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

Dew begins with a personal Introduction, describing himself as a “son of the South” and noting that ancestors on both sides of his family fought for the Confederacy (1). As a young man, he accepted the conventional Southern explanation that the issue of states’ rights was the catalyst for the Civil War, only coming to understand the racism inherent in this view during graduate school. Thus, despite his training as a historian, he “found [Apostles of Disunion] in many ways a difficult and painful book to write” (2), because the book’s source material exposes the revisionism in the Lost Cause narratives of his boyhood. Dew’s encounter with the writings of the secession commissioners as a graduate student sparked his inquiry into the true causes of secession. While this book does not present the war’s history in its entirety, Dew acknowledges the broad body of scholarship that explores its many complex causes. Rather than argue against these histories, Dew positions the story of the commissioners as a crucial addition to the larger story, which must be confronted to overcome the legacies of white supremacy that persist into the present day.