Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War

After the Civil War, many of the commissioners put forth revisionist rhetoric that articulated the constitutional disputes as the cause of war and deemphasized their investment in slavery. Dew describes a graduation speech of Preston’s delivered to a group of young Virginians in 1868: While Preston speaks at length of the honor and glory of the South, he makes no mention of slavery as a driving factor in the push for war. Instead, the South’s efforts in battle are characterized as attempts to defend the dreams of the country’s founders. Reflecting on the speech, Dew asserts that this was “conveniently forgetful” and that “Preston was trying to reframe the causes of the conflict in terms that would be much more favorable to the South” (75). Dew notes that another commissioner, Jabez L.M. Curry, was similarly revisionist in his role as an educator and writer of history books after the war ended.

Reflecting on the evidence presented in Chapters 2 through 5, Dew asserts that the commissioners and the Southern states who seceded acted in fear of a “horrific future facing their region” if the North were to have its way (76). Dew outlines the three major imagined threats that fueled this fear: the specter of racial equality, the prospect of a race war, and the possibility of racial mixture or “amalgamation.