Has anyone read the 2-volume "Road to Disunion" by William Freehling?

[Adsos Letter]

The Road to Disunion, Vol. 1: Secessionists at Bay, 1776-1854 1991

and

The Road to Disunion, Volume II: Secessionists Triumphant 1854-1861 2007

Both published by Oxford University Press.

Volume I can be a bit of a slog; Freehling wrote it during a time when many professional historians were writing monographic studies, and "maligning" narrative histories (his words). Freehling was determined to demonstrate both the utility and the possibility of good narrative history writing; however, he wrote volume I during the 1970's-1980's, and his prose reflects an attempt to be cool and hip according to the lingo of the day.

Other historians really panned him for his style, and Freehling admits in the Forward to volume II that his approach in volume I was ill-conceived. Volume II scans much more smoothly.

Anywaaaay...Freehling's primary thesis, that thinking of the antebellum South as a monolithic entity is a fundamental error, provides for an interesting perspective. According to Freehling, the South can be divided geographically into three tiers with a resultant mix of attitudes regarding antebellum issues.

These works provide a level of nuance in historical analysis which, in my opinion, goes a long way toward exposing the real complexity of the historical process. His account of the interplay between the tiers, between classes within the tiers, and between pro and anti-secession forces during the final moves toward secession make excellent reading, as does his exploration of the "slave-drain" which occurred from North to South during the antebellum years.

A less broadly focused, and much shorter, version of his argument can be found in his The South Vs. The South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War 2001, also by Oxford University Press.

I have found all of these works very interesting. Has anyone else read them? Any thoughts?

[JDPriestly]

1. Sounds interesting. Thanks for posting.

[Bucky]

2. I've read Volume One. It was a lumpy read, but eye opening.

Given the scale & scope of what he was tackling, an apology hardly seems necessary. But maybe he thought it'd help sell some books. I thought it was useful to see the roots of the threats and the level of acceptable social violence behind the threat of secession.

The rest of the country became lest violent as the 19th century moved along, it seems. For a variety of reasons, the South stayed mired back in that violent ethic a lot longer. Perhaps democracy is intrinsically peacemaking. The only thing that really bothered me was his continuous use of the word "Southron" as a synonym for Southerner. It's a silly word.

[Adsos Letter]

3. The part I dislike most was his switching back and forth between terms for the same subject.

Often within the same sentence. It certainly wasn't a deal breaker for me, and sometimes ya gotta do it, but he seemed to do it serially, in the sense of "a series of usually criminal acts over a period of time." The book was on my Graduate reading list, and I felt personally aggrieved by anything that I believed was an unnecessary complication to getting through it...I suspect I've calmed down some since then.

Yeah, his recounting of the development of the issues pertaining to slavery, attitudes toward free blacks, and the development of sectionalism made good reading.

Give the second volume a read, if you are so inclined...he does an excellent re-cap of the first volume, and then provides a very good narrative of the events within both North and South that led to secession. Personally, I was surprised to learn the degree of unwillingness to secede that existed in the Southern states, and that the strategy used by secessionist leaders was directly concerned with that fact.

The 1995 edition of Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War by Eric Foner was another one from the list that was a real eye-opener for me.