Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War.

By Charles B. Dew. A Nation Divided: New Studies in Civil War History. (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2001. Pp. [xii], 124. $22.95, ISBN 0-8139-2036-1.)

Ever since the guns went silent in 1865; veterans, politicians, and eventually, historians have discussed and debated why eleven southern states seceded to form the Confederacy. Depending upon when and where one lived determined what was inculcated and accepted. Charles B. Dew reopens the dialogue in Apostles of Disunion. For him, the key to understanding secession lies in a close reading of the secession commissioners' writings, which Dew argues show unequivocally that the protection of slavery was paramount in the breakup of the Union.

Dew begins his book by discussing current issues involving the Confederate flag, commemoration of Confederate heroes, and other incidents familiar to anyone who reads a newspaper. Centering such debates around states' rights remains provocative, especially among "neo-Confederates." But, according to Dew, "The secessionists of 1860-61 certainly talked much more openly about slavery than present-day neo-Confederates seem willing to do" (p. 10). Although President Jefferson Davis did not mention slavery in his inaugural address, both he and Vice President Alexander H. Stephens referred to it often in later speeches. Indeed, Stephens went so far as to posit slavery as the "corner-stone" of the Confederate nation. Interestingly, neither man spoke of slavery and secession after the war. By the late nineteenth century there were virtually' no references to slavery as a motive for secession, "a claim picked up and advocated by neo-Confederate writers and partisans to the present day" (p. 17).

According to Dew, the real importance of slavery as a cause for secession may be seen by examining the letters the secession commissioners sent to those states straddling the fence between December 1860 and April 1861. The language they used is, to say the least, striking. Jacob Thompson, a secession commissioner to North Carolina, spoke in terms of apocalypse. The "scarlet thread" that ran through all of his missives predicted the South "was standing on the brink of a racial abyss" (p. 32). A. P. Calhoun, the great nullifier's son, believed the advent of the Black Republicans promised nothing less than "degradation and annihilation" (p. 41). In virtually every area where the secession impulse was in doubt, the commissioners unleashed a tide of what Dew characterizes as "rhetorical artillery" (p. 25). Lincoln and his party "promised `freedom to the slave but eternal degradation for you and for us'" (p. 29). Such pleas ultimately did the trick: most of the wavering upper South seceded in the spring of 1861.

Dew finds these prophets of southern doom were not stilled in the postwar era. Rather, they continued to evoke images of race war, racial equality, and, more horrifying still, racial amalgamation. Such messages found a sympathetic audience during the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras.

Dew's pithy work is well written and well argued. He does address the literature on secession and acknowledges the contributions that historians such as Daniel W. Crofts, J. Mills Thornton, and Michael F. Holt have made to the study of this pivotal event. Still, he concludes that the writings of the secession commissioners prove "slavery and race were absolutely critical elements in the coming of the Civil War" (p. 81). One could quibble with the small sample Dew consults, but the evidence in that sample is compelling. Dew's work will force scholars to look more deeply into the writings of the men who pushed the South to secede.

MARY A. DECREDICO
United States Naval Academy