Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War is a small but powerful and revealing book. It takes place in the brief window of time when South Carolina and a few other Southern states had seceded, but when about half of the future Confederate States of America were still undecided about secession or holding their own secession conventions to debate the issue.

Charles B. Dew documents the efforts of State Secession Commissioners, sent from the already-seceded states, to those states like Texas, Louisiana, and Kentucky, that still wavered.  Dew uses the Commissioners’ own words, and those of their audiences, to examine exactly how  Southern politicians interpreted the election of Lincoln and the need for secession.

Lincoln’s election was perceived as a declaration of war on the slaveholding South, even before South Carolina fired on Ft. Sumter.  Why? Because – at least according to Southern Secession Commissioners – Lincoln would prompt and endorse a massive and bloody slave uprising all across the South. Southern politicians refer constantly to the necessity of preserving slavery, and the dire threat that the “peculiar institution” faced with the election of Lincoln.

Anyone who believes that the war was not, in some manner, about slavery would be hard-pressed to refute the case made by Charles B. Dew.

How this work relates to Milliken’s Bend:

Dr. Gregory J.W. Urwin encouraged me to more closely examine the Confederate response to the Emancipation Proclamation. While doing so,  I found Dew’s book about the earliest days of the secession crisis, and learned that the Confederate response to emancipation began much earlier than the fall of 1862. Virulent language used by Southern politicians and editors created a siege mentality and paranoia. The South already felt under attack, and could only respond in kind. Dew’s book was instrumental in my development of Chapter 1 and served as the foundation for understanding the terrifying threat of slave insurrection that Southerners saw on every doorstep, once the Union army began enlisting former slaves.  Emancipation brought a new desperation to the Confederate cause, one overwrought with fear, paranoia, and a willingness to go to any length to deter the Union army from enlisting black men into its ranks. It was indeed a “desperate struggle.”