Analysis Of Apostles Of Ssunion By Charles Dew

In Apostles of Disunion, Charles Dew discusses how he originally thought that states’ rights were the predominant reason that the Civil War occurred. This point of view stemmed from his readings as a boy and his ancestor’s experiences with the war. The central idea behind the authors writing of the book is his analysis of the letters and speeches that the secession commissioners wrote, in which he sought the reasons other than states’ rights to their secession from the Union. Correspondingly, he argues for the centrality of race and slavery as the reasons for the South’s secession. What’s more, is the reasoning behind why the author is writing this book and his projected achievements from doing so. Dew’s analysis of the Confederate documents …show more content…
Starting off, it is simple to say that the secession commissioners were against the support of the equality and racial consolidation of slaves. The commissioners tried to convey the same message to each pro-slavery state they visited to make them secede. The authors of Mississippi’s “Declaration of immediate causes,” promoted that the North now “advocates negro equality, socially and politically...” (Dew 16) Most of the commissioners seem to come up with arbitrary reasons to make secession sound inviting and the North abhorring. For example, a commissioner from Alabama, Leroy Pope Walker described that the Republican rule from the north would cost the southerners, “our property,” and “our liberties. (Dew 52) Perhaps the commissioner who most vividly described the racial fear of the secessionist was Alabama’s Stephen Hale. Hale wrote of the south “facing ‘extermination’”. When he referred to southerners being “degraded to a position of equality with free negroes,” (Dew 52) This fear only attacks the Republicans of the North but sounds repetitive when looking at the things other commissioners had said to justify their secession. They always end up saying something related to slavery or racism. Some good evidence of this, is the representation of the racism that accompanied many of the commissioners’ appeals. Stephen Hale, a commissioner of Alabama, wrote that Republican victory is “an open declaration of war, for the triumph of this new theory of government destroys the property of the South, lays waste to her fields, and inaugurates all the horrors of a San Domingo servile insurrection, consigning her citizens to assassinations and her wives and daughters to pollution and violation to gratify the lust of half-civilized Africans” (Dew 38). This passage is cited by Dew various times in the book. It explains most of the