Disunion! The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789-1859
By Elizabeth R. Varon
(April 2009 Civil War News)

Illustrated, notes, bibliography, index, 347 pp., 2008. University of North Carolina Press, 116 S. Boundary St., Chapel Hill, NC 27514-3808, $30 plus shipping.

Reviewer: Thomas M. Grace, Ph.D.
Thomas M. Grace, Ph.D., is an adjunct professor of history. He is a member of the Organization of American Historians and the Buffalo Civil War Round Table.

Review:
Those familiar with William Freehling’s The Road to Disunion, a comprehensive two-volume work that traces Southern sectionalism from 1776 to 1861, might question the need for a similarly entitled book covering much the same period.

Elizabeth Varon’s masterful new study — published only a year after Freehling’s final volume — acknowledges her substantial historiographical debt to him in her introduction and endnotes. Of these books, Varon’s study is the more clearly written while she also succeeds in broadening the discussion by chronicling the origins of the war from both sides of the Mason-Dixon line.

Viewing the period from 1789 to 1859 through the linguistic frame of the word “disunion,” the author demonstrates the multiple uses that this single character of speech and language had during the period leading to the Civil War.

Varon has been influenced by scholars attentive to the importance of political rhetoric in understanding the past. In so doing, she invests as much significance in the word as did antebellum adversaries who used it alternatively as an “accusation,” a “threat,” and a “prophecy.”

Pro and antislavery foes also came to see disunion, Varon observes, as “a process of sectional alienation” as well as a “program” advanced by antislavery militants like William Lloyd Garrison and proslavery fire-eaters, like William Lowndes Yancey.

If the subject of the book strikes readers as being too distant from the battlefield, they should persevere. Selected by editor and military historian Gary Gallagher, Varon was chosen to inaugurate a series by North Carolina Press that will mark the 150th anniversary of the Civil War.

In this volume Varon skillfully blends race, gender and social history to fashion a political chronicle of the period. Conveying much that is new, she draws on a swell of fresh scholarship, citing 100 monographs published since 2003 alone. On it own, this makes her study valuable, yet she is not content to base it simply on secondary sources. Her work is enriched by archival research and the abundant use of period newspapers and journals.

The book’s nine narrative chapters — sandwiched between a prologue and epilogue — tell the story of Northern and Southern discord from Alexander Hamilton’s proposal for federal assumption of state debts, to the bitter struggles of the 1850s that ended at Harpers Ferry.

In between, she deftly covers the major sectional divisions over the War of 1812, the Missouri statehood crisis, the abolitionist petitions, and resulting congressional gag rule of the 1830s which prohibited discussion of the same, and the disputes over the Mexican War.

Of these sectional tensions, Varon stresses the centrality of the abolitionist petition campaign, the Wilmot Proviso debate (a measure introduced in Congress to ban slavery in the western territories seized in the Mexican War, and the election of 1856 when newly organized Republicans offered Northerners a presidential candidate and party committed to the nonextension of slavery.

Throughout, Varon emphasizes the ever-present specter of disunion: in newspaper editorials, on the public stage and on the floor of Congress. John Brown’s highly disruptive raid — seen by Varon and some others as the point where history pushed and turned — convinced innumerable slaveholders, the author explains, “that…abolitionist Republicans, in their uncompromising campaign to destroy the Southern way of life, had left the region’s leaders no honorable resort but to secede.”

Those who understand the four-year conflict as an inevitable clash between incompatible social systems tender an alternative interpretation of the war’s causation than the “avoidable war” thesis that Professor Varon, with considerable subtly, seems to prefer. Wherever one stands in relation to this old scholarly quarrel, this is an excellent and well-designed book.