Far from a monolithic block of diehard slave states, the South in the eight decades before the Civil War was, in William Freehling's words, "a world so lushly various as to be a storyteller's dream." It was a world where Deep South cotton planters clashed with South Carolina rice growers, where the egalitarian spirit sweeping the North seeped down through border states already uncertain about slavery, where even sections of the same state (for instance, coastal and mountain Virginia) divided bitterly on key issues. It was the world of Jefferson Davis, John C. Calhoun, Andrew Jackson, and Thomas Jefferson, and also of Gullah Jack, Nat Turner, and Frederick Douglass.
Now, in the first volume of his long awaited, monumental study of the South's road to disunion, historian William Freehling offers a sweeping political and social history of the antebellum South from 1776 to 1854. All the dramatic events leading to secession are here: the Missouri Compromise, the Nullification Controversy, the Gag Rule ("the Pearl Harbor of the slavery controversy"), the Annexation of Texas, the Compromise of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Freehling vividly recounts each crisis, illuminating complex issues and sketching colorful portraits of major figures. Along the way, he reveals the surprising extent to which slavery influenced national politics before 1850, and he provides important reinterpretations of American republicanism, Jeffersonian states' rights, Jacksonian democracy, and the causes of the American Civil War.
But for all Freehling's brilliant insight into American antebellum politics, Secessionists at Bay is at bottom the saga of the rich social tapestry of the pre-war South. He takes us to old Charleston, Natchez, and Nashville, to the big house of a typical plantation, and we feel anew the tensions between the slaveowner and his family, the poor whites and the planters, the established South and the newer South, and especially between the slave and his master, "Cuffee" and "Massa." Freehling brings the Old South back to life in all its color, cruelty, and diversity. It is a memorable portrait, certain to be a key analysis of this crucial era in American history.
Industry Reviews
"This is an excellent book; the best that we have for the early period of the sectional conflict. I will put it on my reading list for my Civil War and Reconstruction course. Students in U.S. introductory courses could benefit from this book."--William C. Harris, North Carolina State Univ.
"Many of the details, to be sure, are fresh, and so are some of the shifts in emphases."--Carl N. Degler, The Journal of American History
"Freehling has struck as powerful blow for history as narrative art in this remarkable recounting of the southern secession movement up to 1854."--George M. Fredrickson, Stanford University.
"The major work of scholarship by the author of Prelude to the Civil War....Will interest readers with its brilliant evocation of the antebellum South."--Publisher's Weekly
"A complex, challenging reassessment of southern motives and movements from the birth of the American nation to the Kansas-Nebraska Act...Dense and idiosyncratic...an important contribution to the ongoing scholarly reconstruction of southern history..." --Kirkus Reviews
"No work about the road to disunion now rivals it in comprehensiveness and strength of argument....A brilliant synthesis of what we now know about most of the stops on the road to secession, put forth with fresh emphases and force, a triumph of historical research and art."--Washington Times
"Perceptive, argumentative, revisionist, and bound to be controversial in and out of academe....Impressive."--The State
"Informative in its details of each of the major political crises it treats, and...fascinating in its depiction of the differences between the more southern and the more northern sections of the South. Moreover, it provides a valuable, if provocative, contribution to the study of slavery and the events by which a minority of a Southern minority eventually brought about the political coup that shattered the Union."--New York Times Book Review
"A panoramic view of the antebellum South....[Freehling] puts the Civil War in a new perspective and, in what promises to be the first volume of an epic of the South, he makes an important contribution to the understanding of the united as well as the divided country."--Richmond Times-Dispatch
"Freehling has dug out of the archives a wealth of information about the road to disunion."--Boston Globe
"[Freehling] offers a highly original interpretation of the road to Civil War that may not inspire universal assent but will command the attention of anyone interested in this pivotal era."--Newsday
"This is a rich, vivid work of history. While scupulously careful enough about describing events to satisfy rigorous professional standards, SUNY (Buffalo) Professor Freehling has a sure eye for telling detail and anecdote. the book is fascinating and thoroughly readable, though it is not simple in theme or language. It is, always, clear and concrete. The great virtue of the book, historically, is that it recreates a more varied South that history often
recollects, a land of zealous slavers and ardent democrats, with classes and sections deeply divided....The index is organized well for student research work."--KLIATT, Young Adult Paperback Book Guide
"Freehling's study is important, deserving of wide and careful scrutiny. The scholarship is impeccable, the analysis insightful. His dedication to the narrative literary form, "sadly maligned among professional historians," is laudatory, and his demonstration of the importance of political history to what is sometimes termed "the 'new' social history" is right on the mark. Perhaps most of all, he has restored the slavery issue to its rightful place in Civil War
causation."--Civil War History
"Remarkably well written."--James A. Hakken, Jackson Community College
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