Product Description

Far from a monolithic block of diehard slave states, the antebellum South was, in William Freehling's words, "a world so lushly various as to be a storyteller's dream." It was a world where Deep South cotton planters clashed with South Carolina rice growers, as Northern egalitarianism infiltrated border states already bitterly divided on key issues. It was the world of Jefferson Davis, John C. Calhoun, Andrew Jackson, and Thomas Jefferson, and also of Gullah Jack, Nat Turner, and Frederick Douglass.

Now, in the first volume of his long awaited, monumental study of the South's road to disunion, historian William Freehling offers a sweeping political and social history of the antebellum South from 1776 to 1854. All the dramatic events leading to secession are here: the Missouri Compromise, the Nullification Controversy, the Gag Rule, the Annexation of Texas, the Compromise of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Vivid accounts of each crisis reveal the surprising extent to which slavery influenced national politics before 1850 and provide important reinterpretations of American republicanism, Jeffersonian states' rights, Jacksonian democracy, and the causes of the American Civil War.

Freehling's brilliant historical insights illustrate a work of rich social observation. In the cities of the Antebellum South, in the big house of a typical plantation, we feel anew the tensions between the slaveowner and his family, poor whites and planters, the Old and New Souths, and most powerfully between slave and master. Freehling has evoked the Old South in all its color, cruelty, and diversity. It is a memorable portrait, certain to be a key analysis of this crucial era in American history.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #220110 in Books
• Published on: 1991-12-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 656 pages

From Publishers Weekly
This major work of scholarship by the author of Prelude to the Civil War offers an intimate look at the Old South and describes how the slavery issue led to successive collisions between "private despotism and public democracy." The book also provides a detailed account of how slavery functioned. Freehling's sweeping narrative traces national crises that led to secession: the Missiouri Compromise, the annexation of Texas, the Compromise Act of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Such figures as Andrew Jackson, John C. Calhoun, Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln stride vigorously through these pages. The study, which contributes importantly to our understanding of the causes of the Civil War, will interest readers with its brilliant evocation of the antebellum South. Illustrations.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Broadening the search that led to his prize-winning Prelude to Civil War (1966), Freehling seeks to track Southern disunion from independence to secession. He reaches the Kansas-Nebraska Act in this first of a promised two-part epic that focuses on the South through the filter of national mainstream politics. Freehling brings alive Southern traditions, heroes, villains, and diversity. He depicts various souths caught in an ineluctable tendency to freedom while the antithetical systems of democracy and despotism divided southerners. Akin to James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom (LJ 3/1/88) and Eric Foner's Reconstruction (LJ 4/1/88; both LJ "Best Books of 1988"), Freehling's masterful synthesis brims with wisdom and wit. It is essential for any collection on the nation, the South, or antebellum politics. Highest recommendation. --Thomas J. Davis, Univ. at Buffalo, N.Y.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
"This is an excellent book; the best that we have for the early period of the sectional conflict. I will put it on my reading list for my Civil War and Reconstruction course. Students in U.S. introductory courses could benefit from this book."--William C. Harris, North Carolina State Univ.

"Many of the details, to be sure, are fresh, and so are some of the shifts in emphases."--Carl N. Degler, The Journal of American History

"Freehling has struck as powerful blow for history as narrative art in this remarkable recounting of the southern secession movement up to 1854."--George M. Fredrickson, Stanford University.

"The major work of scholarship by the author of Prelude to the Civil War....Will interest readers with its brilliant evocation of the antebellum South."--Publisher's Weekly

"A complex, challenging reassessment of southern motives and movements from the birth of the American nation to the Kansas-Nebraska Act...Dense and idiosyncratic...an important contribution to the ongoing scholarly reconstruction of southern history..." --Kirkus Reviews

"No work about the road to disunion now rivals it in comprehensiveness and strength of argument....A brilliant synthesis of what we now know about most of the stops on the road to secession, put forth with fresh emphases and force, a triumph of historical research and art."--Washington Times

"Perceptive, argumentative, revisionist, and bound to be controversial in and out of academe....Impressive."--The State

"Informative in its details of each of the major political crises it treats, and...fascinating in its depiction of the differences between the more southern and the more northern sections of the South. Moreover, it provides a valuable, if provocative, contribution to the study of slavery and the events by which a minority of a Southern minority eventually brought about the political coup that shattered the Union."--New York Times Book Review

"A panoramic view of the antebellum South....[Freehling] puts the Civil War in a new perspective and, in what promises to be the first volume of an epic of the South, he makes an important contribution to the understanding of the united as well as the divided country."--Richmond Times-Dispatch

"Freehling has dug out of the archives a wealth of information about the road to disunion."--Boston Globe

Customer Reviews

Essential reading to understand slavery's impact on America
For anyone who has been interested in the impact of slavery upon America's soul, Freehling's opus is a must. Yes it is long, yes it is painfully detailed, yes at times it can border on being a polemic (particularly in Freehling's discussion of Thomas Jefferson); however, it is thorough, researched in depth, very informative and highly persuasive. My only recommendation to the author would be to use fewer adjectives and adverbs in describing "the peculiar institution"; his otherwise objective research says it all and bears up well under its own scholarship. What I learned from "Road to Disunion" is that the question of our nation's expansion during the first 80 years of the Union cannot be understood without knowledge of the national debate and the political maneuvering to extend or limit slavery's expansion during this same time period. And Freehling goes beyond the political archives which record how county and state and national assemblies voted on slavery and other tangential issues. He discusses the psychology of slavery itself - the mindset the slave owner foisted upon the slave, and the ensuing tension which resulted when slave and abolitionist did not buy into this mindset. Freehling's work was a challenge to digest (I am no scholar) but I consider myself a better informed citizen with greater appreciation of the shape of America today because of his research of America's past.

The social roots of politics
With a sharp eye and witty word for the setting, William Freehling delivers a sprawling and most satisfactory account of the antebellum South's queasy lurches towards secession. Contrary to the strained obfuscation of many histories bearing on the Civil War's causes, Freehling effortlessly restores slavery, and the social, cultural and political dilemmas it spawned, to the center of the story where it belongs. The second chapter is pure genius: the disjointed, patchwork nature of the antebellum South is vividly illustrated with an imagined overland journey from New Orleans to Charleston in the 1850s. Freehling describes the frustrating alternative routes one might have wished to take, the constant and comically inconvenient switches between independent railroads with incompatible gauges and timetables, their respective stations often miles apart. With an accomplished historian's power to simultaneously portray minute details and grand themes, the author sinks us into the setting--its pace, its weather, its sights and sounds. Gripped by this elegant evocation, we are then drawn into the book's purpose: an exploration of the uneasy social dynamics of different regions in the Old South, and how they bent and twisted its resulting ideologies and politics. How these, in turn, redounded upon each other and shaped the confrontations and compromises at the national level becomes the sturdy spine of the story, and Freehling never loses his keen appreciation for the place, people and material culture of the period.

Many here have disparaged his writing style, and I understand what they are saying. For instance, try and decode the sentence that begins Chapter 21: "The first plotter Ashbel Smith inflamed Abel P. Upshur by naming was no famous London schemer." Without having read the last sentence of Chapter 20, it seems to defy grammar. Time after time I found that certain sentences made sense only by repeating them with different stresses laid on different words. But after awhile, I found there was a sort of breezy conversational logic to it, and it occurred to me that if Freehling were reading his book aloud we would have no problem with his usage. But, of course, that is no way to write effectively, and I have taken a star off for an otherwise flawless slab of rich historiography.

Detailed political history.
Freehling's "The road to disunion" is a masterful political history of the secession movement from its origin to the mid-1850s. This is very detailed, richly documented, and draws from original letters and official documents. But this is NOT a dry history - it's also storytelling at its best, and historical figures are characterized richly. This book will not be politically correct in Sons of Confederate Veterans circles. But if you want to find out what really went on in the Missourri compromise, or the annexation of Texas - well, chapters 20-25 are a history of Texas annexation which I wasn't taught in school.