Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War

“I have no quarrel with any of these [Civil War] historians, and I have learned a great deal from their work. But I am convinced that the speeches and letters of the Southern commissioners of 1860-61 also reveal a great deal about secession and the coming of the Civil War. I believe deeply that the story these documents tell is one that all of us, northerners and southerners, black and white, need to confront as we try to understand our past and move toward a future in which a fuller commitment to decency and racial justice will be part of our shared experience.” 

Dew articulates the position of his study within the larger field of Civil War historical scholarship and explicitly states his goal for this work. While many historians have surveyed sociopolitical factors that led to secession, Dew believes the words of the secession commissioners reveal that the institution of slavery was a crucial and immediate cause. He offers Apostles of Disunion as a necessary addition to the current body of Civil War scholarship, and as a call to action for Americans to begin a fuller reckoning with their country’s legacy of racism.

“In January 2000 demonstrators both for and against flying the flag descended on Columbia. […] The smaller numbers favoring the flag, many of whom were clad in Confederate uniforms, defended the ‘Stars and Bars’ as ‘a symbol of Southern heritage’ and ‘a reminder of their ancestors’ courage in battling to secede from the Union.’ Many of the antiflag demonstrators carried placards reading ‘Your Heritage Is My Slavery,’ and speaker after speaker denounced the flag as ‘a symbol of slavery and hatred.’ The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had earlier called for an economic boycott of South Carolina until the flag was removed from its place of honor above the Capitol dome. […] If things keep going the way they have in recent years, acrimonious historical debate may soon rival kudzu for prominence on the southern landscape.”

To prove the relevance of his topic to the present day, Dew shows that the cultural significance of the Confederacy is still contested. This example demonstrates the persistent effort required by activists and advocacy groups to assert the connection between Confederate symbols and pro-slavery beliefs. Dew likens the debate to a local invasive plant species, emphasizing his intimate connection to the region while reiterating the fact that disunity over Civil War history is spreading, not abating. 

“Indeed the slavery versus states’ rights argument is only the tip of a very large scholarly iceberg. Differing ideologies, separate cultures (and cultural origins), clashing economies, blundering and/or paranoid leaders, failed political parties, conflicting notions of honor, antagonistic political philosophies, the rivalry between a modernizing, bourgeois, free-labor North and a prebourgeois, planter-dominated, slave-labor South—all these and more have been offered up by recent students of this era as the primary reasons behind Southern secession.” 

This passage helps the reader understand the ambivalence in the scholarly community about naming a definitive cause for the Civil War. With this litany of complex conditions and situations that have been considered “primary reasons,” Dew shows that historians have failed to arrive at a definitive consensus, with a gentle implication that the indecision here verges on the absurd. He underscores the need for a more decisive argument grounded in facts, which he provides through his examination of the commissioners’ writings. 

“Such frank discussion of the slavery issue disappeared once the war was over, however. Writing from the ashes of Confederate defeat, both Davis and Stephens reverted to a passionate insistence that states’ rights, and states’ rights alone, lay at the root of the recent conflict. Their postwar apologias offer scarcely a clue that anything other than the defense of constitutional principle was responsible for launching the South on the tides of war.” 

Dew points out that slavery disappeared from the reasoning of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Vice President Alexander H. Stephens after the war; this and similar rhetorical shifts muddy the waters for historians looking to understand the war’s primary cause. Without making assumptions about the men’s motivations, Dew uses subtle visual metaphors (“ashes of defeat,” “tides of war”) to allude to shameful emotional states and thwarted ambitions that may have contributed to the change. 

“On Thursday, December 13, 1860, twenty Southern senators and representatives met deep into the night at the Washington lodgings of Congressman Reuben Davis of Mississippi. They had gathered at Davis’ invitation to assess the prospects for a congressional compromise that might satisfy the South and bring an end to the sectional crisis. Time was running out. South Carolina’s convention was scheduled to assemble the next Monday, December 17, and the disunionist forces were mobilizing across the lower South.”

Dew captures the volatile political climate in the brief period between Lincoln’s election and South Carolina’s secession, which entailed both swift political organization in the Southern states and a frantic, chaotic tenor in the national dialogue. For Southern US congressmen, their allegiances were put to the test as they struggled to reconcile their duty to the Union with their loyalty to the South. Dew captures a sense of speed and emotional stakes in the rhythm and pace in his writing, which is reflected and expanded in the rhetoric of the commissioners quoted later in the chapter.

“The challenge of […] informing the Southern people of the dark forces threatening their region and driving their states to seek sanctuary outside the Union—was taken up by the secession commissioners. […] In a span of four days, from December 17 to December 20, commissioners carried the secessionist gospel to four states across the South. The messages they delivered were, to some degree, tailored to meet the needs of their audiences. South Carolina, for example, did not need to be prodded in the direction of disunion. Radical forces were in firm control there, and all the commissioners really needed to do was to wish the South Carolinians Godspeed as they turned their backs on the Union. Other states presented more formidable difficulties. In places like Georgia, North Carolina, and Maryland—early stops on the commissioners’ itineraries—secession was by no means assured. It was here—in Milledgeville, Raleigh, and Baltimore—that the commissioners first unlimbered their rhetorical artillery.” 

Dew summarizes the “first wave” of commissioners’ speeches using figurative language that ironically aligns itself with the Southern perspective. He gives the reader insight into the commissioners’ outlooks, feelings, and motivations on the eve of secession: Northern anti-slavery sentiments were “dark forces,” and secession was an attempt to “seek sanctuary,” with the calls to secede a kind of “gospel.” Shifting to a new metaphor at the end of the passage, Dew describes secessionist rhetoric as “artillery,” acknowledging more earnestly to the militaristic coordination and bombastic language with which the commissioners advocated for secession across the South. 

“Hooker, who followed Elmore to the convention platform, agreed wholeheartedly with the commissioner from Alabama. ‘I know, that the interest and welfare, and destiny and fate of South Carolina, is the interest, welfare, destiny and fate of Mississippi,’ Hooker said. It was time for South Carolina to ‘snatch her star from the galaxy in which it has hitherto mingled and plant her flag earliest in the breech of battle, sustaining revolution by the bold hearts and willing arms of her people.’” 

Dew quotes the commissioners at length in the middle portion of the book to demonstrate the rhetorical tactics used to persuade state delegates to secede. Here, Dew highlights the words of Mississippi’s commissioner to South Carolina, who reinforces his audience’s support for a Southern Confederacy by invoking fate, using poetic, emotional language that is at once delicate and stern. He articulates enthusiastic friendship between the seceding states and vocalizes a commitment to go to war with the North if necessary. 

“The election of Abraham Lincoln had plunged the country into ‘a state of revolution,’ Handy told the Baltimore audience, and for good reason; the Republican platform revealed a clear intent ‘to overthrow the constitution, and subvert the rights of the South.’ Handy was not talking about abstract “right” here; he was referring to the right ‘by which one man can own property in his fellow man.’ To the ‘black republican’ claim that ‘slavery is a sin before God and the world,’ Handy posited a counterclaim: ‘Slavery was ordained by God and sanctioned by humanity.’ Southerners ‘would not give up their slaves’ because to do so would turn ‘the beautiful cotton fields’ of their region into ‘barren wastes,’ he said.” 

Many commissioners characterized Lincoln and the Republican Party as aggressors, despotic and fanatical in their leadership style and open enemies of all slaveholding Southern states. Mississippi’s commissioner to Maryland depicts a threat to Southern property rights, including the right to own slaves as property. Handy’s explicit pro-slavery language lays bare how central the defense of slavery was to the Southern secessionist cause; this example is one of the first of very many that appear across the book. 

“The vote in the South Carolina Convention was unanimous. On the afternoon of December 20, 1860, the delegates adopted South Carolina’s Ordinance of Secession by a tally of 169 to 0. That evening, a formal signing of the document took place in Institute Hall in Charleston, and an immense crowd gathered to witness the event. At the conclusion of this solemn two-hour ceremony, the convention president, David F. Jamison, announced that South Carolina was now ‘an Independent Commonwealth.’ The audience roared its approval, and celebrants thronged Charleston’s streets deep into the night.”

South Carolina’s unanimous vote shows of how strong secessionist, anti-Unionist sentiments were in the state. By describing the celebration in reaction to succession, Dew shows how the sentiments of the commissioners and pro-secession delegations went beyond legislators and politicians and extended to a large portion of Southern society. Because withdrawing from the Union heightened the possibility of military conflict with the North, this vote added urgency to the commissioners’ calls for secession that was reflected in the speeches and writings that followed. 

“In contrast with commissioners like Mississippi’s Jacob Thompson, who bemoaned the triumph of the ‘Irrepressible Conflict’ school in the North, [Leonidas] Spratt embraced the rise of Republicans to power. ‘Within this government two societies have become developed,’ he told the Florida convention on January 7. ‘The one is the society of one race, the other of two races. The one is based on free labor, the other slave labor. The one is braced together by but the two great relations of life—the relations of husband and wife, and parent and child; the other by the three relations of husband and wife, parent and child, and master and slave. The one embodies the social principle that equality is the right of man; the other, the social principle that equality is not the right of man, but the right of equals only.’ Two distinct and profoundly different civilizations had thus emerged in the United States, ‘and the contest was inevitable,’ Spratt claimed. ‘There is and must be an irrepressible conflict between them, and it were best to realize the truth.’”

Even when the commissioners differed in their depictions of the sectional differences plaguing the country, slavery remained central to their reasoning that secession was necessary. Here, South Carolina’s Commissioner Spratt repurposes the “Irrepressible Conflict” argument in service of a call for secession as inevitable and necessary, specifically due to differences in Northern and Southern attitudes toward slavery. Spratt characterizes the relationship of master and slave as central to the Southern way of life, again supporting Dew’s central argument.

“Tensions were mounting in Charleston that could explode at any moment. […] War seemed a distinct possibility, and South Carolina could ill afford to enter such a conflict without allies. Spratt, Calhoun, and the other South Carolinian commissioners crafted their messages both to defend their state against charges of undue haste and to secure the speedy cooperation of every slave state holding a convention in January of 1861. Secession, a Confederate government, and military assistance were their goals. South Carolina’s fate was hanging in the balance during the opening weeks of the new year as its commissioners made their way across the Deep South.”

While seceding, South Carolina anticipated a military conflict with the North. Their commissioners coordinated strategically to secure allies in the other slaveholding Southern states. The consistency of their rhetoric and the speed with which they executed their strategy suggests a strong self-awareness in their motivations and actions. The idea that slavery was a tangential or auxiliary factor in secession seems improbable when it appeared so prominently in the commissioners’ carefully crafted calls for secession.

“[South Carolina’s commissioner to Texas, John McQueen] took pains […] to thank the Richmonders for their expression of solidarity with his home state. ‘I have never doubted what Virginia would do when the alternatives present themselves to her intelligent and gallant people, to choose between an association with her Southern sisters, and the dominion of a people who have chosen their leader’—Abraham Lincoln—‘upon the single idea that the African is equal to the Anglo-Saxon, and with the purpose of placing our slaves on [a position of] equality with ourselves and our friends of every condition,’ he wrote. ‘We, of South Carolina, hope soon to greet you in a Southern Confederacy, where white men shall rule our destinies, and from which we may transmit to our posterity the rights, privileges and honor left us by our ancestors.’”

Once again, Dew offers a quote whose explicit racial content lays bare the centrality of slavery to the argument for secession. Here, in a private letter to secessionist sympathizers, Commissioner McQueen expresses total aversion to equality with African slaves, appealing to a Southern sense of honor and a faith in a Southern Confederacy that would be rooted in a white supremacist worldview. As examples of such sentiments accumulate from chapter to chapter, the reader is asked to repeatedly confront the racism inherent in every commissioner’s worldview and argument for secession.

“Lincoln’s election was ‘nothing less than an open declaration of war, for the triumph of this new theory of government destroys the property of the South, lays waste 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,’ [Alabamian commissioner Stephen F. Hale] wrote. ‘The slave-holder and non-slave-holder must ultimately share the same fate; all be degraded to a position of equality with free negroes, stand side by side with them at the polls, and fraternize in all the social relations of life, or else there will be an eternal war of races, desolating the land with blood, and utterly wasting all the resources of the country.’”

Where effective, commissioners employed dark, apocalyptic rhetoric, describing scenes of violence, chaos, and war between the races. Part of this strategy hinged upon characterizing Lincoln as an aggressor and his election as a statement of war against the South. Beyond motivating delegates to fear for their safety and prosperity, such narratives cast Southern militarism as a practical, defensive act, rather than a radical offensive.

“Alabama’s mission to Kentucky ended in failure. Governor Magoffin called the legislature into an extra session in response to Hale’s letter, but a sharply divided Kentucky refused to follow the path of secession. Yet the importance of this document lay not in what Hale accomplished but in what he said and the way in which he said it. This relatively obscure Alabama politician touched on almost every major point in the secession persuasion, and he did so in language that left no room for doubt or ambiguity. His letter is as passionate, as powerful, and as revealing as any message delivered by any commissioner during those critical weeks in late 1860 and early 1861 when the fate of the Union was hanging in the balance. It is a document that should be required reading for anyone trying to understand the radical mind-set gripping the lower South on the eve of the Civil War.”

This passage is one of the rarer moments of commentary in the main body of Dew’s text. He asserts the historical importance of Hale’s letter and argues that it illuminates the secessionist mindset so effectively that it should be “required reading.” By stepping out of the narrative and speaking toward the scholarly, Dew reminds the reader of the urgency of widespread engagement with this source material, as a unique opportunity to reckon with the racism embedded in American history.

“It was as if Judge William L. Harris of Mississippi had stopped off in Montgomery back in mid-December on his way to Georgia and held a briefing for Alabama’s commissioners. Repeatedly the Alabamians described the same nightmare world that Commissioner Harris had painted for the Georgia legislature: a South humbled, abolitionized, degraded, and threatened with destruction by a brutal Republican majority. Emancipation, race war, miscegenation—one apocalyptic vision after another. The death throes of white supremacy would be so horrific that no self-respecting Southerner could fail to rally to the secessionist cause, they argued. Only through disunion could the South preserve the purity and ensure the survival of the white race.”

Dew nods again to the consistency of messaging across many states and summarizes the thesis behind the “dark” images that the secession commissioners described: Racial equality posed a threat to the “purity” of the white race. While many racist arguments for secession invoked the material and economic stakes of maintaining slavery in the South, appeals to a supremacist sense of Southern honor, gentility, and racial purity were common as well. Such language and imagery often persuaded more politically moderate (but racist) Southerners who longed to avoid war but were swayed toward secession out of fear for the white slaveholding class.

“[Mississippi’s commissioner to Virginia, Fulton Anderson] explained at some length why the states of the lower South would never return to the Union. ‘An infidel fanaticism’ had so corrupted the Yankee mind that a return to sanity and conservative principles was impossible among ‘the present generation of the Northern people.’ They hold Southerners in contempt, he insisted; they believed ‘that we are a race inferior to them in morality and civilization,’ and they were committed to ‘a holy crusade for our benefit in seeking the destruction of that institution which…lies at the very foundation of our political and social fabric.’”

Commissioners occasionally employed religious language when making their arguments; Dew emphasizes this with metaphors of “gospel” and in the book’s title, which casts secession commissioners as “apostles.” Here, the commissioner’s language makes use of religious metaphor and accuses his Northern enemy of sanctimonious attitudes toward the South. The phrase “infidel fanaticism” was used both here and by other commissioners to depict Lincoln and Northern abolitionists as self-righteous, brainwashed zealots and traitors to the constitution.

“Like other commissioners, Benning saw a nightmarish scenario ahead for the South. War would ‘break out everywhere like hidden fire from the earth,’ he predicted, and ‘a standing army’ from the North as well as thousands of Northern ‘volunteers and Wide-Awakes’—a reference to the Republican marching clubs that had filled the streets of Northern cities during the recent presidential campaign—would descend upon the South to assist the slaves engaged in mortal combat with their masters.”

Commissioner Henry L. Benning delivered these words in an emotionally charged speech to the Virginia Convention in February 1861, as part of a strategic effort to dissuade the moderate delegation from remaining in the Union. Once again, frightening, threatening imagery appears to make the case for secession. Benning speaks assuredly, almost prophetically, describing a scene not that different from the Civil War that broke out soon after; by depicting an aggressive, warmongering North, Benning demands action from the ambivalent delegation, which in the end only seceded after the South fired on Fort Sumter.

“The emotional climax of Preston’s address came toward the end. ‘Gentlemen of Virginia,’ he called. The people of the South ‘are not canting fanatics, festering in the licentiousness of abolition and amalgamation; their liberty is not a painted strumpet, straggling through the streets; nor does their truth need to baptize itself in pools of blood.’ No, he cried, Southerners ‘are a calm, grave, deliberate and religious people, the holders of the most majestic civilization and the inheritors, by right, of the fairest estate of liberty.’ And South Carolina was no longer standing alone in defense of the sacred soil of the South. Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, ‘and now young Texas’ had formed a ‘majestic column of confederated sovereignties.’ Would Virginia join them? Would the sons of the Old Dominion stand idle at this moment of supreme peril?”

Preston’s lofty rhetoric stirred the Virginia delegation to raucous applause—it stands out in Dew’s text even among the dramatic speeches of the other commissioners. Preston appeals to a shared sense of Southern identity as pious, deliberate, and honorable, and casts the enemies of the South as unholy, unrestrained, and morally tainted. This passage shows Preston using a strategy of calling on this deeply felt identity as a tactic to persuade Virginia—which Dew notes would be an extremely important ally in any conflict with the North—to join the secessionist cause.

“The most fascinating reaction to the speeches of the three commissioners came on February 22, three days after Preston’s performance. In a moment of supreme, albeit unintended, irony, the editor of the Daily Dispatch suggested that Richmond’s most spacious indoor meeting facility should be obtained so that the commissioners could repeat their addresses for an even greater audience; that building, the editor pointed out, was ‘the African Church,’ home of Richmond’s largest black congregation.”

With some grim humor, this anecdote points to the Southerners’ and secessionists’ tendencies to compartmentalize their ideology. Commissioners failed to see the hypocrisy in claiming that they had endured injustices at the hands of the North, while working to preserve the institution of slavery. This instance shows a gross lack of empathy on the part of the newspaper editor, who would seek to present an evening of arguments in favor of slavery inside a place of worship for black Americans. 

“Did these men really believe these things? Did they honestly think secession was necessary to stay the frenzied hand of the Republican abolitionist, preserve racial purity and racial supremacy, and save their women and children from rape and slaughter at the hands of ‘half-civilized Africans’? They made these statements, and used the appropriate code words, too many times in too many places with too much fervor and raw emotion to leave much room for doubt. They knew these things in the marrow of their bones, and they destroyed a political union because of what they believed and what they foresaw.” 

With this series of rhetorical questions, Dew anticipates and refutes any counterclaims that the secession commissioners did not believe their own arguments. Early in the book he expresses some kinship, due to his upbringing, with the “Lost Cause” view of the war, and he understands that the overt racism and white supremacy in the commissioners’ words might be met with disbelief. However, the messages are much too consistent for their statements to be coincidental or manipulative; these are deeply held beliefs.

“I had no idea when I began my investigation of Richmond’s slave traders of the monetary value of their business. I knew that one 1860 dollar would be worth multiple times that amount today, but it did not immediately dawn on me that the sums I was seeing regularly in their correspondence—‘I draw on you today for fifteen hundred dollars’ or ‘I checked on Farmers Bank of Va yesterday for $2,500’ or a reference in 1847 to a $5,000 draft on a Baltimore bank that a Maryland slave trader sent to a Richmond dealer ‘to have laid out in good No. 1 men’—were so staggering. […] Four billion dollars [as the total monetary value of the slave trade] was the figure given by Commissioner Stephen F. Hale of Alabama to the governor of Kentucky in 1860, and I had come to the conclusion that Hale’s figure was an accurate one. Applying the 2016 multiplier of 29.40 to that four billion 1860 dollars produces a valuation of well over 100 billion dollars today.” 

Dew examines the economic factors driving the Southern defense of slavery in his Afterword and offers context on the relative value of the slave trade as a crucial part of the Southern economy. Rather than delivering a flat figure, Dew walks the reader through his thought process and his surprise at the “staggering” numbers he found when examining the values more closely. His conversational style and dramatization of the revelation provide another point of entry for a reader less acquainted with scholarly writing on the subject, while strongly emphasizing his point about the magnitude of slavery’s financial valuation. 

“[Virginia delegate Samuel MacDowell] Moore’s anxiety mounted as February turned into March and no national compromise emerged and the mood in Richmond became increasingly charged. ‘Great efforts are being made, by the secessionists, to get up excitement and alarm among the people, to induce them to instruct their Delegates in the Convention, to vote for immediate secession,’ he wrote to [his friend James D.] Davidson on March 10. ‘We have no newspaper in this City favoring our views, whilst the other side have the Enquirer, Examiner, Dispatch & S[outhern] Lit[erary] Messenger, and The Whig, about half the time.’ The ‘sensation lies and letters’ published in the Richmond press were clearly intended ‘to excite alarm, and drive the people to madness,’ Moore claimed. […] ‘I suppose the negro traders furnished the money to buy the Star,” he wrote Davidson on March 29. ‘I think they are buying up most of the presses in the state,’ and it was rumored in Richmond that ‘the Whig is to come out for secession next week.’”

Dew notes in his original text that local newspapers offered support to the secessionist cause. This detail is reemphasized here in the Afterword to show the press not just as sympathetic to the cause but as a tool for manipulating politicians and the public. As Dew examines the enormous importance of the slave trade in the Southern economy, he shows the level of influence wealthy slaveowners and politicians may have had over the local press.

“[Commissioner George Williamson’s] words are worth listening to. His clear emphasis on ‘African slavery’ as ‘the keystone to the arch of their property’ was simply a recognition of the profoundly important role the institution of slavery played in the economic life of the Old South. But slavery was much more than that, of course. It guaranteed whites social and physical control over what they believed was an alien, brutish, and inferior people. It kept a potential race war in check. It protected white womanhood. It sustained white supremacy. Slavery was at the core, the very heart, of their society and culture. It dominated their politics, it was sustained by their churches, and, as Williamson went to great lengths to suggest, it fueled their economy.”

This passage clarifies the substantial new information Dew covers in his Afterword. While acknowledging the economic importance of slavery to the (white) Southern economy, Dew takes care to reiterate his original, unchanged argument that racism and white supremacy were still the foundation of the institution of slavery and the driving factors that led to secession. In a shift from his typical writing style, he deemphasizes quotations and asserts the structural racism at work in the practice of slavery in short, blunt sentences, signaling a strong, unequivocal argument.