Political Culture and Secession in Mississippi: Masculinity, Honor, and the Antiparty Tradition, 1830-1860

Abstract

Two related features of Mississippi's political culture contributed to the success of the state's secession movement, Christopher J. Olsen argues. A masculine tradition of honor, which reified independence and sensitized citizens and politicians alike to signs of slavish submission, encouraged rhetorically violent reactions to the antisouthern pronouncements of the increasingly Republican North. That culture of honor thrived in Mississippi in part because political parties were relatively weak. Campaigns generally revolved around neighborhood issues and personalities, not statewide concerns, and voters and candidates were rarely bound together within a disciplined partisan framework. The heritage of Jackso-nian party competition might have complicated the process of secession in other parts of the South, Olsen argues, but Mississippi's secessionists operated in a political context largely free of institutional restraints. Honor and antiparty sentiments combined to create a volatile climate in the 1850s, as politicians scrambled for votes by defending slavery and championing manly independence against the demeaning insults of the “abolitionist” North. After an initial chapter setting the social and political context of Jacksonian Mississippi, Olsen devotes the rest of his book to a close analysis of the political forces at work in that crucial decade when the Union split apart.