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Charles B. Dew. Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners along with what causes the Civil War. An Old-fashioned Divided: New Studies in Civil
War History. Charlottesville and London: College Press of Virginia, 2001. x + 124 pp. Cloth ($22.95), ISBN -8139-2036-1.
Reviewed for H-South by Christopher Olsen, Department ever, Indiana Condition College.

Secession, Slavery, and Racism: Confederates versus. Neo-Confederates

T his slender volume examines the job of secession commissioners posted the deep South as well as other slave states through the cold several days of 1860-1861. The
men were billed with protecting secession and promoting fellow southerners to look at them within the Union. Charles B. Dew correctly notes that
historians trying to locate the feelings and motives behind disunion have rarely examined the text of people commissioners. The boys themselves
are often overlooked by historians entirely or overlooked as minor figures. Dew has speeches or letters from forty-among the fifty-two men that offered as
commissioners. These were all slaveowning politicians, with assorted experience and partisan affiliations most were natives in the usa to
that they’re hired. This isn’t an entire study the boys or all their work, but it’s an essential contribution for that literature on
secession along with a good overview of the storyplot of people neglected figures.

Dew clearly intends it for academics along with a more general readership. The writing is barely 80 pages, adopted by an appendix and
only no under notes, which supports that it is appealing for classroom use.

The prose is obvious, jargon-free, and includes an sufficient volume of the
narrative of secession that even beginning students can continue with the book. Nonetheless the types of materials are complex enough, along with the representative
documents well selected, therefore it should also stimulate discussion among advanced readers.

For the book’s primary audience — non academics and beginning students — the author’s intent clearly should be to disabuse them within the (incredibly) still popular notion that secession wasn’t about preserving slavery and racial subordination (along with the southern culture according to them), but instead to condition some form of abstract persistence for states’ legal legal legal rights. Academic historians, clearly, have extended-since figured states’ legal legal legal rights was the means, not only a primary motive, for secession and war. Dew’s principal target may be the somewhat shadowy “Neo-Confederate” movement, such as the League within the South along with the patrons of “Neo-Confederate websites,
bumper stickers, and T-shirts” (10). He notes properly that secessionists themselves “spoken a lot more freely about slavery than present-day-neo-Confederates appear prepared to do” (10). The book’s first chapter makes apparent the relevance of his discussion to recent controversies within the Confederate flag in several states and Virginia’s Confederate history month, amongst others. The writer writes getting a few apparent passion. A close southerner he recalls “my childhood desiring

Confederate glory,” and confesses that he’s “still hit obtaining a serious sadness after i assess the fabric which these studies reliesInch (2).

Unsurprisingly, Dew has little difficulty demonstrating his primary thesis. The secession commissioners repeated exactly the same message wherever
they went: Lincoln subsequently subsequently subsequently along with the Republicans were abolitionists prone to establish racial equality or promote amalgamation secession and independence offered white-colored-colored-colored men the only real option to degradation and cultural destruction. The Republican threat, the boys contended, really was three-fold: racial equality, race war, and racial amalgamation. The authors of Mississippi’s “Commitment of Immediate Causes,” for example, claimed north of manchester “advocates color color color negro equality, socially and
politically, and promotes insurrection and incendiarism of usInch (13). Alabama’s Leroy Pope Master summarized that Republican rule would cost southerners
first, “our property,” “then our liberties,” and lastly “the sacred wholesomeness inside our kids” (79).

Possibly the very best evidence Dew offers may be the coarse racism that punctuated a lot of the commissioners’ appeals. Thoughtful and open-minded
readers will realize that the repair of slavery and racial wholesomeness — within the Ku Klux Klan variety — were founding concepts within the Confederacy. As Stephen Hale, Alabama’s commissioner to Kentucky, authored: Republican victory was “nothing under a clear commitment of war, for the triumph in the new theory of presidency destroys the home within the South, lays waste her fields, and inaugurates all of the horrors in the San Domingo servile insurrection, consigning her citizens to assassinations and her spouses and kids to pollution and breach to gratify the lust of half-civilized Africans” (54). Dew touts Hale’s letter because the best
summary of secessionist arguments about slavery and race — indeed, he quotes the passage reported above on three separate occasions — that is full text
is presented within the Appendix.

Another within the book’s strengths is Dew’s effective juxtaposition of comments produced through the identical men pre and publish the second world war. While using
words of Jefferson Davis, Alexander Stephens, J. L. M. Curry, John Cruz Preston, while some, the writer signifies that ex-Confederates produced the
myth of states’ legal legal legal rights causation once they authored Lost Cause memoirs. Before and through the second world war these men presented arguments for independence and
Confederate nationalism in relation to slavery and racism. Carrying out a defeat, however, they sang another tune. Stephens, clearly, delivered his famous
“cornerstone” speech in March, 1861, and Dew presents an extensive discussion of his remarks. Inside the 1868 memoirs, however, Stephens was adament that
the second world war “is a trouble relating to the concepts of Federation, across the the whites, and Centralism, or Consolidation, alternatively.Inch Slavery “was but _the
question_ which these hostile concepts” finally collided (16). Carrying out a war Preston defended the Confederacy as being a noble defense
of “true constitutional liberty,” definately not his antebellum portrayal of Republican “canting, fanatics, festering within the
licentiousness of abolition and amalgamation” (75).

For specialists, clearly, these styles — otherwise specifically the material — can be quite familiar. Many historians within the secession
movement will resist Dew’s contention that “there’s no better spot to appear [for the “secessionist mind”] in comparison with speeches and letters of
the boys who offered their states as secession commissioners across the eve within the conflict” (18). Furthermore, most likely number of would agree that for that
commissioners fell “the task of offering this type of explanation [for secession] — of informing the Southern individuals in the dark forces
threatening their region and driving their states to discover sanctuary outdoors the Union” (24). Editors, politicians, and lots of other public
spokesmen hammered away inside the same styles using the 1850s and definitely the 1860 presidential campaign the arguments to describe and
justify secession had already received full expression when Lincoln subsequently subsequently subsequently was elected.

Dew also doesn’t engage the historiography his set of “recent” scholarship includes 3 books printed since 1988 (one of these brilliant a
selection of essays). More frustrating for several readers would be the insufficient focus on how “slavery” conjured different images for several
listeners. Probably most likely probably the most innovative focus on secession — books by Lacy Ford or Stephanie McCurry, for example — had the concept in regards to the different
meanings of slavery inside the context of southern political culture and secession. The choice to guard slavery from Black Republicanism was
connected while using repair of regional equality and recognition, personal manhood, the legal legal legal rights of white-colored-colored-colored male property proprietors and husbands, and even more — the end result is,
the responsibilities and legal legal rights of white-colored-colored-colored men were in danger combined with actual way ahead for slavery and racial brilliance.

None of people objections diminishes the author’s primary thesis or possibly the book’s effectiveness. Really, most of the fabric within the book will make
furthermore, it a bigger factor as being a teaching tool for advanced students. A careful studying and discussion should pressure individuals to interact the concept many
southerners understood “slavery” as not only the institution itself and racial brilliance. For example, the text of South Carolina’s Leonidas W. Spratt, commissioner to Florida, related the need for maleness furthermore to slavery: “We understood the boys within the South were too instructed, and too brave, to pass through the severities of ultimate subjugation” (44). Religious imagery infused the speeches of Mississippi’s Fulton Anderson. Northerners were corrupted, he pointed out, by “an infidel fanaticism” that warped women and men into believing “that we’re a race inferior on their own account in morality and civilization.” Republicans were
prone to wage “a holy campaign for your benefit when deciding on the destruction from the institution which. is dependant on step one toward our social and
political fabric” (63). Numerous passages repeated the ever-present terms — always linked by southern spokesmen — of “degradation and dishonor.”
The end result is, Dew’s work should prompt readers to think about the different styles associated with slavery that informed the secession crisis and affected how southern
men understood the imperative dangers that Republicanism introduced home. The inclusion of two full texts within the Appendix is particularly welcome in
this regard.

Apostles of Disunion should, although it will not, finish the discussion of setup South’s primary aim in 1861 ended up being defend its
slave-based culture. It offers most of us who have a problem with the irrepressible myth of states’ legal legal legal rights devotion a great way to pressure
students to confront the integral location of slavery and racism within the mind within the Old South along with the popular movement for secession.

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