Miles J Smith

All historical writing, he said, even the most honest, is unconsciously subjective, since every age is bound, in spite of itself, to make the dead perform whatever tricks it finds necessary for its own peace of mind.1 The search for peace of mind has taken on more than one form in this new twenty-first century. Conscious that we remain bound to the sources that are available to us and in many ways to the received interpretive frameworks that have defined each historians own training, historians have taken it upon themselves to find peace of mind by revising predecessors in the search of improved and understandably more inclusive narratives for an increasingly diverse society. Samuel Price argued that in the modern West "the centrality of 'religious belief' ... has sometimes led to the feeling that belief is a distinct and natural capacity which is shared by all human beings. Just as the words and actions[and Facebook post, Instagram photos, and Tweets] of religious leaders are susceptible to scrutiny by online sources, so the Internet can create spaces for people to re-examine the doctrines, symbols, and practices of religious traditions." Because of the increased breadth and diversity of Internet users, they note, "more people have been given access to a global audience for their ideas, creating new sources of authority."

Historians have argued that disestablishment liberated American religion and allowed for the proliferation of religious practice and religious freedom, especially individualistic Evangelicalism in the South. This proposition reduced nearly all of southern Protestantism to Revivalist Evangelicalism, and failed to account for the powerful presence of coercive Protestant religiosity in older southern states such as South Carolina. While they shared certain Evangelical particulars with frontier populations, Protestants in South Carolina, especially Presbyterians, rejected individualized religion in favor of religiosity that favored and nurtured activist state protection of both antidemocratic political norms and chattel slavery. This essay argues that ostensibly disestablished Presbyterianism in South Carolina helped intellectually erect and socially perpetuate coercive religious and state power.

This article represents an exploration of class identity among southerners during the decade preceding the Civil War. Myriad works on class identity in the antebellum era are extant, but few have used sources by Americans living abroad. William Stiles's History of Austria shows consistent amount of sympathy for European nobles and aristocrats during the 1848 Revolution in the Austrian Empire. The book, centered on a historical event that stemmed from class inequality and nationalist thought, provides an interesting lens to address the issue of class culture and identity in the United States. Using Stiles's work, newspapers, and appropriate primary and secondary monographs, the article argues that aristocratic identity in the South remained more influential than recent historians allowed well into the nineteenth century.