William A. Link, Roots of Secession: Slavery and Politics in Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

SYNOPSIS:

Link argues that slavery was changing in the 1850s in Virginia and becoming more loosely controlled. Slave hiring, in particular, contributed to this shift, as did the growth of industry and manufacturing. Slave resistance mainly took the form of criminal acts against white slaveowners and overseers. Murder, assault, theft, and infanticide were all prevelant in the 1850s, and increasingly these acts threatened white Virginians' sense of security. Link argues that parallel threats in the late 1850s helped push white Virginians to secede--enslaved people's resistance to slavery and political opposition to slavery in the Republican Party.

EXCERPT:

"Slavery became a metaphor for larger social tensions of the late antebellum period. These tensions affected nonslaveholders and slaveholders alike; both realized that changes were affecting Virginia society, remaking the social landscape and reorienting patterns of social, economic, and cultural life." (5)

"Late antebellum Virginia, like the rest of the South, had long existed as a 'slave society' rather than a 'society with slaves.' Slavery infused the commonwealth's social and political institutions, constitutional system, and methods of agriculture, commerce, and industry. Although tobacco culture had passed into relative decline, the institution of slavery displayed remarkable resiliency. Despite the exodus of thousands of slaves to the Deep South, the expansion of slave hiring, and the presence of a sizeable free black population, slavery moved in lock-step with dynamic economic forces of the 1850s. Especially during this decade, the Transportation Revolution expanded markets, spread commercial agriculture, fostered manufacturing, extended mining, and, not the least important reinvigorated slavery's economic position. Wherever dynamic market forces made an appearance, slavery accompanied them, and, far from verging on extinction on the eve of the Civil War, the peculiar institution in Virginia remained adaptable, viable, and modernizing." (29)

RELATIONSHIP:

Link's argument that reactionary fears drove Virginians to secede differs from ours in several important respects. While there were many acts of enslaved people resisting the institution of slavery in Augusta, there is little to connect their action with the rhetoric of white secessionists. We consider the determining causes of secession to be grounded in the political and economic logic of Virginia's communities in the context of state, regional, and national politics.