Book
Reviews
The
Road to Disunion, Vol. II
Secessionists Triumphant
By William W. Freehling
The
Round Table was doubly honored when Professor Freehling
spoke to us last April. First, he came to visit coincident
with the long awaited, 17 years, publication of Volume
II of his epic, The Road to Disunion. Second, he
is one of a handful, if that, who witnessed the first
and founding meeting of our club over 50 years ago.
Over
1000 pages comprise this masterpiece of historical research.
This is the go-to book and keystone in the arch of understanding
how the war came. Not only is the sweep breathtaking but
the narrative is compulsively readable.
Superlatives
are all understatements and short of the mark in describing
the scope and depth of people and events this magisterial,
magnum opus lays before us. Integrating the anti-expansionist
attitude of South Carolina with the "we must expand
slavery at all costs" mentality of the new cotton
kingdoms of Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana gives a
sense of drama to the underpinnings of secession missing
in any other study. This is no schematic drawing as what
too often passes for the history of the origins of the
war.
No,
we have a complexity of interests and human motives conflicting
with and subsuming one another but never disappearing
so that the coming of the war becomes personal and real
to life. Yes, motives were mixed and paradoxical and at
times quite pedestrian.
Large
and impersonal forces were at work but Professor Freehling
never lets them sweep aside the actualities of real people
living in real time confronting an uncertain future. There
is no place for the inevitable or irrepressible here.
Choices were being made that could have taken them anywhere.
Forgotten and obscure individuals are as important as
those who remain famous working out what comes to be a
mosaic of powerful people advancing and retreating with
their agendas. Indeed, a series of crises some not touching
on slavery but used in the politics of slavery come and
go leaving their residue as precedents for other crises.
Manifest destiny and nullification, democracy and the
tyranny of slaveholders, are but threads in the garment
making up the cloak of disunion.
This
volume untangles these confusing strands of history and
arranges them so that they may be understood on their
own and above all in their synergistic relationship to
one another. The war came as a result of a polycentric,
contradictory but still identifiable Southern culture
struggling to make itself survive. How intriguing it is
to note that slavery's expansion to the Southern mind
would allow for its elimination and thereby keep the union
together while the Northern people never understood this
dynamic yet alone contemplate its meaning.
We
will probably never see again a work such as this in any
area of Civil War studies. It comes from a more contemplative
place than the one we occupy today. It deserves the highest
honors on our book shelves and from those who confer the
glittering prizes. No work can substitute for its reach
and grasp.
Review
by Leonard Rehner.
