better engage with Freehling, who depicts the sequel to Lincoln’s election as an extraordinary and unpredictable departure rather than a logical sequel to trends that had built for decades. Paulus pays surprisingly scant attention to Freehling’s two-volume masterpiece, the most important history of the Old South ever published. If Paulus thinks Freehling shortchanged a key part of the story, he should say so. Did the white southerners fear something that might really have happened? Did the enslaved see any advantage in resorting to violent resistance? As this review may suggest, Paulus raises questions that remain unresolved. Daniel W. Crofts