This chapter explains the tendency of revolutions to produce new forms of oppression rather than genuine liberation. It distinguished between Lockean and Hobbesian revolutionary conditions. In the former, the aspiring revolutionary leadership has institutional resources for solving the participation problem (how to get enough people to join the revolution) and the coordination problem (how to organize participation). Because they have access to relevant institutions and experience in operating within them, the aspiring revolutionary leadership can solve the participation and coordination problems in a relatively peaceful, noncoercive, consensual manner. In contrast, in Hobbesian conditions, where they lack access to institutions, the aspiring revolutionary leadership will typically have to resort to coercion to solve the participation and coordination problems. A particular kind of revolutionary ideology can help them achieve coercive solutions to those two problems. The features of this type of ideology that encourage coercive solutions to the participation and coordination problems are (1) framing the struggle against the regime as a Manichean contest between good and evil, a zero-sum, winner-take-all battle where the only options are victory or annihilation, (2) extreme deference to those the ideology identifies as the true leaders of the revolution, and (3) reliance on conspiracy theories that explain away failures of the leadership or other setbacks to the revolution. I then go on to identify the factors which, combined with reliance on this type of revolutionary ideology, make it highly likely that the new regime will be authoritarian, violent, and oppressive.

Chapter 2 recreates winter and spring 1860 in South Carolina, characterized by social calls and events, and demonstrates that while women noted when political events occurred, they quickly returned their thoughts to their daily lives as excessive commentary on electoral politics was improper. It explores a father’s and a daughter’s description of the same event to demonstrate that women’s political consciousnesses were not mere imitations of men’s. It then describes the Democratic National Convention of 1860, held in Charleston, which resulted in the walkout of southern representatives when Stephen Douglas was nominated as presidential candidate. As audience members, women shaped the political discussion and peer-pressured representatives into leaving the convention. Despite its importance in history, the convention quickly faded from women’s conversation, indicating that women did not immediately view this as a life-changing political event.

The final days of 1860 demonstrated a marked difference from the joys of secession just weeks before. Chapter 5 explains the relativity of time for South Carolinians as they rapidly approached secession and then spent the next several months waiting for action. The occupation of Fort Sumter caused women in South Carolina to feel constantly on edge and anticipate war. This chapter discusses melancholy Christmases, comparisons of weather to the state of the Union, and a restless energy that caused the most pacifist of women to long for action. Some women used writing to relieve their tensions, and others could not write. Those that did utilized popular conventions of the sentimental novel to express their political misgivings and describe their subdued holidays. Anxious women increasingly predicted a millenarian end of days and prayed for God to take them to heaven rather than allow them to exist in a world with freed African Americans. This chapter takes seriously these women’s frantic, religious pleas and explores the interrelation between emotions, politics, and religion. It ends on the eve of yet another moment of catharsis: the siege of Fort Sumter in April 1861.

Chapter 4 argues that the return of South Carolinian elites from their summer travels by October 1860 marks the end of the antebellum period for the state. By October, men and women alike were unable to avoid discussions of politics, a frenzy which sparked suddenly rather than grew over the summer. Almost all women in this study realized that Lincoln’s impending election brought about a point of no return. This chapter explores how women grappled with this all-consuming political atmosphere, both with religious reservation and wide-eyed patriotism, all within the constraints of political expression considered suitable for “ladies.” It argues that women were more likely to predict the devastating effects of war that disunion would bring and engages with masculinity studies in explaining why men could not, or would not, express similar worry. To make sense of their rapidly changing world, women wove political discussion into letters and diaries alongside social visits, chores, and the weather, and self-consciously defended their right to do so. The chapter closes with the cathartic events surrounding South Carolina’s secession on December 20, 1860.

This chapter recounts women’s reactions to the siege and subsequent fall of Fort Sumter and their short-lived hope that it would be the sole conflict that resulted from secession. Their cathartic moment of joy quickly evaporated when soldiers departed for Virginia, leaving them once again in a tormented state of lonely anticipation. Until the events of First Bull Run, men’s letters home expressed a jovial mood. This atmosphere changed drastically when loved ones began to die in combat. Thus, while Fort Sumter may be considered the first shot of the Civil War, it took First Bull Run for South Carolinians to realize the urgency of the conflict and finally, completely, enter the Civil War. The conclusion traces the lives of the elite white women profiled through the Civil War and its aftermath. Many of them earnestly subscribed to the Lost Cause myth after the war, writing rosy memoirs of antebellum days or joining Confederate memorial organizations. That their prewar predictions of doom and destruction do not line up with their postwar remembrances further proves that the Lost Cause mythology is divorced from the reality of the South after the Civil War.

Chapter 3 unpacks the “sickly season,” or the summer of 1860, characterized by the threat of mosquito-related diseases in the Lowcountry. It argues that South Carolinians’ insistence upon traveling to their usual vacation haunts, often ending their trips in New York City, reveals a still-uncertain political future. During this “season” (roughly late May to late October), South Carolinians felt time slow down, and talk of electoral politics faded to the background. South Carolina women continued to express political thoughts, however, revealing rivalries with Virginians that coexisted with desires to form social, and therefore economic and political, relations at Virginia’s healing and resort springs. The annoyance with Virginia reflects a tension between the two states of who is the true inheritor of the American Revolutionary spirit, and this chapter uses the Mount Vernon Ladies Association to explore shifting perceptions of a federalist and yet southern president. It also describes the increasing anxieties surrounding slave rebellion on the eve of secession, and to what extent enslaved women increased their day-to-day resistance as rumors of disunion spread.

This chapter traces how the concept of ethnicity emerged as a depoliticised alternative to nationality. By the end of the nineteenth century, the triumph of nationalism as the hegemonic source of state legitimacy had resulted in the politicisation of the nation concept. This conceptual linkage of ‘nation’ with ‘state’ opened up a terminological vacuum: If nationhood implied statehood, what label should be given to those stateless nations and national minorities that had neither a state of their own nor the political capacity to acquire one? Against this backdrop, the chapter traces how an embryonic concept of ethnicity was articulated to fill in the terminological void. The chapter’s empirical focus is on the early twentieth-century academic literature on nationalism and the establishment of the world’s first international minority rights regime after the First World War. The argument also has significant implications for debates surrounding the conceptual distinction between ‘civic’ and ‘ethnic’ nationalism.

This chapter examines Daniel Boorstin’s contention that historically Americans’ special genius grew from taking a practical, nonideological approach to politics and government. For Boorstin, this approach allowed Americans, unfettered by ideology, to react to changing circumstances with deliberation and confidence. Boorstin argued that even the American Civil War was a nonideological conflict, emerging from a practical sectional disagreement over the need to manage the slavery question. Since Boorstin, scholarship has revealed that he failed to grasp the ideological nature of American politics in the Age of Civil War and the conflicting ideologies that drove North and South to war. Given the horrific conflict, the sweeping nature of emancipation, and the promise, later abandoned, of full citizenship to African Americans, how can the nation now have confidence that the political “genius” of American politics can survive the current era of polarization and disillusionment?

The World Peace Brigade was one of many advocacy organizations in a sphere of unofficial international politics, a sphere in which corporations also paired with nongovernmental organizations to provide de facto recognition to nationalist claims. The political turmoil surrounding the United Nations intervention in Congo and the breakup of its neighboring Central African Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland made sub-Saharan Africa the epicenter for this transnational advocacy. It may seem counterintuitive for a mining company with operations in regions controlled by colonial or settler-colonial regimes to support anticolonial nationalist aspirations. However, in 1962 the American Metal Climax mining company (AMAX) chose to back certain anticolonial nationalists in Southern Africa, in direct response to the blowback that its competitor, Union Minière, received for backing the secessionist Congolese province of Katanga. Katanga hovered over the imagination of advocates and nationalists as the ultimate example of illegitimate nationalism – the potential of failed national liberation – in which Western imperial interests had co-opted a state-in-waiting and violated postcolonial state sovereignty.

Building upon my previous account of the antecedents of statehood, this chapter establishes five procedural principles that further condition the emergence of new states. These principles can be split into two sets: those that establish means for state creation through which valuable politics can either be instantiated or enhanced, and those that either prohibit or restrict state creation through means that violate or disrupt political action. The first set comprises the 'recognition principle' and the 'referendum principle', which determine the legal salience of foreign recognition and independence referendums. The second set comprises the 'negative self-determination principle', the 'international peace principle', and the 'territorial integrity principle'. These three relate, respectively, to the international legal prohibitions against mass disenfranchisement and political subordination, the unlawful threat or use of force, and the violation of an established community's territorial integrity. These five principles provide a procedural framework for state creation, which, along with the antecedents of statehood, collectively comprise 'statehood as political community'.

This chapter draws upon the normative resources of political community to construct an account of the 'antecedents' of statehood: the factual prerequisites that nascent entities characteristically must demonstrate in order to mount a plausible statehood claim. These antecedents, which will be familiar to doctrinal lawyers from sources such as the 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, are: a permanent population, a relatively determinate territory, an 'effective' government, and some degree of governmental independence. In addition to grounding each antecedent within both historical and contemporary practice, this chapter demonstrates their coherence with the ethical value of politics, thereby reconstructing these elements of international law into a normatively coherent whole. Several aspects of this reconstruction will strike readers familiar with state creation as controversial. In particular, I advance a novel conception of governmental 'effectiveness' that turns upon the capacity of nascent states to facilitate ethically valuable political action.

The Introduction establishes the topic of the book - the creation of states in international law - as well as the method adopted when investigating that topic. It argues that doctrinal debates over state creation have become deadlocked as a result of the prevailing method of 'legal positivism' and that this approach, which focuses exclusively upon the factual provenance of putative laws, should be abandoned. Advocating a form of 'rational reconstruction', whereby the normative appeal of putative laws must be assessed alongside their provenance within international legal practice, it connects this method of law identification to the earlier 'Grotian tradition' developed by scholars such as Hersch Lauterpacht. To aid readers who might be unfamiliar with the details of international legal reasoning, an extended summary of the legal framework endorsed by the text is then presented, followed by a brief overview of the structure of the argument to follow.

This chapter considers the first of two additional reconstructions of state creation under international law, both of which present alternatives to statehood as political community. I call this first alternative 'the stability thesis', given its core claim that the law of state creation is primarily explicable and provisionally justifiable, not in terms of international peace and friendly relations, rather than political community. Two versions of this rational reconstruction are considered. Under the first, stability is secured by seeking to eliminate controversy: on this 'modus vivendi' approach, only those standards that meet broad international consensus should be considered legally relevant to the creation of states. Under the second, which prioritises substance over consensus, international practice is reconstructed so as to prioritise legal standards that are maximally conducive to stability in and of themselves. Ultimately, I argue that we should reject both versions of the stability thesis. Although international peace is morally important, both within state creation and otherwise, it cannot function as the primary normative foundation for this area of law.

This chapter will analyse the right of self-determination in respect of its external and internal dimension, the rights of minorities and the rights of indigenous peoples. Self-determination is the point of reference for any discussion of indigenous and minority rights, although it is far broader than both of these. Minority rights in turn are not considered collective entitlements in relevant international human rights instruments. None the less, as the reader will come to appreciate, they are not devoid of a collective character altogether. Indigenous rights are largely based on soft law and some of their fundamental premises (for example, land rights) are hotly disputed by interested states. Yet, it is indisputable that the international community recognises that the vulnerable status of indigenous peoples necessitates a distinctive approach based on the adoption of measures that allow the preservation of their culture and traditions, while on the other hand helping them to develop, whether technologically, financially, educationally or otherwise. Group rights are controversial primarily because they give rise to questions of ‘us’ and ‘others’ in addition to challenging traditional notions of state sovereignty.

Scholars often frame Republican supporters in 1860 as the moral center of American politics. The Republicans, after all, were antislavery proponents, at least in a moderate sense. But it is important not to infuse Republican Party morality with a more modern ethic, such as an antiracist or antiviolence stance. Most Republicans focused on White enslavers and the institution of slavery without developing much policy on freed slaves beyond colonization - the removal of African Americans from the United States. Despite the Republican Party’s self-promotion as a coalition committed to peaceful law and order (in contrast to the bullying leadership of slaveholders and Democrats), it was an organization built to resist and fight. In the 1860 election cycle, the Wide Awakes, Abraham Lincoln’s Republican backers, engaged their Democratic counterparts in physical battle across the northern, urban landscape. Shootings, stabbings, chasings, and beatings marked these clashes. Chapter 6 explores how partisan physical and electoral fights would shape questions of violence and the national state in the challenging period between Lincoln’s election and his assumption of office.

The chapter reviews the geographic aspects of Madisons system at the local, state, and regional levels. It begins with the crucially important rules that translate citizens votes into seats in Congress. It then describes how the advent of computers made it easier for politicians to evade traditional anti-gerrymandering rules and argues for an alternative, computerized approach that is simultaneously neutral, transparent, and respects the constitutional principle community. The scheme is further described in an Appendix. The chapter then turns to the states role in fostering political consensus within their borders while leaving room for different policy choices on the national scale. It concludes by examining how voters pushed the federal government into expansive missions that undermined the Framers principle of limited government and produced a bloody Civil War. The result was a new uncertainty over just where federal power begins and ends which still exists today.