Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War (Nation Divided: Studies in the Civil War Era) [Hardcover]

Dew's _Apostles of Disunion_ is one of several recent books to assert that slavery, not states' rights, was the cause of the Civil War. His train of reasoning runs as follows: According to Southern secession commissioners, the men appointed by states which had seceded to convince other slaveholding states to join them in a new confederation, the primary reason for secession was the fear that a Republican president would abolish slavery and place "the Negro" on an equal plane with White citizens. Thus, the maintenance of slavery and race-based oppression were the public reasons behind the secession movement, and secession marked the start of the Civil War.

If this were the only evidence that supported Dew's case, and if Dew's were the only book to come to this conclusion, it would be fairly thin gruel. But there is plenty of other evidence to confirm the point. Before the war, President Buchanan had rejected Kansas's petition to abolish slavery, and the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision mandated governmental support of slavery even in states which had determined to reject this "peculiar institution." Both of these decisions were clear violations of the doctrine of states' rights, yet slaveowning Southerners cheered. The problems came with the possibility that future states, given a free choice (and a Republican presidency), would not embrace slavery -- and might even endorse social and political equality for Black Americans.

_Apostles of Disunion_ is refreshingly concise, direct and accessible; the book can be read in less than an hour, but its impact is impossible to shake. Dew has found a remarkable series of documents in the letters and speeches of secession commissioners.

Even more disturbing, the commissioners' arguments for secession in December 1860 and January 1861 closely resemble Southern anti-civil-rights rhetoric over a century later. Dew reminds us, once again, how much has changed in race relations over the past forty years, and how little had changed before that.

The debate over the causes of secession is contentious even today. While one side of this debate argues the Confederate states seceded solely over the issue of states' rights, the other contends that the institution of slavery was the primary cause of the conflict. In Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War, Charles B. Dew attempts to end this debate by examining pre-Civil War political documents, letters, and speeches made by secession commissioners and Southern politicians. According to Dew, these sources clearly demonstrate that the institution of slavery was at the heart of the conflict.
Dew organizes this book chronologically and provides an extensive appendix, endnotes, and a short index. Dew begins this book by discussing several current events that demonstrate that Americans have not come to a consensus on the causes of the Civil War. For instance, on the Immigration and Naturalization Service's citizenship exam, the question, "`The Civil War was fought over what important issue?,'" can be answered by choosing either "slavery" or "states rights" (4). The debate surrounding the Confederate battle flag also reveals what Dew describes as "the deep division and profound ambivalence in contemporary American culture over the origin of the Civil War" (4). While some see this flag as a symbol of racism and oppression, others view it as a symbol of "Southern heritage" (8). Despite this contemporary debate, in the closing pages of chapter one, Dew argues that the words of the secession commissioner leave no question about the central role that slavery played in the Civil War.
After this brief introduction, Dew examines the course of events that led Southern states to appoint secession commissioners and the role these men played in garnering support for the Confederacy. According to Dew, the first secession commissioners were appointed just a few weeks after the Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln, won the presidential election on November 6, 1860. In fact, Mississippi appointed secession "commissioners to every slave state" in the Union twenty-four days later, and eventually most of the states in the Deep South would follow suit (23). While the messages these men brought to other Southern states varied, the central argument was the same: secession was the only logical course of action given the Republican Party's hostility towards the institution of slavery. For example, William L. Harris, a secession commissioner from Mississippi, told a joint meeting of the Georgia General Assembly, that the North wanted constitutionally guaranteed "equality between the white and negro races" (29). Harris went on to declare, that Lincoln's election "promised `freedom to the slave, but eternal degradation for you and for us" (29). Dew claims that Harris's speech set the tone for every subsequent speech of the secession commissioners.
In the next three chapters, Dew discusses the speeches made by the secession commissioners to South Carolina, Alabama, and Virginia. While the rhetoric of secession commissioners may have softened the farther North they went, the message was still the same: the North wants to institute racial equality and abolish slavery. Secession commissioner Andrew Pickens Calhoun's speech to the Alabama Convention is a prime example of this type of argument. The foundation of Calhoun's speech was that, "The election of a `Black Republican' to the presidency threatened South Carolina with `degradation and annihilation'" (41). Degradation would come in the form of federally imposed racial equality and annihilation would result from slave insurrection and the resulting racial amalgamation. Fulton Anderson, an appointee from Mississippi, was even more direct in his speech to the Virginia Secession Convention. Anderson argued that a Republican controlled federal government would be hostile to the South and described the Republican Party as having an "unrelenting and eternal hostility to the institution of slavery" (p. 62). Based upon the remarks of the secession commissioners, Dew argues that the preservation of slavery was a primary cause of secession and thus, the Civil War.
Dew concludes this book by examining how Southern politicians, including many secession commissioners, attempted to reframe the conflict in a more noble light after the end of the war. For example, Jabez L. M. Curry, a secession commissioner from Alabama, wrote in 1901 that the Civil War was fought to "save the principles of the Constitution," but he made no mention of the role that slavery played (57, 76). Even Jefferson Davis, former President of the Confederacy, tried to reframe the conflict writing in 1881, "`The sectional hostility' that developed before 1861 `was not the consequence of any difference on the abstract question of slavery'" (17). Instead, Davis claims, "The South...fought for the noblest principles...for `constitutional government,' for `the supremacy of law' and for `the natural rights of man'" (17).
According to Dew, the fact that the debate over the origins of the Civil War continues today, demonstrates the success of this concerted effort to reframe the conflict.
While initially overlooked, historians today view the arguments made by secession commissioners as an important factor in understanding the origins of the Civil War, and Charles B. Dew's Apostles of Disunion is largely responsible for this historiographic shift. Orville Vernon Burton's The Age of Lincoln demonstrates the persuasiveness of Dew's argument. In addition to making clear that the institution of slavery was the primary cause of the Civil War, Burton includes a short discussion of the secession commissioners. Burton even cites Henry L. Benning, a secession commissioner from Georgia, as declaring, "It was a conviction, a deep conviction on the part of Georgia, that a separation from the North was the only thing that could prevent the abolition of her slavery" (Burton 120). Due to the soundness of Dew's argument, and the endorsement of historians like Burton, this reviewer earnestly recommends Apostles of Disunion to anyone interested in understanding the Age of Lincoln or the American Civil War.

The question of what the Civil War was fought over is both one of the most innocuous and THE most divisive question in American history. The answer expressed to that question - slavery or states rights - can speak more to the respondent's ancestry, background, and ideological beliefs than to their understanding of history. Few appreciate this better than Charles Dew. A self-professed "son of the South", he grew up amid the assertions that South seceded over state's rights. Yet as his book demonstrates, the issue that agitated secessionists and motivated them to leave the union was slavery, clear and simple.

To demonstrate this, Dew turns to a previously unutilized source: the speeches made by "secession commissioners" sent out by Southern state legislatures to convince their neighbors to join them in leaving the union. Mississippi and Alabama were the first, sending ambassadors of agitation to Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina even before their own convention had met. Soon delegates crisscrossed the region, hoping to persuade as many of the slave states as they could. As Dew demonstrates, in speech after speech, the argument they resorted to was the threat Abraham Lincoln's election posed to the institution of slavery. Repeatedly they argued that Lincoln's election would unleash a vanguard of "Black Republican" activists who would create a race war or mass miscegenation. Such statements clearly identify the cause around which Southern states rallied to defend, with the issue of "states rights" only emerging after the war with the Confederacy's defeat and the abolition of slavery accomplished.

Dew's slim book is a powerful rebuttal to those who would deny that slavery was the defining issue of secession. Yet while Dew does an excellent job of analyzing the arguments of the commissioners, his narrow focus on the speeches themselves leaves a few questions unanswered. Nowhere, for example, does he explore their composition - whether the speeches were based on a common set of talking points, for example, or if each commissioner was left to his own devices in writing them. The impact of the speeches on the secession debates is also left unexamined, leaving the reader with no idea whether the speakers' arguments were ignored or whether they influenced the debate and were taken up by others in advocating disunion. Nevertheless, in his stated goal Dew makes a convincing and well-supported argument. His book is a persuasive addition to the debate, one that is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand secession and the causes of the Civil War for themselves.