What I never knew about the Civil War | Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the...

Who decided to secede in 1960 | Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War (A Nation Divided) | Charles B. Dew

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	• Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War (A Nation Divided) Charles B. Dew University of Virginia Press, 2002 - 124 pages average customer review:based on 17 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Innovative But Incomplete Viewpoint

Apostles of Disunion by Charles B. Dew is a concise and fresh look at the causes of the Civil War as observed through the oratory and writings of the commissioners that were sent by the seceded Southern republics to the other Southern states to plead the case of secession. Dew has done an admirable job in compiling the words of these commissioners and analyzing them to the degree that he theorizes that slavery - and not states rights - was at the heart of the cause of the war. Unfortunately, while the case can be made that racism and slavery were at the heart of the secession case presented to the Southern states, it is hardly a broad reaching statement that sums up the viewpoint of all Southerners. The book lacks any look at the opinions of the men who joined the ranks and the people that supported them on the homefront. Statistics have proven that a majority of Southerners at the time of the war were not slaveholders. And the opinion of individuals - judges, lawyers, etc - selected by politicians in the various seceded state legislatures may not have necessarily represented the viewpoint of all Southern citizens. Rather, these opinions were put forth in words by men of the powerful slaveholding class who were looking out for themselves.

I appreciate Dew's effort, and I think any Civil War buff will too. But the viewpoint of the commissioners is simply too narrow to draw broad conclusions on the causes of the war.

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What I never knew about the Civil War

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.

Who decided to secede in 1960

This was a refreshing change from Southern history I was taught as a kid. The idea that the South seceded in 1860 for an abstract principle unrelated to slavery, is absurd. Hatred of The Federals haunts the nation to this day.

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The South Fought Bravely for Its Rights!

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.

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Annihilates Redeemer Myths

One can still hear the refrain that "slavery had no bearing on the Civil War; the war was fought over state's rights." Drew refutes that comforting delusion better than anyone I have seen. This book uses the words and actions of Southern leaders to convict them of treason. Drew's succinct, plain, and professional scholarship will leave readers convinced of the centrality of secessionists' actions in defense of ever-expanding slaveholder rights to the origins of the Civil War. A great, depressing book.

In late 1860 and early 1861, state-appointed commissioners traveled the length and breadth of the slave South carrying a fervent message in pursuit of a clear goal: to persuade the political leadership and the citizenry of the uncommitted slave states to join in the effort to destroy the Union and forge a new Southern nation.

Directly refuting the neo-Confederate contention that slavery was neither the reason for secession nor the catalyst for the resulting onset of hostilities in 1861, Charles B. Dew finds in the commissioners' brutally candid rhetoric a stark white supremacist ideology that proves the contrary. The commissioners included in their speeches a constitutional justification for secession, to be sure, and they pointed to a number of political "outrages" committed by the North in the decades prior to Lincoln's election. But the core of their argument--the reason the right of secession had to be invoked and invoked immediately--did not turn on matters of constitutional interpretation or political principle. Over and over again, the commissioners returned to the same point: that Lincoln's election signaled an unequivocal commitment on the part of the North to destroy slavery and that emancipation would plunge the South into a racial nightmare.

Dew's discovery and study of the highly illuminating public letters and speeches of these apostles of disunion--often relatively obscure men sent out to convert the unconverted to the secessionist cause--have led him to suggest that the arguments the commissioners presented provide us with the best evidence we have of the motives behind the secession of the lower South in 1860-61.

Addressing topics still hotly debated among historians and the public at large more than a century after the Civil War, Dew challenges many current perceptions of the causes of the conflict. He offers a compelling and clearly substantiated argument that slavery and race were absolutely critical factors in the outbreak of war--indeed, that they were at the heart of our great national crisis.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

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