This chapter offers, first, some how-to tips for close analysis of documents and other texts to uncover a greater range and depth of meaning. Examining the choice of words, the grammatical structures, and the leaps of logic within metaphors and other figures of speech can yield fresh insight into the assumptions, the categories of analysis, and the overt as well as the less conscious agendas of historical actors. Cadence, inflection, repetition, and even silences can in this sense “speak.xy4 Physical presentation, cultural practices, and personal behaviors can suggest how leaders oriented themselves toward others and their likely intents. Second, this chapter explains how historians can read sources for evidence of the interplay between more emotional and more rational modes of thinking. Historians studying the emotions do not need training in neuroscience or psychology. Rather, they need to read texts carefully and evaluate such evidence as discussion of emotion, words signifying emotion, emotion-provoking tropes, and bodily actions triggered by emotion. Also significant is language evidencing excited behaviors, ironies, silences – and the cultural milieus of these and other expressions. Like all historical evidence, such signs of emotion should be interpreted and contextualized rather than taken at face value.

The national security paradigm is a comprehensive framework or methodology that relates variables to one another and allows for diverse interpretations of American foreign policy in particular periods and contexts. National security policy encompasses the decisions and actions deemed imperative to protect domestic core values from external threats. This definition underscores the relationship of the international environment to the internal situation in the United States and accentuates the importance of people’s ideas and perceptions in constructing the nature of external dangers as well as the meaning of national identity, American ideals, and vital interests. This chapter outlines the key tasks to employ a national security methodology, beginning with identifying the key decision-makers, for example by reading memoirs, diaries, biographies, and oral histories. It then discusses the sources to use to appraise how these decision-makers assessed the intentions and capabilities of prospective foes, as well as perceptions of their own country’s strength and cohesion, the lessons of the past, the impact of technological innovations, and the structural patterns of the international system. The chapter emphasizes the importance of using empathy, understanding the core values of the past, and defining the meaning of power.

This chapter is where the writings and deeds of the upcountry’s lower-class "common whites" are analyzed most forensically. This material testifies to the genuine struggles ordinary households encountered due to the loss of male family members (and their labor) to Confederate armies, though this evidence also suggests that some white men remained home and played important roles in their households and neighborhoods during the first half of the war. These circumstances could provoke contests over power within families, contests that must be viewed holistically to appreciate the sometimes interwoven gendered and generational conflicts within them. The final part of this chapter considers the short-term military service that some older white South Carolinian men were required to complete at certain points of the war and how, by the final stages of the conflict, the well of white military manpower was finally running dry.

This chapter begins by analyzing the society and culture of the South Carolina upcountry during the late antebellum period. In particular, it outlines the subregional differences between the upper and lower piedmont parts of the state and considers the nature of class relations in the pre-Civil War upcountry. With respect to the latter, it argues that certain aspects of daily life, like socially and economically meaningful interactions between men of different classes and a prevalent culture of labor, helped ensure that class conflict did not cause white society to come apart at the seams. The remainder of the chapter focuses on sectional politics, fears about the ascendant Republican Party and what their success would mean for life in the U.S. South, and the secession crisis. Ultimately, a broad consensus on the necessity of secession was achieved in the upcountry in the aftermath of Abraham Lincoln’s election, but the prevalent ethos of unanimity could gloss over different levels of fervency toward disunion.

This chapter explores the relationship between technology and US national security. While it affirms the continuing importance of “traditional” historical subjects like war and diplomacy, it calls for scholars to bring more rigorous research and critical sophistication to bear on them. In other words, it calls for scholars to take a “process-based” approach to these historical subjects rather than the “outcome-based” approach favored by strategic studies scholars. It explains how the author came to study the relationship between technology and national security and how other scholars influenced her approach, which seeks to blend empiricism with theory and benefits from a comparative perspective. Next, the chapter offers tips for conducting broad and deep archival research, emphasizing the value of finding aids and the need to minimize reliance on intermediaries between the researcher and the evidence. It also offers tips on reading in and across subfields and disciplines. Finally, the chapter highlights the importance of taking technical matter, whether it be weapons technology or law, seriously on its own terms while also understanding its constructed nature.

What is ideology? How can we discern significant, enduring ideas from more fleeting ones? With these opening questions the chapter lays out some ways scholars might investigate the impact of ideology on international history. The chapter offers how-to insights for historians to examine worldviews, national visions, and personal biases as they have shaped US foreign relations. In so doing, we are reminded to always consider our own ideologies, preconceptions, and assumptions, regardless of whether those presuppositions are more or less obvious. The chapter singles out key contested concepts – such as “civilization” and empire – and suggests a focus on language and rhetoric in approaching this subject. Biography and a concentration on people and groups is crucial to any deep investigation of ideology. The cultural embeddedness and historical context of the actors and ideas we focus on is critical to this work. International and transnational dimensions of thought are virtually omnipresent in the historical record; so, too, one must keep in mind the shaping role of markets and economic ideas and the impact of competing forms of nationalism. Overall, the chapter emphasizes the relationship between norms and ideology, the significance of religion, along with themes such as power, progress, and democracy.

This chapter explores desertion, disaffection, and disloyalty in the South Carolina interior. A spate of unauthorized absence from some military units and frustrations with the war at home led to a problem with disaffection and desertion emerging in the hilly and mountainous fringe along the state’s border with North Carolina during the summer and early fall of 1863. Concerned by this development, the authorities dispatched anti-deserter expeditions to the affected region. Though disturbances caused by recalcitrant deserters in and around the Blue Ridge Mountains would never be fully eradicated, these expeditions were generally effective at restoring order. This outcome warrants emphasis for it is revealing. Similar efforts elsewhere in the Civil War South tended to produce limited results at best or cycles of retaliatory violence at worst, but the relative success of these expeditions suggests that the dispatched troops needed only to reassert Confederate authority, not impose it by force on communities that were either completely out of heart with the war or never bought into the Confederate nation in the first place. This chapter also considers the small, isolated, though quite often impactful networks of dissent that could be found in some parts of the state.

Historians of US foreign relations have much to gain by incorporating some of the methodological interventions made by scholars of race and Ethnic Studies. Drawing on research on US–Caribbean and US–Central American relations, this chapter tackles the following questions: What does it mean to study race as a central component, and not just a byproduct of US foreign relations? How does race appear in and outside of government archives? And what are some assumptions that require reassessment to ensure that US foreign relations scholars are not using –race– as a mere descriptor of –other–? A core component of the chapter is its combined use of field-specific observations and personal reflections amassed over the course of twenty years of research and writing. It does not propose one unified meaning of “race,” nor one specific method for examining race as an idea and practice. Instead, it maps out how the fields of African Diaspora Studies and Critical Ethnic Studies have expanded our understandings of racialization and racial formation, provides examples of effective approaches that draw from specific events and published works, outlines questions to ask before, during, and after conducting research, and invites researchers to recognize how archives function as racialized spaces.

The slave trade was immediately raised as a matter for debate in the First Federal Congress. In February and March 1790, Quaker petitions on the subject were presented to both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Members of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, a body mainly composed of Quakers, took the lead in presenting these memorials and some of their members, notably James Pemberton and Warner Mifflin, were especially active in providing support. South Carolina’s delegates in Congress tried hard to divert attention away from the moral claims of the memorialists. The issue proved to be too divisive for extensive consideration by Congress at a time when politicians were putting all their efforts into the sustained operation of a national government. For most of the 1790s the American Convention of Abolition Societies met annually to coordinate anti-slave trade activity and to pressurise Congress to act in relation to those aspects of the slave trade where it could legitimately intervene. It never translated its good intentions into a wide-ranging anti-slave trade campaign, but it did pressurise Congress to introduce laws in 1794 and 1800 to restrict the participation of American citizens in the foreign slave trade. The elephant in the room of slave trade restriction in the 1790s was South Carolina, which kept its ports closed to African importations throughout the decade and up to 1803. A sectional divide had emerged in South Carolina between upland planters who needed to recruit additional Africans to grow cotton and indigo and tidewater planters who had sufficient black workers cultivating rice. Many smuggled slaves were brought into South Carolina at the turn of the nineteenth century and it only needed a change in the state’s prospective economic circumstance to put pressure on a change to laws relating to the slave trade.

The abolition of the transatlantic slave trade to the United States was the result of proscribing the traffic step by step. It was determined by complex contingent factors and not by a wave of anti-slave trade campaigning. This was partly because the attack on the slave trade moved at different paces in various parts of North America; partly because of the location of political sovereignty; and partly because the issue of the slave trade was bound up with broader concerns over slavery and politics in the transition from the thirteen British colonies in North America to the new federal nation. Quakers, emphasising moral and humanitarian arguments against the slave trade, made significant inroads into banning the slave trade in Pennsylvania and New Jersey in the generation before the American Revolution, and their influence later spread throughout the northern colonies and states and into the Chesapeake by the 1780s. But the Quaker anti-slave trade stance did not spread sufficiently among other groups in North America to produce widespread disapprobation of the Guinea traffic by the time of the American revolutionary war. Thus, there was no national consensus against the slave trade when the United States was created.

Between 1774 and 1787, greater condemnation of the slave trade occurred from mainly Christian individuals and groups, notably Quakers, than was the case before the American War of Independence. The humanitarian arguments made, however, did not translate into coordinated campaigning against continuance of the slave trade. Both Continental Congresses banned slave importations as part of a wider package of non-importation measures on British goods, but neither had any authority to impose enforcement measures. Jefferson’s attempt to insert a clause into the Declaration of Independence to prohibit slave importations backfired as he penned words stretching far beyond the required remit of such a clause and was forced to withdraw his statement. The Confederation Congress under the Articles of Confederation lacked the political authority to deal with slave imports. Yet positive activity occurred at state level. Delaware and Vermont banned the slave trade in their state constitutions of 1776 and 1777 respectively. The Bill of Rights included in the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 proscribed slave imports. The New Hampshire state constitution of 1783 also banned slave imports. In 1778 Virginia passed a statute to end slave importations to the state. The Pennsylvania gradual abolition of slavery law in 1780 incorporated a bill in the same state from the previous year that banned slave imports. Abolitionist views spread widely as a result of efforts by Anthony Benezet and other Quakers, but there was no national campaign against the slave trade. South Carolina was the state where the most acrimonious arguments occurred over the slave trade. The state legislature reopened Charleston to slave importations in 1783 and over the next four years thousands of Africans were imported. Divisions underscored the reality that proscribing the entire slave trade to the United States could only happen under the aegis of national political authority and that was absent in 1787.

Colonial restrictions on the slave trade main took the form of slave import duties. Nine of the thirteen British North American colonies legislated in favour of such duties at one time or another before the War of Independence. Colonies passed such legislation to restrict slave imports when saltwater Africans were not required economically, when there were fears of slave revolts, in order to boost white immigration, manufacturing and trade and when military costs had to be met. South Carolina made particular use of high slave import duties to stop Africans being imported in the wake of the Stono rebellion of 1739, thereby supporting public safety against protesting slaves. The British parliament reserved the overall political and constitutional right to decide on the merits of slave trade restriction and its decisions were binding. The colonies did not combine to form an anti-slave trade stance before the meetings of the First Continental Congress in 1774, and even then the Guinea traffic formed just one element in the North American boycott of British goods in the tense couple of years leading up to the War of American Independence. Moral concerns about the slave trade were fairly muted in North America’s colonies before the War of Independence. The Quakers were at the forefront of anti-slave trade commentary but even they took decades to persuade their own membership to relinquish slave importation and slaveholding. New England clergymen joined by the 1770s in their condemnation of the slave trade. But there was no consensus in the North American colonies that consistent pressure should be exerted to proscribe the transatlantic slave trade. The trade was banned by most colonies in the non-importation protests of 1776–8, 1769–70 and 1774–6, but there were no detailed discussions about the subject at the two Continental Congresses after the Coercive Acts had been implemented in 1774.

By the end of 1803, it appeared that controversies over the transatlantic slave trade had been largely overcome in the United States. All states by then had stopped slave imports, including South Carolina, the most recalcitrant state dealing with this issue. The issue of the slave trade, however, came to the fore dramatically as a political issue with the acquisition of the Louisiana Territory by the United States in 1803 and the subsequent reopening of South Carolina’s slave trade for the first time since 1787. The massive increase in US-owned territory through the Louisiana Purchase held out the possibility of further demand for slave labour, with Charleston acting as an entrepôt for furnishing new African imports across the southwest United States to New Orleans and Natchez. But there was no consensus among politicians either at federal or state level that this was a desirable outcome. The years between 1803 and 1806 were therefore marked by bitter controversies about whether to reopen the slave trade to South Carolina and then, after that had taken place, whether the trade should remain open. Jefferson’s presidential message of December 1806, looking forward to the time when Congress could intervene constitutionally to prohibit the slave trade, gave notice that the issue would be subject to detailed scrutiny in the national legislature at the first available opportunity. Debates on the slave trade accordingly were regularly held in Congress and in South Carolina’s state legislature in late 1806 and 1807 and the final result was for Congress to prohibit the slave trade to the United States from 1 January 1808. This was achieved without significant abolitionist pressure or campaigning. In Congress, few representatives dwelt upon the morality and cruelty of the slave trade but upon the practical measures needed to prohibit it. Slave importations to the United States were banned at the first moment constitutionally that action on this matter could be taken.