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CHARLES B. DEw, Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001. Pp. 124. $23.00/$12.95.
Charles Dew grew up in a Southern culture. For him the civil war had been fought over the issue of states' rights. As so often happens during historical inquiry, Dew stumbled across a new field while researching another. He was reading the Official Record of the Civil War searching for materials on manufacturing, but happened upon secession commissioner Stephen F. Hale's letter to the Governor of Kentucky. Dew experienced a first-class paradigm shift when reading this letter. He discovered that Stephen E Hale stressed the issue of racial integration as a tactic for scaring Kentucky into secession rather than appealing to the noble cause of states' rights. This dramatic episode during an otherwise mundane historical quest prompted the writing of Apostles of Disunion.
After the election of Abraham Lincoln in November 1860, states of the deep South began sending out commissioners to persuade the slave states to secede from the Union. Although they were not entirely successful with their task, their recorded speeches have left a trail of evidence connecting the secession cause with the issue of slavery and attitudes of racism. Dew marshals considerable evidence to reveal that slavery was the predominant concern in the eyes of the secession commissioners, rather than the issue of states' rights. For example, Judge William Harris, a native Georgian living in Mississippi, was sent as the latter...