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Book Review
| The Road to Disunion, vol. 2: Secessionists Triumphant, 1854–1861. By William W. Freehling. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. xviii, 605 pp. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-19-505815-4.)
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| The problem of secession is simply stated but oh so difficult to solve. Was it a popular movement among voters in the southern states, a majority of whom did not own slaves, or was it an essentially undemocratic triumph of a small group of reactionary slaveholders? The political system of the southern states in 1860–1861 was essentially the same as that in the northern states, except in South Carolina: a vast electorate animated into a frenzy of popular participation by experienced political parties. How could something unpopular possibly survive the scrutiny of America's eager voting masses, North or South? On the other hand, South Carolina became the first state to secede, and it did not share the same political ethos as the others. Furthermore, however comfortably the slaveholders in any state might accommodate themselves to universal white manhood suffrage, somewhere in their values lurked oppressive doctrines that supported the enslavement of millions of human beings. |
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William W. Freehling argues in his second volume on secession that it came "against the wishes of a vast majority of southern whites" (p. 104). The election of Abraham Lincoln as president was intolerable to secessionists because the South was a closed society, needing authority to silence dissent on slavery that slaves or discontented yeoman whites might hear. Although Republicans lacked the majorities in Congress to attack slavery directly, the president could establish through patronage Republican parties in the border South, and those parties would then open the debate on slavery there. Such fears caused South Carolina to move immediately to secession. After that, the hard work, circumstance, and luck of the secessionists led more states to secede. All the seceding states agreed that there was "a state's right to secede," but not that secession was wise. If South Carolina seceded and "if the federal government coercively denied that one state's supposedly natural right to withdraw its consent to be governed," the other states might rush to defend it (pp. 345–46). |
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