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Title: Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War by Charles B. Dew ISBN: 0-8139-2104-X Publisher: University of Virginia Press Pub. Date: April, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (8 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Chain of causality
Comment: Dew's _Apostles of Disunion_ is one of several recent books to assert that slavery, not states' rights, was the cause of the Civil War. His train of reasoning runs as follows: According to Southern secession commissioners, the men appointed by states which had seceded to convince other slaveholding states to join them in a new confederation, the primary reason for secession was the fear that a Republican president would abolish slavery and place "the Negro" on an equal plane with White citizens. Thus, the maintenance of slavery and race-based oppression were the public reasons behind the secession movement, and secession marked the start of the Civil War.
If this were the only evidence that supported Dew's case, and if Dew's were the only book to come to this conclusion, it would be fairly thin gruel. But there is plenty of other evidence to confirm the point. Before the war, President Buchanan had rejected Kansas's petition to abolish slavery, and the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision mandated governmental support of slavery even in states which had determined to reject this "peculiar institution." Both of these decisions were clear violations of the doctrine of states' rights, yet slaveowning Southerners cheered. The problems came with the possibility that future states, given a free choice (and a Republican presidency), would not embrace slavery -- and might even endorse social and political equality for Black Americans.
_Apostles of Disunion_ is refreshingly concise, direct and accessible; the book can be read in less than an hour, but its impact is impossible to shake. Dew has found a remarkable series of documents in the letters and speeches of secession commissioners.
Even more disturbing, the commissioners' arguments for secession in December 1860 and January 1861 closely resemble Southern anti-civil-rights rhetoric over a century later. Dew reminds us, once again, how much has changed in race relations over the past forty years, and how little had changed before that.
Rating: 5
Summary: Refreshing
Comment: Adult American's are often heard to say that "the Civil War was not about slavery; it was about states' rights." This statement (and ones similar to it) betray two poor assumptions the speakers make: that they were first told that slavery was the cause, but view that as juvenile because they were juvenile when they first heard it; that the answer must be one or the other. Both of these assumptions are false. There is no reason that what is commonly said is necessarily false, or to think that there was only a single cause of the Civil War. Dew makes an error in this book in claiming to answer the question "what was the singular cause of the Civil War." Although any attempt to answer this question will inevitably be wrong there is no reason to dismiss the rest of the work as wrong.
What Dew does manage to do is show that the issues of slavery and states' rights were intertwined. Why would Southerner's have cared about whether or not the Federal Government had the authority to abolish slavery if slavery was not immensely important? The answer, of course, is that they would not have. Dew examines the speeches of Deep Southerners sent to Western and Border states to convince their legislative bodies secede to show exactly why slavery was such an emotional issue for Deep Southerners. The answer is racism; and more specifically, fear of emancipation under any terms. The three common points made in the speeches of all fifty-two secessionist commissioners were: white supremacy (and the fear of being made equal); a race war in the South; and the genetic (and, obviously, sexual) mingling of the two races.
An interesting point that Dew makes in his introduction and his conclusion is that many of the major powers of the CSA retracted their racist statements immediately after the war. It was them -- Davis, Stephens, and many of the secessionist commissioners -- that began to perpetuate the myth of "states' rights." It is as if they realized that there only escape from shame was to become martyrs for an honorable cause -- and that slavery was not it.
Finally, Dew's work is simply a short and refreshing look at an ignored aspect of the five months between Lincoln's election and the attack on Ft. Sumter. These hundred pages are very much worth your time. I look forward to reading more of Dew in the future, and I am certain that, after reading Apostles of Disunion, you will too.
Rating: 3
Summary: Dew asks the wrong question
Comment: At the purely historical, factual level, this little work is useful inasmuch as it informs the reader of a little known aspect of pre-war political life. I suppose in the hothouse atmosphere of the politically correct academy the race card as it is now understood is a pretty good path to publication. Dew posits that slavery was the proximate cause of the so-called Civil War and uses the words and deeds of the secession commissioners to prove his point. Here is the logical inconsistency. No serious student of the War of Southern Independence can doubt that slavery and Southern perceptions of Northern fanaticism were the proximate causes of secession. The more interesting and difficult question is whether slavery caused the War. By mixing his analysis, Dew makes the bare assertion, but he offers nothing to prove it. This writer believes that the evidence is conclusive that the United States could never have mobilized its populace simply to defeat "Slavery," and, in fact, never addressed slavery except as a cynical military expediency now revered as the emancipation proclamation. It helped that the "emancipated" contrabands enlisted in the US army kept Northern white boys from being drafted. Southern secession was ideological and that ideology was white supremacy; there is no reason to try to gloss over that. Northern war-making was not ideological - the true abolitionists could not have elected anyone to office - but rather pecuniary. A seceded, free-trade South would have crippled the US economy and deprived the US government of three-quarters of its tariff revenue. It is here that you find the causes of war.
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Title: Mothers of Invention : Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust ISBN: 0679781048 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 30 September, 1997 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Free at Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom, and the Civil War by Ira Berlin, Steven Miller, Barbara Jeanne Fields ISBN: 1565841204 Publisher: New Press Pub. Date: September, 1993 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory by David W. Blight ISBN: 0674008197 Publisher: Belknap Pr Pub. Date: March, 2002 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: A Short History of Reconstruction by Eric Foner ISBN: 0060964316 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 10 January, 1990 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War by James M. McPherson ISBN: 0195124995 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: September, 1998 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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