The Road to Disunion: Secessionists Triumphant

By William W. Freehling
Illustrated, maps, bibliography, index, 605 pp., 2007. Oxford University Press, 198 Madison Ave., New York, NY 10016-4314, $35 plus shipping.

Reviewer: Richard M. McMurry
Richard M. McMurry's latest book (edited) is An Uncompromising Secessionist: The Civil War of George Knox Miller, 8th (Wade's) Confederate Cavalry.

Review:
Secessionists Triumphant completes William Freehling's account of "the road to disunion." The first volume, Secessionists at Bay (1990), covered the 1776-1854 period. The concluding 2007 volume deals with events from the Kansas-Nebraska Act through the beginning of the war and the secession of what Freehling calls the "Middle South" states of Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Arkansas.

The South was clearly the actor - the aggressor - in these years, and Freehling devotes most of his pages to describing and analyzing events and personalities in that region.

White Southerners were caught in a bind as the 19th century unfolded ("Slavery crisis," Freehling calls it). Many of the long-standing religious, scientific and intellectual "truths" that had justified Negro slavery were being challenged and gradually undermined.

At the same time, immigrants pouring into the Northern states (and the northern slave states) were slowly shifting political power away from the states where slavery was most deeply entrenched.

By mid-century it had become clear that the "border South" (especially Delaware and Maryland) was well on the way to abolishing slavery.

White Southerners found their economic (slavery) and racial (white supremacy) institutions endangered by intellectual, religious, economic, demographic and political developments. Some of these threats were obvious; others much less so.

Few modern students would think of the local post office as a major threat to slavery, but Freehling shows that it was - or, at least was so regarded in Dixie. Pro-slavery adherents feared that President Abraham Lincoln would use the Post Office Department patronage, the appointment of postmasters, to create an anti-slavery Republican Party in the slave states.

Virtually all white Southerners were in agreement that the South should be left alone to handle its racial problems, and the great majority of them wished to preserve slavery and white supremacy. When it came to specifics, however, they almost always differed among themselves.

For example some proposed reopening the international slave trade to import more Africans and thereby lower the price of slaves. Then more whites could afford to become slaveowners and would thereby acquire a personal stake in the institution. The proposal ran into opposition from slaveowners who did not want the value of their slaves to decline.

What were pro-slavery people to do? The situation was tailor-made for a small minority of men who favored secession to take advantage of events and maneuver first South Carolina and then the other states into an attempt to leave the Union. The general history of this period and the major personalities involved in the late antebellum squabbles over slavery are well known.

Freehling now adds many crucial details to this account and shows us the important roles played by several lesser figures in bringing on secession and civil war. Such people as David Atchison, Francis S. Bartow, John G. Fee and James Henley Thornwell get to strut their brief moments on the stage.

Arguably Freehling's most important contribution is to show us how coincidence, accidents, and usually-ignored factors affected events. Had a railroad not been completed and a celebration to mark its completion not held in Charleston in December 1860, for example, Francis S. Bartow would not have made a speech and South Carolina may not have dared to secede.

No short review can begin to do justice to the complex story Freehling tells in this magnificent book.

Anyone who wants to understand how and why secession came about when and where it did - to understand the coming of the Civil War - must read Secessionists Triumphant.