Charles B. Dew
Autor de Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War
Sobre El Autor
Charles B. Dew is the Van Alan Clark Third Century Professor in the Social Sciences at Williams College.
Créditos de la imagen: Williams College
Obras de Charles B. Dew
Obras relacionadas
Region, Race and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward (1982) — Contribuidor — 19 copias
Etiquetado
Conocimiento común
- Nombre legal
- Dew, Charles Burgess
- Fecha de nacimiento
- 1937-01-05
- Género
- male
- Nacionalidad
- USA
- Lugar de nacimiento
- St. Petersburg, Florida, USA
- Lugares de residencia
- Williamstown, Massachusetts, USA
- Educación
- Williams College (AB | 1958)
Johns Hopkins University (PhD | 1964) - Relaciones
- Dew, Robb Forman (wife)
- Organizaciones
- American Historical Association
Organization of American Historians
Southern Historical Association
Virginia Historical Society
Phi Beta Kappa
Delta Psi
Miembros
Reseñas
Listas
Premios
También Puede Gustarte
Autores relacionados
Estadísticas
- Obras
- 4
- También por
- 1
- Miembros
- 508
- Popularidad
- #48,806
- Valoración
- 4.1
- Reseñas
- 6
- ISBNs
- 15
- Idiomas
- 1
To demonstrate this, Dew turns to a previously unutilized source: the speeches made by “secession commissioners” sent out by Southern state legislatures to convince their neighbors to join them in leaving the union. Mississippi and Alabama were the first, sending ambassadors of agitation to Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina even before their own convention had met. Soon delegates crisscrossed the region, hoping to persuade as many of the slave states as they could. As Dew demonstrates, in speech after speech, the argument they resorted to was the threat Abraham Lincoln’s election posed to the institution of slavery. Repeatedly they argued that Lincoln’s election would unleash a vanguard of “Black Republican” activists who would create a race war or mass miscegenation. Such statements clearly identify the cause around which Southern states rallied to defend, with the issue of “states rights” only emerging after the war with the Confederacy’s defeat and the abolition of slavery accomplished.
Dew’s slim book is a powerful rebuttal to those who would deny that slavery was the defining issue of secession. Yet while Dew does an excellent job of analyzing the arguments of the commissioners, his narrow focus on the speeches themselves leaves a few questions unanswered. Nowhere, for example, does he explore their composition – whether the speeches were based on a common set of talking points, for example, or if each commissioner was left to his own devices in writing them. The impact of the speeches on the secession debates is also left unexamined, leaving the reader with no idea whether the speakers’ arguments were ignored or whether they influenced the debate and were taken up by others in advocating disunion. Nevertheless, in his stated goal Dew makes a convincing and well-supported argument. His book is a persuasive addition to the debate, one that is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand secession and the causes of the Civil War for themselves.… (más)