In late 1860 and early 1861, state-appointed commissioners traveled the length
and breadth of the slave South carrying a fervent message in pursuit of a clear goal: to persuade
the political leadership and the citizenry of the uncommitted slave states to join in the effort to
destroy the Union and forge a new Southern nation.Directly refuting the
neo-Confederate contention that slavery was neither the reason for secession nor the catalyst
for the resulting onset of hostilities in 1861, Charles B. Dew finds in the commissioners' brutally
candid rhetoric a stark white supremacist ideology that proves the contrary. The commissioners
included in their speeches a constitutional justification for secession, to be sure, and they
pointed to a number of political "outrages" committed by the North in the decades prior to Lincoln's
election. But the core of their argument--the reason the right of secession had to be invoked
and invoked immediately--did not turn on matters of constitutional interpretation or political
principle. Over and over again, the commissioners returned to the same point: that Lincoln's
election signaled an unequivocal commitment on the part of the North to destroy slavery and that
emancipation would plunge the South into a racial nightmare.Dew's discovery and
study of the highly illuminating public letters and speeches of these apostles of
disunion--often relatively obscure men sent out to convert the unconverted to the secessionist
cause--have led him to suggest that the arguments the commissioners presented provide us
with the best evidence we have of the motives behind the secession of the lower South in
1860-61.Addressing topics still hotly debated among historians and the
public at large more than a century after the Civil War, Dew challenges many current perceptions of
the causes of the conflict. He offers a compelling and clearly substantiated argument that slavery
and race were absolutely critical factors in the outbreak of war--indeed, that they were at the
heart of our great national crisis.