Secession as an International Phenomenon: From America's Civil War to Contemporary Separatist Movements ed. by Don H. Doyle (review)

Reviewed by: Secession as an International Phenomenon: From America's Civil War to Contemporary Separatist Movements ed. by Don H. Doyle Stuart McConnell Secession as an International Phenomenon: From America's Civil War to Contemporary Separatist Movements. Ed. Don H. Doyle. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-8203-3712-8, 392 pp., paper, $24.95. This collection of essays originated at a 2007 conference in Charleston, South Carolina—ground zero for secession in the United States. Five of the authors explore the South during the Civil War era, but the other thirteen essays range very widely indeed, from studies of Mexico, Kurdistan, Germany, Taiwan, and postcolonial Africa to philosophical essays on the nature and definition of separatism. As Don H. Doyle points out in his introduction, scholars of nationalism and separatism "tend to specialize in one slice of geographic space or one moment of historical time" (7). While historians such as Susan-Mary Grant (a contributor to this volume) and David Potter have occasionally placed Union and Confederate nationalism in international context, among Americanists the study of secession has remained largely insular, a situation this admirable volume sets out to remedy. The obstacles to comparative study of secession are formidable. National states threatened with secession have varied widely across time and space—some ethnically heterogeneous, some not; some centralized, some not; some violent, some not—and so have secessionist movements. The risk is of facile or misleading comparisons, such as the one Alan M. Wachman demolishes in "Did Abraham Lincoln Oppose Taiwan's Secession from China?" Since secession is "state breaking," it also begs the prior question of what a state is and what makes a state legitimate. One group's self-determination struggle is another's terrorist insurrection. Theoretical essays by Christopher Wellman, David Armitage, Peter Radan, and Margaret Moore probe the morality of secession with an eye toward some sort of normative ethical definition, though as Moore points out in her essay on Quebec, "normative arguments are one thing and empirical examinations of successful secessions quite another" (91). Several contributors ponder the relationship between Civil War and Revolutionary War separatism. Armitage points out that the Revolution began as a civil war between [End Page 388] groups of British co-nationals and evolved into a revolutionary movement, with the Declaration of Independence as the world's first unilateral declaration of secession. The sectional crisis reversed the process, with secession coming first and leading to civil war. Radan examines Lincoln's thinking about secession by going back to the adoption of the Constitution, which was technically "an illegal and revolutionary act" relative to the existing Articles of Confederation (62). Pondering the revolutionary parallel, Lincoln regarded secession as legitimate only with unanimous consent, or as a revolutionary right that required moral justification. And Grant argues that the mounting casualties of war by 1862 led to a redefinition of northern nationalism, away from the constitutional niceties that preoccupied Lincoln and other thinkers at the war's outset, and toward a more millennial, missionary sense of national destiny. Other essays focus on the Confederacy. Charles B. Dew traces the path from moderation to secession in the thought of South Carolina congressman John Ashmore; Robert E. Bonner does so by examining "calculating secessionists" who took a utilitarian approach to disunion. Paul Quigley examines southerners' attempts to link themselves with European champions of national self-determination such as Mazzini, through "the power of victimhood," and the limits to such rhetoric given the slave basis of southern society. Both Quigley and Frank Towers discuss ethnic and racial conceptions of southern nationalism, with Towers's essay focusing on romantic secessionism as a forerunner of southern antimodernism. While not directly focused on the Civil War, the essays of Andres Resendez and Terry Rugely—on antebellum secession movements in Texas and the Yucatan, respectively—highlight the incredible political turbulence of the Gulf of Mexico basin during those years, with New Orleans emerging as the hemispheric capital of revolution and filibustering and Texas as the repeated site of secessionist intrigue. This archipelago of secession was marked by complex national, imperial, and ethnic loyalties, which tended to make secession movements both unstable and hard to categorize retrospectively in...

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