Road to Disunion Vol I: Secessionist at Bay 1776 to 1854 By Dr. William W Freehling and companion video

 Road to Disunion Vol I: Secessionist at Bay 1776 to 1854

By Dr. William W Freehling

Dr. William W Freehling was born in Chicago, Illinois on December 26. 1935.  He grew up in Chicago and headed to Harvard for his undergraduate work.  He graduated from Harvard in 1958 with honors, including Magna Cum Laude, and Phi Beta Kappa.  He then headed to the University of California, Berkeley, where he received his MA in 1959 and his PhD in 1964.  He would then go on to teach at Berkeley, the University of Michigan, John Hopkins University, and Harvard, and endowed chairs at The State University of New York, Buffalo, and Kentucky. After a long and respected career, he retired and turned his hand to writing history. 

Today we’re looking at his first published book, Road to Disunion Vol I. published in 1991.  The book sets out to provide a political and social history of the South, from the nation's early days after the Revolutionary War to 1854, just after the passing of the Fugitive Slave Act.  This period includes the Missouri Compromise, a compromise passed in hopes of quieting the feud between the North and the South but only ended up inflaming it. In doing so, the compromise became one of the prime sparks that led to the explosion we call the Civil War.  

The book sets out with two primary arguments, the first bluntly and forthrightly stated, and the second is never outright stated, but you’re led to it, as any other conclusion is blocked off.  The first is the argument that there was not A South, but the region we would call the South was several different regions bound together by the overriding tie of being slave states.  The second was that secessionism was something created, nurtured, and, after decades of failure, finally exported to the rest of the slave states from the malaria-choked, miserable swamps of South Carolina.  Let me explore these arguments here. 

First Dr. Freehling carefully splits the region we tend to think of as The South into three separate regions.  First, we have the Deep South, of which South Carolina occupies pride of place in this book, but states like Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi are also part of this region.  Then we have the Upper or Middle South, with Virginia usually being the prime example, but also including North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas. Lastly is the Border South made up of states that border the Free States of the Union: Maryland and Delaware being the main two, but Missouri and Kentucky would also be part of this region. 

That said, the book also leads me to a fourth region that emerges from the text, the southwestern frontier states like Arkansas, Tennessee, and Missouri. These states were often in conflict with the older states along the Gulf of Mexico or Atlantic Coast, and often acted against those states to secure their own interests. This is illustrated in the book by the extensive coverage of the conflicts between Andrew Jackson and Senator John C Calhoun, men who worked together but whose conflicting interests led to them spending just as long bitterly fighting each other. Given how much time and space Dr. Frehling devoted to those intra-South battles, I feel we should count those states as a separate region. 

The second argument that Dr. Freehling lays out is how South Carolina was different from other Southern states.  Most of the original states were settled by colonists out of England, but South Carolina was settled by colonists from the sugar island of Barbados, who brought their slaves with them.  So unlike, for example, Virginia, where the laws allowing slavery weren’t passed until 50 years after the colony’s founding, South Carolina had slavery as part of its economy, its social structure, and very identity from day one. This would have a profound effect on how South Carolina viewed slavery, a view that would do incredible damage to South Carolina, the South, and the United States as a whole. 

Dr. Freehling leads us through the many crises that pitted the interests of slavers against those of freemen, for example, the banning of slave importation in 1807, along with early attempts to close off new territories to slavery.  If this had succeeded it would have meant that Alabama, and Mississippi for example would have been free states. This was incredibly close, and only failed by one vote because a New Jersey representative was home sick with a fever. We also see the early battles in the Northwest Territories where Illinois and Indiana were almost made slave states; this was prevented by the heroic action of Edward Coles the governor of Illinois at the time, who honestly seems to be a forgotten American hero here.  

We proceed from there to nullification, where South Carolina tried to act alone declaring their right to nullify and ignore federal laws and almost got the entire state’s teeth kicked in by an enraged President Jackson. He parked the US Navy outside of South Carolina’s ports to collect the “nullified” tariffs and threatened to march in with an army, while the rest of the South sat on its hands and watched.  Meanwhile, attempts to block slavery from expanding in Missouri and Arkansas failed. The battle lines were being drawn, though; it was clear that an increasing number of Americans in the North and the Border South believed slavery should not be allowed to spread.  This was something that the aristocrats of South Carolina found utterly enraging, and leading them to formulate the idea of leaving the Union and forming a Southern nation. However, a pan-southern identity didn’t exist yet, and most Southerners considered the aristocrats of South Carolina lunatics. 

We also learn that early generations of slave owners often professed hopes that one-day slavery would disappear from the South naturally, that economic conditions would change, leading to slaves being sold away and, at some tipping point, their distant descendants would pass laws banning slavery (Not that they ever took action to make that happen.).  South Carolinians, however, argued from the earliest days of the Republic that slavery should be eternal, and it was good in and of itself. In fact, members of the South Carolina elite class declared that slavery was not just good but the best organizing principle for society. 

As the nation expanded, the confrontations between those who wanted the evil of slavery contained and those who supported its spread became more protracted and more bitter.  At first slave owners in Virginia would plead for more slave states because that would let them “diffuse” their slaves away from the Border States and Middle South, but as the decades wore on this argument increasingly fell to the wayside. South Carolinian thinkers reached out to the rest of the South in a never-ending attempt to forge a united region under a single political banner, with slave-owning being the common bond across regional and state lines. 

We see how this effort to forge a united front was pushed further by the Gag Rules, where the first abolitionist societies believed that all they needed to do to end slavery was reason directly with the slave owners. To this end, they sent individual slave owners letters outlining why slavery was not just bad for slaves, but also for the owners. The South reacted as if they had found out that abolitionists were sending letter bombs, and demanded that mail be censored and never delivered. Bonfires were created from the letters, and any Southerner who was caught reading these letters risked being thrown on those fires. 

Abolitionists caught by surprise by this decided that, if they couldn’t speak to slaveowners, they would speak to Congress.  They sent petitions to Congress asking for a national ban on slavery, gradual emancipation of slaves, or other plans.  Southern Congressmembers demanded that such petitions to Congress be thrown out unread; this deeply rankled the Northerners, even those unsympathetic to abolitionists. Most Northern Congressmembers had no intentions of granting those petitions, but refusing even to read them was a bridge too far. Eventually the gag was rescinded, but the fact that the South felt it had the right to censor Northern speech deeply offended Northern Americans.  Meanwhile, Southerners resented being told their way of life was evil and not fitted to democracy, even when all they were being told was the truth. 

The next great battle was over the annexation of Texas, which would later be tied into the battle over spreading slavery to the Mexican Cessation, the lands seized from Mexico after the Mexican-American War.  Slave owners wanted Southern California as a slave state, but the North, already irked at having fought a war for slavers and panicking at the idea that Texas would become an English protectorate and a haven for escaped slaves, flat-out refused.  A compromise was found, but it only left behind more anger, frustration, and determination to make the next confrontation the last one. So by 1854, when the book ended, South Carolina’s pan-Southern ideas of secession and a common Southern identity were no longer dismissed.

Each conflict led to a hardening of attitudes in both the North and the South.  In the North, the abolitionists went from a despised fringe group to a mainstream position.  In the South, the idea of getting rid of slavery someday was abandoned as a surrender to outside Northern pressure. As the stances hardened, the battle lines became more set and more dug in, and violence was increasingly likely. The differences between states within the regions of the North and the South increasingly became less important as the major difference of Free vs Slave drowned out everything else. 

This is a very well-detailed book that covers a lot of history and provides an incredible depth of information, especially of parts of our history that are all but forgotten or glossed over by popular histories and schools today. That said, I don’t entirely buy blaming South Carolina for secession.  Yes, they were calling for it as early as the 1820s, but I don’t think a group of people who successfully fought a revolution to split from the world’s most powerful empire would have failed to come up with the idea on their own. That said, I’m still giving Road to Disunion Vol I: Secessionist at Bay 1776 to 1854 by Dr. William W Freehling an A. If you want to dig deeper into the causes and tensions leading to the Civil War, this book is for you.  Just beware it’s a dense and detailed read, so you may have to read it more than once or take a lot of notes to retain information. 

Watch the companion video here: https://youtu.be/cvfKnXwO9nI?si=StGr5WwnF4zThtKr