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Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War. By CHARLES B. DEW. A Nation Divided: New Studies in Civil War History. JAMES 1. ROBERTSON, JR., Editor. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2001. xii, 126 pp. $22.95.
CHARLES B. DEW'S thesis is as succinct and unambiguous as the barrel of the artillery piece that points between the reader's eyes from the cover of his book: secession of the southern states hinged fundamentally upon perpetuating African American slavery and white supremacy. Although his is hardly a new argument, Dew refers to conspicuous events of recent years-efforts in Virginia to instate a "Confederate History Month," the controversy over the Confederate flag flying over the state capitol of South Carolina, and neo-Confederate web sites, to name a few-to show that much of the public has a distinctly contrary view to the scholarly consensus on the centrality of slavery to the formation of the Confederacy. Dew even cites a question asked of prospective new American citizens by the...