Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War (A Nation Divided: Studies in the Civil War Era)
This incisive history should dispel the pernicious notion that the Confederacy fought the Civil War to advance the constitutional principle of states' rights and only coincidentally to preserve slavery.(The New York Times Book Review)Dew has produced an eye-opening study....So much for states' rights as the engine of secession.(James McPhersonThe New York Review of Books)Charles B. Dew offers a penetrating and incisive evaluation of secessionist ideology, with a clear eye to the priority of race over issues of constitutional rights. The principal source on which the book is built certainly appears neglected to me, and the source is worthy of exploitation: we have an opportunity here to see what Southerners said to each other and not what they said primarily to the North or to the world.(Mark E. Neely, Jr., author ofThe Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil LibertiesandSouthern Rights: Political Prisoners and the Myth of Confederate Constitutionalism)