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.
AfterwordChapter Summaries & Analyses
Afterword Summary: “Apostles of Disunion Fifteen Years Later”
This edition of Apostles of Disunion includes a new Afterword by Dew that reflects on the 15 years since its original publication in 2001. Dew narrates the profound hope he felt after Barack Obama’s election in 2008, as a symbol that the legacies of slavery and the Civil War had been overcome. Unfortunately, he witnessed a renewal of racist and Neo-Confederate rhetoric in its wake: the birther controversy, the rise of the Tea Party, and growth in the number of white supremacist hate groups across the US. He describes the publicized police killings of young black men and women, starting with Trayvon Martin in 2014, and the mass shooting committed by Dylann Roof at Emanuel AME Church in 2015. Roof’s racist writings and touting of the Confederate battle flag sparked another harsh debate over the display of Confederate symbols, like the many incidents Dew recounted in Chapter 1 of his 2001 edition.
These national events resonated with Dew’s research for the book project that followed the publication of Apostles of Disunion. In his research, he became fixated on a price list for slaves from a slave trading firm in 1860. Dew was incredulous that white Southerners could have engaged in such brutal, inhumane treatment and commodification of other human beings. Continuing his research into the slave trade, Dew came to a greater understanding of the economic significance of slavery in the push for secession. He notes that economic factors were not central to the secessionists’ motivations for war—racism and slavery remain the core factors, in his view. However, the promise of economic prosperity and the threat of economic collapse were influential factors in building alliances and convincing states to secede.
Dew revisited the speeches and writings cited in Apostles of Disunion and found consistent arguments in nearly every document about the states’ economic stake in foreign and domestic slave trades. Commissioners frequently acknowledged of white Southerners’ dependency on slaves for prosperity and stability. They named potential manipulation of the local slave trade by Northern government as a threat to all slave states. Commissioners promised not just a preservation of Southern honor and racist social norms but material wealth to states that joined them in secession. Dew describes a moment of coming to understand the monetary value of the slave industry: roughly $4 billion at the time, which would be $100 billion in 2016. Dew shows also that the wealth acquired from slavery may have been put to use in the campaign to preserve it: He quotes a Unionist delegate in Virginia, lamenting in a letter to a friend that wealthy slave traders might have been buying up newspapers in Richmond to promote the cause of secession to a broader public.
Dew closes the Afterword with an anecdote that occurred at the time of his writing: A proposed bill in Alabama aimed to prohibit removal of Confederate monuments, followed by another clash between Southern politicians and civil rights activists. He quotes an editorial in the Richmond Times-Dispatch calling for an organized reckoning like South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which he himself had mentioned in the Introduction to the original edition of Apostles of Disunion. The idea has not been taken up, but Dew asserts that it is “not beyond our reach” (103). He suggests that the first task such a commission might tackle is to commit to a singular answer as to the true cause of the Civil War.
Afterword Analysis
Dew revisits his 2001 argument in the current cultural context and shows that it remains relevant to the present day. He presents timely recent examples of the ways in which the legacies of slavery are alive, contested, and still in need of confrontation. He offers an analysis of the commissioners’ writings that adds nuance to our understanding of their motivations. His assertion of slavery’s economic importance reinforces his original argument by showing how the racism at the heart of secessionist rhetoric was institutionalized and coordinated—not simply a hateful sentiment but the material foundation of Southern life. In his closing anecdotes, he reiterates a need for some form of thorough confrontation with this history in the hopes of stirring his reader to action.
To open the Afterword, Dew uses a personal anecdote of watching election night in 2008: “It was a day I never thought I would see in this country” (83). This grabs the reader’s attention with engaging heightened language and a scenic, dramatized retelling of Obama’s victory speech, “the dawn of a new era,” which builds tension and deflates it in a quick reversal: “It seemed too good to be true. And, of course, it was” (84). The anecdote highlights Dew’s naïve reaction to the election as a symbol of “racial reconciliation,” which offers another point of access for readers who may have had similar naïve hopes. Throughout the Afterword, Dew uses rhetorical questions and a tone of surprise and discovery to acknowledge the “gut-wrenching” nature of his inquiry:
How had we white southerners come to this, I asked myself. How could we not see what we were doing back then, treating human beings as livestock, buying them, selling them, tearing families apart, extracting labor from them—millions of them—by force? (86).
He uses a similar technique in discussing the economic details of the slave trade, admitting that he initially “had no idea […] of the monetary value of their business” (93-94). He walks the reader through his discovery of the pricing of slaves and the conversions of those values into large, “stunning” sums of money by today’s standards. By pacing the information at the speed of his own gradual realizations, he guides the reader to a fuller grasp of the significance of these figures. Across the chapter, Dew describes his process of methodically reexamining his primary source material, revisiting documents and characters with which the reader is already familiar; through this step-by-step examination, he casts the reader as a research assistant or peer learner, with whom he shares his latest analysis. This technique depicts historical study and confrontations with historical documents as a dynamic interpretive process, one which benefits from time, contemplation, and practice.
Dew bookends the Afterword with pertinent sociopolitical events—Obama’s election at the beginning and the Alabama monument bill at the end, which was reported “on the day [Dew] composed the paragraph just above” (101). This structure reminds the reader that time has passed since the book’s original publication, but that the issues it examines persist to the present day. He ends this final section with a reference to the citizenship test question that opened the book: “[A truth and reconciliation commission] could well start by answering, honestly and forthrightly, the question […] ‘The Civil War was fought over what important issue?’” (103). Both by concluding on a question and recalling the opening of his original edition, Dew strikes a tone of measured urgency, of simultaneous ending and beginning. He emphasizes the lack of resolution in American political dialogue around the question. The question urges the reader and American society more broadly toward a more substantial confrontation with the ongoing legacies of secession, war, and slavery.
