Lawrence T. McDonnell. Performing Disunion

In Performing Disunion: The Coming of the Civil War in Charleston, South Carolina, Lawrence T. McDonnell offers readers a guided and peculiar tour through the streets of Charleston, South Carolina, on the eve of secession. McDonnell, a skilled microhistorian, focuses on fresh yet seemingly insignificant events and individuals whose lives and choices in fact “were crucial to the history of Southern disunion” (i). Nearly ninety pages of endnotes and an extensive bibliography evince the breadth of the author’s exhaustive research into these ordinary men and their extraordinary but disastrous decisions. Who were these radical Minute Men of 1860, who upon Abraham Lincoln’s election joined a local company of volunteers called the Vigilant Rifles in resistance to federal “tyranny”? “They were, it appears, the shock troops of the Southern revolution,” the book’s prologue provocatively contends, “committed to disunion by any means necessary” (4). Had these little-known men—akin to Jesse Lemisch’s jack-tars in the streets of revolutionary America—not acted to hold the city’s and the state’s political leaders to account and tipped the scales toward disunion, the national crisis of 1860–1861 may have ended in union-preserving compromise like in the early 1830s and 1850s. Refusing to again accept this dissatisfactory outcome and insisting on southern and internal unity, scores of ambitious white Charlestonians pinned blue cockades to their hats, serenaded their socioeconomic superiors, paraded proudly and donned new uniforms, and drilled for battle. The pressure of such public and masculine performances, McDonnell intriguingly argues, clumsily dragged a conflicted, conservative, and commercial city long tethered to the federal union to the forefront of southern extremism and wartime wreckage.

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