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WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., April 16, 2001–Although he has spent more than two decades teaching at a New England college, historian Charles B. Dew is still “a son of the South.” Even so, he has always been bothered with the argument that slavery was not the main cause of secession, and that states’ rights and constitutional issues caused the Civil War.
In his new book, he enters the historical debate over the origins of the war: What prompted Southern secession and the subsequent outbreak of hostilities?
“Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War” (University Press of Virginia) is a provocative argument about the war–that slavery and race were “absolutely critical factors at the heart of our great national crisis.”
In the book, Dew traces the speeches and writings of state-appointed commissioners who barnstormed across the South in late 1860 and early 1861 raising support for secession. He uncovers “a stark white supremacist ideology” that, he says, refutes neo-Confederate claims that slavery and race were only peripheral factors in leading to the war.
Dew’s analysis shifts the focus of the Civil War in the South from the much-discussed great figures–Lee, Davis, Jackson–to some fifty-two secession commissioners.
“These individuals were not, by and large, the famous names of antebellum Southern politics,” he writes, but in speaking to legislatures, state conventions, and public meetings across the south, they helped shape public opinion as significantly as any of their more renowned counterparts. Dew found more than 40 of the commissioners’ speeches and public letters, and these heretofore ignored sources form the basis of his argument.
Historians have praised Dew for his unique study. James M. McPherson of Princeton University notes that Dew “reveals many smoking guns” supporting the importance of slavery and race, while Mark E. Neely, Jr. of Pennsylvania State University heralds his scholarship as “penetrating and incisive.”
“Apostles of Disunion” is Dew’s third book on Civil War history. “Bond of Iron: Master and Slave at Buffalo Forge” was published by W.W. Norton & Co. in 1994, and “Ironmaker to the Confederacy: Joseph R. Anderson and the Tredegar Iron Works” was republished in a revised edition by the Library of Virginia in 1999.
Both books received major awards. “Bond of Iron”–which drew on material from a television documentary Dew narrated in 1979-80–won the Elliott Rudwick Prize, awarded biennially to a book on the experiences of racial and ethnic minorities in the United States, and was a finalist for the Lincoln Prize. “Ironmaker” earned an award of merit from the American Association for State and Local History and the Fletcher Pratt Award, issued annually to the best non-fiction book on the Civil War.
Dew earned his B.A. from Williams College in 1958 and his Ph.D. in 1963 from The Johns Hopkins University, where he was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, a University Fellow, and a Samuel S. Fels Fellow.
He has taught at Williams since 1977, and he served as chair of the history department from 1986-92 and as director of the Francis Christopher Oakley Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences from 1994-97. He is W. Van Alan Clark 1941 Third Century Professor in the Social Sciences. This year he was named an advisor to the fledgling Tredegar National Civil War Center in Richmond, Va.
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Published April 16, 2001
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