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Reviews in American History 35.4 (2007) 522-529

Democracy and Despotism:
Roads (and Railroads) to Disunion
Reviewed by
John Ashworth
William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion, Volume II: Secessionists Triumphant, 1854–1861. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. xvi + 586 pp. Notes, illustrations, and index. $35.00 (cloth).

Seventeen years have passed since the appearance of the first volume of William W. Freehling's Road to Disunion, and approximately forty years have passed since the author embarked upon the project. Originally intended as a study of the secession crisis, the enterprise has grown chronologically to encompass the years between the Revolution and the outbreak of the Civil War, though the emphasis on the later period has clearly been retained. Volume one took the story to 1854; the second and concluding volume thus completes this long-awaited account of the origins of the Civil War.

Or does it? The author's earlier remarks do not make entirely clear whether he intended a full-scale examination of this subject or instead an account of the southern side of the story. In the first volume he seemed to imply that the two were more or less the same (since "in the [apparently all-important political] mainstream," southerners seized the initiative and northerners merely reacted) and elsewhere he referred to the "model of the causes of the Civil War" that Road to Disunion offered.1 Perhaps in response to criticism of this claim, however, he has now abandoned it, and the two volumes are intended, as he tells us on the very first line of the very first page of the new volume, to produce an account of "the southern Road to Disunion."2 Hence the spotlight remains firmly upon the South and upon southerners.

Moreover Road to Disunion is a heavily political account. This is true not only in the obvious sense that the main protagonists (with the odd exception) are politicians. In addition, the causes of the conflict are found to be political rather than economic. Of course slaves represented, among other things, a huge economic investment on the part of the southern elite, and Freehling never neglects this fact. He is also attentive to the economic changes in the South in the 1850s and stresses that for most planters (some of the South Carolinians being a major exception), these were flush times indeed. More importantly he does stress that black resistance to slavery "remains the most [End Page 522] overlooked cause of the Civil War" (p. 67). Nevertheless, the conflict over slavery is presented as one that is fundamentally political. Northerners, it is claimed, are motivated above all by the need to prevent slaveholders from oppressing whites, by depriving them of their democratic rights and entitlements. Southerners meanwhile, in order to maintain their control over their slaves, especially in the border states, where slavery is weakest, are driven to impose despotic controls over whites as well as blacks. The United States in these years thus witnessed "the immersion of the world's most powerful slaveholders in the world's most advanced republic": and this "most paved the southern road to disunion" (p. 9). In a fundamental way, the conflict pitted democracy against despotism.

With this focus on southerners, Freehling tells the story of the events of the mid- and late-1850s and of the final desperate weeks and months of the antebellum Republic. Although there is some discussion of the "ideological frustrations" experienced by many defenders of slavery, the bulk of the volume is concerned with the political events that take place in federal politics, in the states, and in the territory of Kansas. Freehling discusses the various movements in which southerners enlisted in these years: the drive to acquire additional territory in the Caribbean, the campaign to re-open the African slave trade, the proposal to re-enslave free blacks. But most of the pages are devoted to the standard events of the era: the Kansas imbroglio, the Dred Scott decision, the Brown raid, the controversy over Hinton Helper's Impending Crisis...

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