| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3 | The History Cooperative

William A. Link. Roots of Secession: Slavery and Politics in Antebellum Virginia. (Civil War America.) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2003. Pp. xvii, 387. $45.00.
William A. Link, better known as a historian of the postbellum and twentieth-century South, has written a most valuable work on antebellum Virginia. Focusing almost entirely on the period from 1850 to the state's secession in April 1861, Link has drawn on a wide variety of sources to write what will surely become the standard work on the subject. A considerable amount of research has gone into this book; it is well written, and it will be welcomed by all who are interested in slavery and the politics of the sectional controversy.	1
The search for the origins of the Civil War has traditionally centered on slavery in the South. Nevertheless, the politics of slavery has traditionally been understood to mean the politics of slaveholders and white nonslaveholders, northern as well as southern. The voice of blacks, whether free or slave, has rarely intruded into originary narratives. This is beginning to alter, however, and we now have before us an enticing prospect: an integration of the social history of slavery with the political history of the sectional controversy.	. . .

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