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.
ConclusionChapter Summaries & Analyses
Conclusion Summary: “Apostles of Disunion, Apostles of Racism”
After the Civil War, many of the commissioners put forth revisionist rhetoric that articulated the constitutional disputes as the cause of war and deemphasized their investment in slavery. Dew describes a graduation speech of Preston’s delivered to a group of young Virginians in 1868: While Preston speaks at length of the honor and glory of the South, he makes no mention of slavery as a driving factor in the push for war. Instead, the South’s efforts in battle are characterized as attempts to defend the dreams of the country’s founders. Reflecting on the speech, Dew asserts that this was “conveniently forgetful” and that “Preston was trying to reframe the causes of the conflict in terms that would be much more favorable to the South” (75). Dew notes that another commissioner, Jabez L.M. Curry, was similarly revisionist in his role as an educator and writer of history books after the war ended.
Reflecting on the evidence presented in Chapters 2 through 5, Dew asserts that the commissioners and the Southern states who seceded acted in fear of a “horrific future facing their region” if the North were to have its way (76). Dew outlines the three major imagined threats that fueled this fear: the specter of racial equality, the prospect of a race war, and the possibility of racial mixture or “amalgamation.” Using rhetorical questions, Dew names and refutes any possible critique from the reader that the commissioners were not truly racist, or did not fear these visions of their future: “Did these men really believe these things? […] They made these statements, and used the appropriate code words, too many times and in too many places with too much fervor to leave much room for doubt” (80). Dew states finally and certainly that it was slavery and race, not the ideological concept of states’ rights, that drove the South to secede.
Conclusion Analysis
In closing, Dew shifts from citation and narration to a summary and analysis of secessionist rhetoric. He asserts that the shift in Southern rhetoric after the war does not contradict the evidence of racism and pro-slavery sentiment to secessionists’ pre-war arguments. He emphasizes that the commissioners saw disunion as the only way to protect Southern society and economic prosperity. After five chapters and an extensive study of the evidence, Dew argues that the commissioners, by way of their overtly racist arguments, “would seem to have laid to rest, once and for all, any notion that slavery had nothing to do with the coming of the Civil War” and that in fact “race and slavery were absolutely critical elements” in secession and the war that followed (81). He reiterates the power of the documents themselves in proving this point, inviting his critics to examine the material.
Dew structures this final section in anticipation of possible counterarguments. First, before asserting his own thesis, he mentions several instances of revisionism among the commissioners after the war. Giving prolonged focus to these incidents might lend legitimacy to Neo-Confederate counterarguments and inflame the ambiguity around secession in social and academic discourse, which is the opposite of Dew’s goal. Instead, he dismisses the counterargument that they “didn’t really believe what they said,” over a few paragraphs, naming and answering the reader’s possible doubts in a quick list of rhetorical questions. He locates the confusing logic of the secessionists not in our readings of their words but in the hypocritical, self-contradictory logic that continuing slavery was a morally righteous cause. In his concluding paragraph he nods—with some irony—to the potential Neo-confederate “disagreement” with his thesis—in a single sentence. Dew’s economy supports his larger strategy to allow the overtly racist logic in the secessionists’ documents to speak for itself.
Apostles of Disunion aims to address a lack of clarity in academic and social discourse about the central causes of the Civil War; specifically, Dew refutes the notion that slavery was not a central issue in the push to secede. His goal is to make a persuasive argument and highlight historical documents that provide undeniable evidence of this fact. The Conclusion summarizes the research again, addresses possible counterarguments, and makes a final, unequivocal statement of fact in response to his research. Dew cuts through the ambiguity around this history, providing Apostles of Disunion as a resource for others to do the same.
