| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Roots of Secession: Slavery and Politics in Antebellum Virginia. By William A. Link. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. xx, 387 pp. $45.00, ISBN 0-8078-2771-1.)
William A. Link's new book shows how slavery lies at the roots of Virginia's secession. At first glance, this might seem like nothing new. Among Civil War historians, the idea that the issue of slavery caused secession and war is so widely shared as to make it almost a truism.	1
Yet too often the story of antebellum politics has been portrayed from the top down by historians interested in explaining elections, party ideology, and sectional conflict. Even when such accounts examine the issue of slavery, they usually focus solely on the experiences and actions of the white men who made up the polity. Meanwhile, the lived experience of slaves and their resistance to the Old South regime has generally remained the province of social historians. Accounts of slavery and slave resistance have transformed our understanding of African American daily life while making scarcely a dent on our collective understanding of the state-level politics of disunion. Link's book is a worthy attempt to draw connections between the social history of slavery and the political history of the antebellum South.	. . .

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