Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War

by Charles B. Dew

Overview

Charles Dew’s Apostles of Disunion has established itself as a modern classic and an indispensable account of the Southern states’ secession from the Union. Addressing topics still hotly debated among historians and the public at large more than a century and a half after the Civil War, the book offers a compelling and clearly substantiated argument that slavery and race were at the heart of our great national crisis. The fifteen years since the original publication of Apostles of Disunion have seen an intensification of debates surrounding the Confederate flag and Civil War monuments. In a powerful new afterword to this anniversary edition, Dew situates the book in relation to these recent controversies and factors in the role of vast financial interests tied to the internal slave trade in pushing Virginia and other upper South states toward secession and war.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813939445
Publisher:	University of Virginia Press
Publication date:	02/03/2017
Series:	A Nation Divided
Edition description:	Fifteenth Anniversary Edition
Pages:	168
Sales rank:	304,138
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Charles B. Dew is Ephraim Williams Professor of American History at Williams College and the author of The Making of a Racist: A Southerner Reflects on Family, History, and the Slave Trade (Virginia) and Bond of Iron: Master and Slave at Buffalo Forge, selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	ix
	Introduction	1
1.	Slavery, States' Rights, and Secession Commissioners	4
2.	The First Wave	22
3.	The South Carolinians	37
4.	The Alabamians	51
5.	The Mission to Virginia	59
	Conclusion: Apostles of Disunion, Apostles of Racism	74
Appendix	Documents	83
	Notes	105
	Index	119

What People are Saying About This

"Charles B. Dew offers a penetrating and incisive evaluation of secessionist ideology, with a clear eye to the priority of race over issues of constitutional rights. The principal source on which the book is built certainly appears neglected to me, and the source is worthy of exploitation: we have an opportunity here to see what Southerners said to each other and not what they said primarily to the North or to the world." -- Mark E. Neely, Jr., author of The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties and Southern Rights: Political Prisoners and the Myth of Confederate Constitutionalism

Mark E. Neely

Charles B. Dew offers a penetrating and incisive evaluation of secessionist ideology, with a clear eye to the priority of race over issues of constitutional rights. The principal source on which the book is built certainly appears neglected to me, and the source is worthy of exploitation: we have an opportunity here to see what Southerners said to each other and not what they said primarily to the North or to the world.

Editorial Reviews

As tensions between the northern and the southern United States rose in late 1860 and early 1861, five of the southern states appointed commissioners to other slave states in order to encourage secession. Dew (social sciences, Williams College) explores the arguments of these men to their peers as a window into the real motivations of the secession of the South. He debunks persistent arguments, first advanced by the former vice president of the Confederacy, that the Civil War was fought over "great principles" of states rights versus federal centralism. Instead he finds that these men had white supremacy and slavery at the very dark heart of their arguments and their motivations. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews

Winner of the 2001 Fletcher Pratt Prize from the Civil War Round Table of New York

"This incisive history should dispel the pernicious notion that the Confederacy fought the Civil War to advance the constitutional principle of states' rights and only coincidentally to preserve slavery."—Allen D. Boyer, New York Times Book Review

"Dew has produced an eye-opening study.... So much for states' rights as the engine of secession."—James M. McPherson, New York Review of Books

"This is an important study, meticulously researched and convincingly argued."—James Oliver Horton, author of The Landmarks of African American History

From the Publisher

Charles B. Dew offers a penetrating and incisive evaluation of secessionist ideology, with a clear eye to the priority of race over issues of constitutional rights. The principal source on which the book is built certainly appears neglected to me, and the source is worthy of exploitation: we have an opportunity here to see what Southerners said to each other and not what they said primarily to the North or to the world.

Mark E. Neely

Dew has produced an eye-opening study....So much for states' rights as the engine of secession.

— James McPherson

The New York Review of Books