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The University of North Carolina Press
472 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 12 illus., notes, bibl., index
The Littlefield History of the Civil War Era
The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789-1859
In the decades before the Civil War, Americans debating the fate of slavery often invoked the specter of disunion to frighten or discredit their opponents. According to Elizabeth Varon, "disunion" was a startling and provocative keyword in Americans' political vocabulary: it connoted the failure of the founders' singular effort to establish a lasting representative government. For many Americans in both the North and the South, disunion was a nightmare, the image of a cataclysm that would reduce them to misery and fratricidal war. For many others, however, threats, accusations, and intimations of disunion were instruments they could wield to achieve their partisan and sectional goals.
In this bracing reinterpretation of the origins of the Civil War, Varon blends political history with intellectual and cultural history to show how Americans, as far back as the earliest days of the republic, agonized and strategized over disunion. She focuses not only on politicians but also on a wide range of reformers, editors, writers, and commentators. Included here are the voices of fugitive slaves, white Southern dissenters, free black activists, abolitionist women, and other outsiders to the halls of power. In a new and expanding nation still learning how to meld disparate and powerful interests, the rhetoric of disunion proved pervasive--and volatile. As the word was marshaled by competing sectional interests in the tumultuous 1840s and 1850s, the politics of compromise grew more remote and an epic collision between the free North and slaveholding South seemed the only way to resolve, once and for all, whether the struggling republic would survive.
"A broad study. . . . Strong both in illuminating operative gender and racial perspectives and in presenting in some detail the views and methods of presentation and activism of many figures who will be unfamiliar even to most American historians, but who, as this book demonstrates, should not be ignored."
--Reviews in American History
"Highly engaging. . . . Makes good use of recent historical literature to produce a synthetic and balanced account of the politics of disunion in the American republic."
--Civil War Book Review
"Masterful. . . . Varon skillfully blends race, gender and social history to fashion a political chronicle of the period. . . . An excellent and well-designed book."
--Civil War News
"Expertly tackles a substantial body of historical literature while weaving the growth of disunionist rhetoric through the traditional landmarks on the road to Civil War."
--Southern Historian
"Definitive . . . explain[s] the effects Disunion had upon the various political groups and the citizens from our founding fathers and later on. . . . Balanced history at its very best."
--The Midwest Book Review
"This exciting book puts North and South, politics and ideas, abolitionists and secessionists into conversation across the entire era between the Constitution and the Civil War--and by doing so explains a crucial part of American history. This is a story of great importance, powerfully told."
--Edward L. Ayers, president, University of Richmond
Cloth: $30.00
© 2009 The University of North Carolina Press
116 South Boundary Street, Chapel Hill, NC 27514-3808
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