Customer Reviews

Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War (A Nation Divided: Studies in the Civil War Era)

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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.

The question of what the Civil War was fought over is both one of the most innocuous and THE most divisive question in American history. The answer expressed to that question - slavery or states rights - can speak more to the respondent's ancestry, background, and ideological beliefs than to their understanding of history. Few appreciate this better than Charles Dew. A self-professed "son of the South", he grew up amid the assertions that South seceded over state's rights. Yet as his book demonstrates, the issue that agitated secessionists and motivated them to leave the union was slavery, clear and simple.

To demonstrate this, Dew turns to a previously unutilized source: the speeches made by "secession commissioners" sent out by Southern state legislatures to convince their neighbors to join them in leaving the union. Mississippi and Alabama were the first, sending ambassadors of agitation to Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina even before their own convention had met. Soon delegates crisscrossed the region, hoping to persuade as many of the slave states as they could. As Dew demonstrates, in speech after speech, the argument they resorted to was the threat Abraham Lincoln's election posed to the institution of slavery. Repeatedly they argued that Lincoln's election would unleash a vanguard of "Black Republican" activists who would create a race war or mass miscegenation. Such statements clearly identify the cause around which Southern states rallied to defend, with the issue of "states rights" only emerging after the war with the Confederacy's defeat and the abolition of slavery accomplished.

Dew's slim book is a powerful rebuttal to those who would deny that slavery was the defining issue of secession. Yet while Dew does an excellent job of analyzing the arguments of the commissioners, his narrow focus on the speeches themselves leaves a few questions unanswered. Nowhere, for example, does he explore their composition - whether the speeches were based on a common set of talking points, for example, or if each commissioner was left to his own devices in writing them. The impact of the speeches on the secession debates is also left unexamined, leaving the reader with no idea whether the speakers' arguments were ignored or whether they influenced the debate and were taken up by others in advocating disunion. Nevertheless, in his stated goal Dew makes a convincing and well-supported argument. His book is a persuasive addition to the debate, one that is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand secession and the causes of the Civil War for themselves.

I purchased this book for a Civil War reconstruction university class and was amazed at the information which I never knew about the start of the War.

This is a very interesting book and a very easy read. I had to read the whole thing for class and I found it very hard to put down.

I highly recommend it to anyone taking a class about the Civil War or just interested in Civil War history.

According to this book, the American Civil War was not about slavery... it was about racism, and racial hierarchy.

Rife with quotes from the public speeches and private letters of the men assigned with persuading other states to join in secession, this book is quick, short, and easy to read, if slightly repetitive.

This sort of book is harsh and to the point because it needs to be. Too widespread is the fictional belief that the Civil War was a squeaky-clean "gentlemen's" affair over "states rights" (States rights to keep slavery), oblivious to all evidence to the contrary, choosing instead to believe the post-war arse-covering writings of people like Jefferson Davis and others sugar-coating the Confederacy.

The language used in the documents (of which several are included in the book's appendix) is undeniable; virtually nowhere does the idea of "states' rights" appear. Virtually everywhere do the ideas of racial hierarchy appear; the black man at the very bottom, all white people above them. The speeches play on fears of Southerners at the time, giving the image of What Will Happen If Lincoln Is Elected/If Your State Does Not Secede; apocalyptic images of American soldiers running roughshod over Southern lands, with freed slaves raping white women of all ages, and the white man relegated to the same subhuman status the slaves themselves were in.

Straight from the secessionists themselves come visions of this, and outright THREATS that true Southerners would never allow themselves the "degredation" of racial equality, and that an end to slavery would institute a "saturnalia of blood"

Due to the heated nature of Civil War literature, the author (much like in many other books) writes in the prologue stating that he IS a Southerner, with ancestors who fought on both sides of the Civil War, and was obsessed with the Civil War as a young man.

I was not aware of the existence of the Secessionist Commissioners until reading this book. This provides examples of the Commissioners speeches and writing and uses them to prove that the South seceded because they wanted to preserve Slavery. The examples are enlightening and entertaining. The book with its examples does show the prevailing viewpoint in the South and illustrates the way the first States to secede attempted to persuade other States to Secede and join the Confederacy. This is a very interesting book and suitable for the general reader.

The Civil war may not technically be about slavery. The South leftm the Union and Lincoln was detrermined to reunite the country. However, the question must be asked, "why did the South seek the radical course of secession in the first place?" This book makes it clear that the reason was slavery. For well over a century, the Confederate cause has been justified as one of states rights. We must ask, however, "the right to do what?" Clearly, the South was most concerned about the right to hold other human beings in bondage.

Most histories of the Civil War and biographies of Lincoln refer to the Southern rhetoric of "Black Republicanism" during the campaign of 1860 and the months immediately following Lincoln's election. Thus, it was never a secret that the reason many of the Southern states left the Union was because of their concern over the issue of slavery. In truth, slavery could not have been abolished without an amendment to the Constitution but, its spread into newly admitted states and into the territories was a hotly debated and compromised issue for decades preceding the war.

In this book, Dew removes any doubt as to why the South left the Union. Commissioners from five states toured the South, made speeches, and wrote letters and documnets to convince the remaining Southern states to leave the Union. The most passionately espoused reason was slavery. Despite post war efforts to posit other reasons, the primary source material that Dew has uncovered makes clear the real Southern motive for secession. Dew is a Southerner (albeit he now teaches at Williams College in MA) whose ancestors fought for the Southern cause. Nonetheless, he cites material that, at the time, was not for public consumption but was only for the audience to which it was directed, i.e., arguments for secession directed officials of other Southern states. Dew makes this original source material available to the public and the falacious arguments which have been advanced for secession (states rights, tariffs, etc.) must fall.

This exceptional scholarship proves what drove secession and the Civil War. Extensive quotation of the speeches and writings of the emissaries the deep South sent to more moderate Southern states to persuade them to join in secession demonstrates that secession and the War were about slavery. Attributing them to high sounding principles such as state's rights was a fig leaf. State's rights did not drive the South to slavery; slavery drove it to invoke state's rights. This book is an excellent complement to Disunion.

Why did the southern states attempt to secede from the Union in 1860-'61?

Confederate apologists constantly insist it was all a question of the Constitution. The Northern states were violating the Southern states rights to do something or another, and the South had no choice except secession in order to preserve 'Constitutional' govt. Union supporters insist that this isn't so. So what really happened?

Prof. Charles Dew cuts right to the heart of things by quoting the arguments made in 1861 by supporters of secession. Seven states passed secession ordinances in 1860 and '61, and four of them sent representatives to other slave states, explaining the reasons why they too should secede.

So what was the Southern cause? Surprise, surprise. It was WHITE SUPREMACY. The South needed to secede before the North amended the Constitution. In the nightmare world of the disunionists, the "Black Republicans," as the South invariably called them, were bent on seeing a South simultaneously: drenched in blood when the slaves rose in revolt; drenched in equality, as whites and blacks lived together withouth a master race; and drenched in miscegnation, as the races became one. Of course, it was logically impossible for all these things to happen at the same time, but logic was not the South's strong point.

Neither was honesty. As Dew makes clear, disunionists started lying about why they'd pushed secession as soon as they lost. Dew notes he was indoctrinated during his Florida youth with the story that "the South had seceded for one reason and one reason only: states' rights;" Dew also quotes contemporary neo-Confederates trying to deny the truth that the South was trying to preserve White Supremacy and Slavery.

Their sucessors keep it up: Art Chance maintains "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." Chance then tries to change the subject to 'why did the North resist Southern Aggression?' (Answer: we were fed up with being pushed around by the South).

'A reader from USA' sets up a fantasy about the Founding Fathers, citing a book titled FORCED FOUNDERS (go look at the reviews; they say the Virginian Founders were motivated by anti-slavery).

'tabsaw' says the book "walks down the road well traveled," without giving titles of any of the other books making this argument.

Still, we progress. Not even the apologists for slavery reviewing this book have the nerve to deny that preserving Slavery and White Supremacy was the South's reason for secession. Once we get that established, we'll be able to go on to more interesting issues.

Yes, indeed! and chiefly for its cherished rights: 1. to enslave Africans and their descendants, and to coerce their labor by force; 2. to institutionalize the religious and 'scientific' doctrine the racial inferiority of those Africans in perpetuity; and 3. to extend the institutions of slavery into new territories and eventual states to the west and south. In ante-bellum Southern public opinion, the Constitution had guaranteed those rights, which were central to the concept of true liberty for the white race. The first right - of slavery - was the irreconcilable difference between Southern and Northern society by 1830, and the root cause of violent conflict, as Southerners hardened in the opinion that slavery was not only legal but moral and even righteous. The second right - of socially sanctioned racism - was destined to survive even defeat in the Civil War, in the form of Jim Crow apartheid that has lasted very close to the present day. The third right - of expansion - was the right threatened by the victory of Lincoln's Republican Party in 1860, and the fear of containment, by a Northern party of 'fanatics' bent on extinguishing the first two rights, was the proximate cause for secession, military preparation, and the first attack on Fort Sumter.

Those are not merely my opinions, dear readers! Those were the sentiments expressed by the advocates of secession in the months BEFORE Lincoln took office. They were embedded in the recorded deliberations of the Southern legislatures and conventions that led to secession and the formation of the Confederacy. They were the message carried by the "Secession Commissioners" whose speeches and writings are neatly analyzed in this irrefutable study by the Southern historian Charles B. Dew. None of those commissioners and none of those legislators who voted for secession had any reservations about declaring that the preservation of slavery and racial inequality was the chief motive for their radical decisions. Not BEFORE the war, that is, though some of them lived to sing a different tune after the fact.

Professor Dew begins his book with an apologia and a confession: that as a Southerner he himself had thoroughly accepted the notion that the 'War Between the States' was a battle for "states' rights" and for the original meaning of the Constitution. He had worshiped Lee, had hung the 'Stars and Bars' on the wall of his dorm room in high school. However, his study of the rhetoric of the leading spokesmen for secession had forced him to the realization that the odious racism expressed in the justification of segregation, during his boyhood, was absolutely the same odious racism that excited Southerners to go to war in 1861.

Secession agitation was not new at the time of Lincoln's election. The rhetoric had been heard in Congress, in the state legislatures, and in public fora. Immediately after the Republican victory and months before Lincoln's inauguration, in December of 1860, the governors of Mississippi and Alabama appointed 'commissioners' to travel to the other slave states and to foster resistance to Northern domination, up to and including secession and war. Gov. Moore of Alabama declared that such action was necessary because the Republicans aimed for "the destruction of the institution of slavery." Mississippi's Commissioner to the state of Georgia, Judge William Harris, spoke to the Georgia Legislature on Dec 17; the North, he said, had refused "to yield to us our constitutional rights in relation to slave property... They have demanded, and now demand, equality between the white and n-gro races... in representation, equality in the right of suffrage... equality in the social circle, equality in the rights of matrimony..."

The Secretary of the Interior under Buchanan, Jacob Thompson, had no doubts about the need for secession. In an open letter to the legislature of North Carolina, in December of 1860, he declared that Republican abolitionists would pervert the federal government 'into an engine for the destruction of our domestic institutions, and the subjugation of our people." It was simple common sense, he concluded, "that all questions arising out of the institution of slavery, should be settled now and settled forever."

Judge A. H. Handy, Mississippi's commissioner to Maryland, was even more explicit: "Slavery was ordained by God and sanctioned by humanity... The first act of the black republican party will be to exclude slavery from all the Territories, the District, the arsenals and the forts, by the action of the general government... That would be a recognition that slavery is a sin... The moment that slavery is pronounced a moral evil - a sin - by the general government, that moment the safety of the South will be entirely gone."

On January 1, 1861, Alabama's commissioner to Delaware, warned the governor of that state that Lincoln's party sought "the establishment of an equality of races in our midst." It's hard even to credit the hysteria these secessionists expressed, particularly since one of the standard Lost Cause arguments against the causative role of slavery in the War has been the antipathy of most Northerners to any equality of races. It is absolutely true that the North did NOT fight to free the slaves, but the commissioners were correct that containment of slavery to the Old South was the chief goal of the Republican "free soil" Party. Thus they were almost certainly correct that such containment would be the prelude to the abolition of slavery. As events emerged, however, Northern support for racial equality never matched Southern fears; not even the brief tenure of "radical reconstructionists" in Congress, or the passage of the post-war amendments, in any way threatened white supremacy in the South over the next 100 years. Yes, the war was lost, slavery was abolished as such, but the Cause of racism wasn't Lost after all! That "right" survived.

Occasionally, history provides its delectable ironies. Southern fears that abolitionist 'fanaticism' would lead to social and political equality, and eventually to the 'nightmare' of racial integration and amalgamation, were absolutely RIGHT! for which I am joyfully thankful. We now have a President whose father was African and whose mother was White, with cultural roots in the South. To spice the irony, this President is a member of the Democratic Party, while the once 'black' Republican Party has become the bulwark of 'states' rights' reaction, utterly confined by its own 'Southern Strategy.' How bizarre to think that so many scions of secession have taken "neo-con" to mean "neo-confederacy"!

This short book is powerful, my friends! Perhaps the truth shall make us free after all.

Charles B. Dew's book provides us conclusive evidence as to why the rebellious states decided to withdraw from the Union. The letters and speeches of the Commissioners sent from the slave states to their counterparts reveal the population's fears that were driving them to their destiny.

The book is a mere 125 pages, but in this short span Professor Dew provides us a clear exposition on why the Union shattered. My only complaint is that I would have wished for more. As it is, the book can be read in just a day or two. In this reviewer's opinion, it settles the question of why the states seceded, once and for all. It also provides us a clearer understanding of why non-slaveowners would fight for the South.

This book will be enjoyed by teens and adults, especially those interested in the Civil War, Southern heritage, and the formation of the Confederacy.