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| The Mad Historian's Athenaeum |
Charles B. Dew. Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession
Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War. Charlottesville: University
of Virginia Press, 2001. x + 124 pp.
Historians
have been debating the cause of the American Civil War since before the guns
fell silent to end that conflict. Multiple theories have been proposed and
examined, but regardless of the theory, the issue of slavery cannot be ignored.
With the advances in historiography in that era’s history, examinations of the
primary sources from that period have been emphasized. Charles Dew, a
Southerner himself who described his background as one that embraced the notion
of state’s rights as being the cause of the Civil War, explained how his
research involving primary documents in Confederate records brought up
documents that challenged what he had been told about the war and its cause,
and that inspired him to look at the subject to determine the answer for
himself.
The result
was a study into the letters and speeches of the secession commissioners from the
first states that seceded to the remaining slave owning states in the attempt
to form a new nation. Dew’s analysis of those documents revealed what was said
about the reasons for secession by leading figures of the South and the
secession commissioners. The study served as the reason he wrote Apostles of Disunion where he presented
both the primary documents he examined and his conclusions. The result is a
concise assessment of the secession commissioners themselves and their beliefs,
what they wrote and said concerning the issue of secession both privately and publicly, the reactions to their words by their audiences, and the
conclusions Dew drew from his research.
Instead of
trying to speak for the commissioners, Dew chose to let their words and actions
speak for themselves. He detailed the personal history of each commissioner as
well as the context of the situation in the various states the commissioners
spoke in. This gave the words of these commissioners a setting in which they
could be understood for what they were instead of just words on paper. Dew drew
attention to the rhetoric of slavery and race which were prominently mentioned
multiple times in each address to the secession conventions. This was a sharp
contrast to long held views by some that the war was not about slavery or race,
but that of state’s rights, economic differences, or constitutional arguments.
Dew pointed out that while the commissioners did bring up those points, they
did not place the emphasis on those points while they spoke at length about
slavery and race. 
He also
described the reactions to the commissioner’s addresses from both individuals
and newspapers which also focused on the issues of race and slavery stated by
the commissioners, and not on any other issue. Dew’s major drawback is that he
did not explore the conventions or the makeup of the delegates beyond that of a
cursory examination. In many cases the commissioner’s speeches were merely
exhortations to openly receptive audiences while others failed to sway their
audiences into outright secession although in some instances the speeches may
have caused some delegates to finally side with secession.
The result
is a slim tome in which Dew was able to show that the fear of slavery’s
elimination as well as racial equality was the primary cause of the war because
that was what those commissioners focused on in those speeches. In doing so Dew
was able to fill in a gap in the historiography of the months prior to the war
by limiting the book’s topic to that of the secession commissioners and their
own words which speak for themselves as to why secession was desired by many in
the South.
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