| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Charles B. Dew. Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War. (A Nation Divided: New Studies in Civil War History.) Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. 2001. Pp. x, 124. $22.95.

This slender volume targets contemporary neo-Confederate polemicists, who insist the South fought the Civil War entirely to sustain the abstract principle of states rights. Charles B. Dew's antagonists have, in his view, swept under the rug antebellum white southerners' visceral commitment to slavery and racial hierarchy. 1

The evidence presented is drawn entirely from the secession winter, the five-month interval between the election of Abraham Lincoln as president in November 1860 and outbreak of war in April 1861. Within weeks of the election, it became apparent that several states in the Deep South would withdraw from the Union and attempt to establish an independent nation. The radical impulse was strongest in Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina; before long it swept across the entire Gulf South. The most ardently prosecession states appointed commissioners to spur the cause elsewhere. An important initial target was Georgia, which did indeed secede and then enlisted its own commissioners. The Upper South was a tougher sell. There, hopes for a Union-saving compromise persisted into late winter and early spring. The commissioners gravitated especially to Virginia, the greatest prize in the tense struggle for allegiances. . . .

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