Ford, Lacy K. Jr. : University of South Carolina - Columbia

"Unquestionably the finest book on an antebellum southern state since J. Mills Thornton's Politics and Power in a Slave Society....His major contribution...is not to explain uniqueness but rather to portray convincingly a state sharing much with the other states of the cotton South....In sum, Lacy K. Ford has written a major book."

--Journal of Southern History

"Excellent....A major contribution to the history of South Carolina."

--South Carolina Historical Magazine

"An important book....A carefully researched, well-written analysis."

--Civil War History

"Both undergraduate and graduate readers will benefit from this revealing look at the Old South's bellwether state."

--Choice

"This is a superb book. It carefully situates republican ideology in its social, economic, and political context and skillfully portrays interrelationships between ideas and social reality."

--Georgia Historical Quarterly

Oxford University Press Web Site, May, 2000

In the sixty years before the American Civil War, the South Carolina Upcountry evolved from an isolated subsistence region that served as a stronghold of Jeffersonian Republicanism into a mature cotton-producing region with a burgeoning commercial sector that served as a hotbed of Southern radicalism. This groundbreaking study examines this startling evolution, tracing the growth, logic, and strategy of pro-slavery radicalism and the circumstances and values of white society and politics to analyze why the white majority of the Old South ultimately supported the secession movement that led to bloody civil war.