Apostles of Disunion

Charles B. Dew. Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2001.

This brief study of the speeches and letters of several of the over fifty men who served as "Secession Commissioners"--essentially delegates sent as representatives of pro-secessionist state conventions to similar conventions in other states--identifies the language, rhetoric, and arguments of these men as an important indicator of the centrality of pro-slavery sentiment and a commitment to white supremacy to the secession crisis.

Dew's argument is concise and he includes the text of some of the more notable speeches in the Appendix so that the reader can read them in their entirety. Dew, who was raised in the South and was taught from an early age that the "War of Northern Aggression" was fought by his ancestors as a principled defense of Constitutional values and State's Rights--acknowledges that there were other "causes" of the war, including diverging economic systems, and a deeply-rooted (if, I would argue, possibly insecure) culture of honor in the South, but he argues that these documents provide a damning indictment of any effort to deny the degree to which the Confederacy was founded on, and fought for, a defense of slavery and the continued degradation and oppression of Black Americans.