When South Carolina seceded from the United States in 1860, Benjamin F. Perry wrote mournfully to James L. Petigru that he “had been trying for the last thirty years to save the State from the horrors of disunion. They are now all going to the devil” (141). For three decades—from the nullification crisis of the 1830s to Lincoln’s election as president in 1860—hotheads in South Carolina had bent their energies toward pushing the state out of the Union. It can be easy to read history backward and see South Carolina’s secession as inevitable, but doing so understates the strength of Unionism in the Palmetto State. Bloody Flag of Anarchy examines the nullification crisis with particular attention to what this important moment reveals about Unionism in the Cotton South, nationalism and internationalism, and manhood and masculinity.
“The American public has largely forgotten the nullification crisis,” Neumann writes (3). He is certainly...