Two Perspectives on the Secession Crisis

Charles Hoffman and Tess Hoffman. North by South: The Two Lives of Richard James Arnold. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988. xxii + 318 pp. Richard H. Sewell. A House Divided: Sectionalism and Civil War, 1848-1865. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988. xii + 223 pp. These two books survey the sectional crisis as if from opposite ends of a powerful telescope. Beginning in 1848 with "the legacy of the Mexican War," Richard Sewell's A House Divided deftly surveys the broad range of events which led up to the firing on Fort Sumter in April of 1861 and which culminated four years later in Lee's surrender at Appomattox, giving as it were a macroscopic view of the sectional crisis. In North by South, the Hoffmans painstakingly reconstruct the experience of one man, Richard James Arnold. A member of a wealthy Northern mercantile family, Arnold became by his 1823 marriage, a Southern planter and slaveholder. For fifty years, his life and work straddled the Mason-Dixon Line, and thus, the Hoffmans argue, Arnold's experience epitomizes the sectional crisis microscopically

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