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  • House Divided
  • Craig Miner (bio)
Elizabeth R. Varon . Disunion! The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789–1859. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. xii + 455 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. 30.00.

The deep causes of a war are arguably more unique and interesting than the battle details themselves, and it is certain that analyzing the kind of talk that led to the fatal impasse can be useful and entertaining. This book is strong on both these features, taking, as it does, the sectional conflict chronology back to the Constitutional Convention, and, withal, analyzing the rhetorical "framing"—the stereotypes, simplification, and name-calling—that finally put the sections into a fighting mood. Such a broad study makes clear that there was an element involved of just plain fatigue. There were so many compromises, from the Missouri Compromise of 1820 to the English Compromise on the Kansas Lecompton Constitution in 1858, and all with such a pitiful, shoddy, even shameful outcome, that battle seemed preferable as a way of achieving a clean resolution. In addition to careful attention to these elements, Varon's book is strong both in illuminating operative gender and racial perspectives and in presenting in some detail the views and methods of presentation and activism of many figures who will be unfamiliar even to most American historians, but who, as this book demonstrates, should not be ignored.

Varon's overarching theme is the conflict between the loaded terms of "Union" and "Liberty." Although some argued that the Union had been flawed from the beginning by the accommodation made with the South and with slavery, to many in both sections the Union was almost a sacred concept; and breaking it, while legally possible, seemed a sacrilege. Certainly, many in the North felt that, while Nullification might be instituted in the South, the threat of actual secession was so much vapid posturing and would never, could never, happen. That the verbal conflict escalated so much was definitely grounded in the assumption—by both sides, for many years—that the American Union was inviolable. It was no wonder then that the word "disunion" was "once the most provocative and potent word in the political vocabulary of Americans." This one word, as Varon puts it, "contained, and stimulated, their fears of extreme political factionalism, tyranny, regionalism, [End Page 226] economic decline, foreign intervention, class conflict, gender disorder, racial strife, widespread violence and anarchy, and civil war, all of which could be interpreted as God's retribution for America's moral failings" (p. 1).

The early nineteenth century was an age of media expansion and of the emergence of what Varon calls "middling rhetoric." People of little education and strong emotion were moved by cartoons showing a black man embracing a white woman or by the hyperbolic "lowbrow" and sometimes vulgar phraseology that polarized the nation, not only into North and South but into "immedialists" and "gradualists." Traditional views of honor and mutual respect were some of the casualties of the "partisan rituals."

The breadth of the coverage of this book means that sometimes the more standard topics, such as the Compromise of 1850, "Bleeding Kansas," John Brown, and the Dred Scott case, are covered competently, but briefly, and without too much originality. It is in introducing and covering topics either partially neglected or not so deeply interpreted that this book shines. There is a strong chapter, for example, on the antiabolition movement, which was thriving in the North as well as the South. Uncle Tom's Cabin had its foil in Aunt Phyllis's Cabin, written by Mary Eastman. Emphasis upon John Calhoun, Daniel Webster, Frederick Douglas, and Henry Clay has overshadowed such influential figures as William Preston, Nathaniel Tucker, Samuel Cornich, Thomas Dew, Clarina Nichols, Lydia Child, Maria Stewart, Sarah Mapps Douglas, Elizabeth Wicks, and David Walker.

Varon does a good job of going into more detail than is usual about the rhetorical approaches and arguments of the major figures; and her bibliography, particularly the Primary Printed and Secondary sections, is an education in itself. It is in presenting the minor writers, however, that the book makes its greatest contribution. This is particularly true of the surprisingly...

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