The Road to Disunion, Vol. 2: Secessionists Triumphant, 1854–1861 (review)

This volume, covering the years 1854–61, completes William W. Freehling’s magnum opus of the slaveholding South’s decision to leave the Union. Freehling takes readers on a masterful journey. Writing in the grand narrative tradition, Freehling introduces us to countless new pieces of evidence, provides a plethora of small and large interpretations of small events and broad processes, and draws extraordinary sketches of key southern actors. Written in a bold, sometimes cryptic, style, Freehling tells how the secessionists, a minority of people in a minority section, managed to manipulate events to break the Union. But while the details of people and events are plentiful, the broader generalizations are less satisfying.

This short review cannot possibly detail the topics Freehling covers. In many ways a standard narrative of national events after 1853, it is distinctly a political history governed by the single topic of secession. Even within these boundaries, Freehling spends more time on active secessionists than unionists or cooperationists, and it should come as no shock that South Carolinians steal center stage. He does give social history a nod by using its findings about the psychology of slaveholding to explain the fanaticism of secessionists, but beyond that, his methodology is nearly a repudiation of all the “new” histories that grew up in the 1960s and is almost (but not quite) a reversion to the narrative tradition of assembling quotes and determining which of them reveal the most truth.

Historians will have to scan the book to find those interpretations most pertinent to their research because it is impossible to discuss all those offered. On the more general question of the forces driving the South to separation, Freehling is difficult to pin down, but I think his basic answer would be the following. The South was fractured into three parts, each determined by extent of slaveholding: the Border South, the Middle South, and the Cotton South. Two essential tensions characterized the areas of high slaveholding. The first was the problem of keeping white democracy alive in the midst of black slavery, because slavery drove masters to seek despotism. The second was fear of racial imbalances and an apprehension that slaves (“Cuffees”) were not loving servants but actually traitors hatching plots of violent retribution. These two forces arising from slaveholding sent slave-masters on a continuous quest of mastery in politics to control the enslaved population. The antislavery attack of Republican Party leaders, however, threatened this control; and by enunciating their reckless, arrogant morality Republicans evoked from southerners passionate outbursts of honor. Finally, the extremists bolted for disunion because they dreaded the possibility of Lincoln using patronage powers to form a southern Republican Party and ultimately killing slavery everywhere. The extremists then took advantage of local situations and extraneous incidents to goad the majority into a position they really did not want, disunion. In explaining secession, Freehling openly discounts the territorial issue, Republican control of federal economic policy, states rights, republican ideology, and any economic motivation whatsoever.

Freehling’s dismissal of economic factors, almost contradicted by the evidence he presents, is not persuasive, but, putting aside that particular squabble, his methodological claims elicit even stronger reservations. First, he openly rejects “abstruse theory” (531). But one can detect the use of this theory within the book. Freehling’s discussion of “Cuffee” to draw out implications about slaveholder behavior, and his emphasis on southern fear of Republican patronage policies rather than other federal powers are both largely derived from theoretical considerations.

A second disturbing element of Freehling’s methodology is his use of the idea of contingency, that events when slightly pushed by actors or happenstance in one direction produce altogether different outcomes then when pushed in another direction. Freehling’s key exhibition of contingency is his description of how South Carolina finally passed a law establishing a secession convention. Yet the presentation fails to persuade that chance and not long-standing developments ruled the minds of South...