43 pages • 1 hour read
Charles B. DewApostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2001A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Key Figures
Charles B. Dew
Dew, the author of Apostles of Disunion, is an American historian specializing in the Civil War and Reconstruction eras. He is the Ephraim Williams Professor of American History at Williams College, where he has taught for over 30 years. Despite spending his adult life in New England, Dew asserts a connection to his origins in the book’s first lines, saying, “I am a son of the South” (1). In his youth, he took pride in idealized stories of Confederate righteousness and glory in battle; he believed that the South seceded due to a dispute over states’ rights. Dew’s personal history as a descendant of Confederates and Confederate sympathizers reveals emotional tension between his origins and his historical assertions, as he admits he found this “a painful book to write” (2). Apostles of Disunion calls for a broad-scale confrontation with America’s legacy of white supremacy; this call to action is more compelling for the fact that Dew has undertaken this kind of reckoning personally.
Dew’s training as a historian informs the structure and presentation of the material in the book. He offers a wealth of detailed evidence in support of his central argument, with an intention to persuade his reader and expand a scholarly conversation with thorough examination of primary source material. He aims not to comment upon incidents of racism but to demonstrate a consistent pattern of coordinated white supremacist rhetoric. While Dew’s relationship to the book’s driving question is personal, he presents his material with minimal commentary, attempting to let the words and actions of the commissioners speak for themselves. His individual perspective emerges again in the book’s reflective final chapters, as he draws connections between the events leading to secession and the Civil War and the ongoing racial injustice and strife in the US today. While Dew is not the first or the only person to make an argument that slavery was a driving cause of the Civil War, his background as a Southerner and scholar adds legitimacy and urgency to his case and his call for a deeper reckoning with the past.
William L. Harris
Harris was Mississippi’s commissioner to Georgia, who spoke to a joint session of the Georgia General Assembly on December 17, 1860 (“at high noon,” Dew notes). Harris was raised and educated in Georgia before moving his law practice to Columbia, Mississippi in 1837 and getting involved in state politics as a member of the Whig Party, eventually receiving a nomination for the United States Supreme Court by James Buchanan (which he turned down, anticipating the sectional conflict that resulted in the Civil War). Dew details Harris’ prestigious biography and his loyalty to his Southern roots in Chapter 2, “The First Wave,” as an example of the stature and influence that many of the commissioners carried with them in their journeys across the South.
Harris was one of the first commissioners to deliver a speech to a state delegation, and his oration in Georgia is the first example presented of the pointed, strategic, and racially charged rhetoric employed by many commissioners to sway a convention in their favor. Later in the book, Dew remarks on the consistency of the commissioners’ messaging as grounded in initial rhetoric: “It is as if Judge William L. Harris of Mississippi had stopped off in Montgomery back in mid-December on his way to Georgia and held a briefing for Alabama’s commissioners” (58). Harris’ biography and his speech are the first of many described throughout Apostles of Disunion, and while he does not necessarily figure more prominently than the others, his rhetoric “sets the tone” for what follows, both chronologically, in the history of the period, and in the structure of Dew’s retelling.
Stephen F. Hale
Hale was Alabama’s commissioner to Kentucky, where he met with Governor Beriah Magoffin, as the legislature was not in session. Hale published an open letter to the governor on December 27, 1860 urging Kentucky to secede. Dew calls Hale’s letter “one of the most remarkable documents of the secession crisis” (52); he explains in the Introduction that his encounter with the letter drove him to question his assumptions about the causes of secession for the first time. He examines Hale’s letter in detail throughout Chapter 4, noting that it touches on every major argument made for secession by commissioners across the South.
John Smith Preston
Preston was one of three commissioners sent to speak to the Virginia Convention in mid-February, in the hopes of convincing the more moderate, Union-sympathetic state to join the Deep South in secession. Preston arrived from South Carolina alongside commissioners from Mississippi and Georgia; of the three, Preston was the most widely known and the most skilled orator, and thus was chosen to speak last in a series of speeches to the Virginian delegates. Born in Virginia, Preston relocated to South Carolina after marrying into one of the state’s wealthiest families and leaving his law practice for a lucrative career as a sugar planter. He traveled and lived in Europe, was active in South Carolina politics, and had been specially chosen for his skill as a performer and public speaker to appear in Virginia, where his speech stirred the otherwise calm audience to tears and thunderous applause. Preston serves as another powerful example of the character of the Southern commissioners, as well as the various persuasive strategies used to gain allies across the South. Dew also mentions Preston in the Conclusion, citing a speech he gave in Virginia after the war as an example of the widespread revisionism that occurred in the South in the years following the war.
