Articulating the Crisis
Population Politics and the Onset of the US Civil War
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 17550228 |
|---|---|
| Authors | C De Leon (0000-0003-3750-9188, University of Massachusetts Amherst, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Pages | 1-25 |
| Publication date | 2026-04-16 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Social Science History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0145-5532 • E-ISSN: 1527-8034 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/ssh.2025.10114 |
| OpenAlex | W7154615154 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 40 |
Drawing on the case of the US Civil War, this article redefines crises of hegemony as crises of “articulation,” in which insurgent actors disrupt support for joining up the elements of the dominant social order under existing terms. The collapse of mass white consent just prior to the war entailed partisan struggle over imagined demographic futures. Breaking with the nativists of their former party, Illinois Whigs, turned Republicans, argued that the extension of slavery into Indigenous territory and northern Mexico would permit the planter class to monopolize the land, overrun it with the enslaved, and condemn white workers, many of them immigrants, to a life of endless toil in the factory. Having thus framed slavery as a demographic threat, northern Republicans held that the territorial claims of white settlers must supersede those of planters. Alabama Democrats, now Southern Rights secessionists, retained their erstwhile party’s expansionist politics but predicted that prohibiting the transport of human chattel to new territories would dam whites up with the enslaved, who, after overtaking the white population, could overthrow slavery and the white race itself. The article illuminates the role of population politics and partisan struggle in the re-organization of white supremacy and the advent of critical historical conjunctures. That white supremacy underpins even paradigmatic transitions to liberal democracy may also inform the work of mass movements, as they diagnose and challenge the ways in which supposedly democratic institutions consolidate, rather than protect against, elite power
Elite · Expansionism · Hegemony · Politics · Population · Spanish Civil War · White (mutation) · White supremacy · American History and Culture · Literature: history, themes, analysis · Race, History, and American Society
National Colors
Building a New American State
Incarcerating the Crisis
Why Parties?
The Fiscal Crisis of the State
“A Structure, Not an Event”
Policing the Crisis
A Practice of Anthropology
How Everyday Forms of Racial Categorization Survived Imperialist Censuses in Puerto Rico
The Politics of Population
River of Dark Dreams
Settler Colonialism
The context of struggle
Insurgent Universality
The Neglected Legacy of Insurgent Universality
Theorizing race and settler colonialism within U.S. sociology
Vicarious Revolutionaries
Mass Party Formation
Slaveholding Operatives of the Benevolent Empire
Labor and the Class Idea in the United States and Canada
Don’t You be My Neighbor
Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native
The Crisis Sequence
Why Is There No Labor Party in the United States? Political Articulation and the Canadian Comparison, 1932 to 1948
Political Action and Party Formation in the United States Constitutional Convention
Weather with You
Art and Biculturalism
Three Tensions in the Theory of Racial Capitalism
Theory Construction in Qualitative Research
Political Articulation
Path dependence in historical sociology
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |