Overview

The United States of the 1850s and 1860s was characterized by intense sectional conflict. Perhaps no two events capture this conflict before the outbreak of the Civil War better than the caning of Charles Sumner in the Senate Chamber on May 22, 1856 and the secession crisis of late 1860 and early 1861. Both of these crises have been considered and reconsidered by historians as ideal lenses through which to view sectional political strategy and the chasm between the ideologies of slaveholders and abolitionists. This study places these two events into a larger sectional conversation characterized by confusion over discursive meaning, and, in doing so, goes beyond past scholarship as I suggest that, rather than just being in disagreement, the North and South did not even understand the messages they were recieving from each other.

As the nation discussed Sumner's speech, Brooks' caning, and the prospect of secession, these sectional conflicts were enlisted into two disparate masculine paradigms--the Northern, middle-class ideal of self-controlled, market manhood and the Southern planter's honor-based manhood. While operating within different masculine ideals, Northern and Southern men saw each other as sharing a similar manly ideal based on their shared memory of the American Revolution and oppressive, paternalistic attitudes toward blacks, women, and immigrants. Newspapers and periodicals in both sections used these commonalities to frame their arguments regarding the Brooks-Sumner affair and the secession crisis. Consequently, when sectional crisis reared its head, Northerners and Southerners did not see each other as two different cultures attacking an opposite worldview; instead, they looked at each other as having absurd views within a shared value system. However, even these perceived areas of commonality were enlisted differently into the Northern and Southern masculine worlds. When the two regions collided in these sectional conflicts, they used arguments that appealed to a perceived shared masculinity while the meanings of their arguments were transformed through cultural translation and were misinterpreted. Such misinterpretations often made Northern rhetoric more inflammatory to Southern men of honor while diminishing the ferocity of Southern rhetoric in Northern eyes. This project will analyze and interpret the cross-sectional meanings of the arguments that took place within public discourse.