Reddit Reddit reviews Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War (A Nation Divided: Studies in the Civil War Era)

We found 5 Reddit comments about Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War (A Nation Divided: Studies in the Civil War Era). Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War (A Nation Divided: Studies in the Civil War Era)
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5 Reddit comments about Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War (A Nation Divided: Studies in the Civil War Era):

u/Look__a_distraction · 155 pointsr/HistoryPorn

I graduated from The University of Alabama (an obviously deep south school) with a history degree and all history majors I knew took a fantastic class on the civil war taught by a truly great teacher (in my biased opinion). Anyways we were all made to read this book.
https://www.amazon.com/Apostles-Disunion-Southern-Secession-Commissioners/dp/081392104X

Completely changed my view on the cause of the war. Anyone who says the Civil War wasn't because of slavery is either deliberately in denial or retarded.

u/usa_rebuilt_europe · 14 pointsr/europe

Absolutely undoubtedly not.

https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Road_to_Disunion.html?id=OCSL1OEwV6AC

http://www.amazon.com/Road-Disunion-Secessionists-Triumphant-1854-1861/dp/019537018X

http://www.amazon.com/Apostles-Disunion-Southern-Secession-Commissioners/dp/081392104X

Those three books demonstrate it beyond a shadow of a doubt. It isn't an old fashioned view. The old fashioned view is the one you are telling that rose to prominence because the old southern guard wrote and propagandized it from 1861-1910s when it became the received wisdom. But it is wrong. We have the state documents, the commissioners, we have letters, we have an extensive history of southerners eroding their own democratic rights and instituting a dictatorship. The south was not a democracy even considering white men. It was a single party state under the thumb of a consolidated self-aware oligarchy. The southerners had legitimate grievances and illegitimate grievances but this is the real historiography of the civil war and how people change their minds about it:

  1. Public school --> slavery

  2. High school/precociousness/intro-class --> state rights

  3. Actually studying it --> Slavery, slavery, slavery, slavery
u/Devlar_Omica · 11 pointsr/changemyview

http://www.amazon.com/Apostles-Disunion-Southern-Secession-Commissioners/dp/081392104X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1376500775&sr=8-1&keywords=documents+of+secession

Link is to a book called Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War.

Read the arguments of the men appointed by southern legislatures, men whose job it was to confer with other states and convince them of the need to maintain slavery. Their arguments are primarily, if not exclusively, about slavery and the necessity of maintaining the purity of the races and how intolerable it would be to permit their slaves to live normal lives as free persons. Even if we take them entirely at their word, states rights is far from their tongues and certainly not the top billing.

u/The_DanceCommander · 1 pointr/todayilearned

The vast majority of southern citizens wouldn't have even thought to make the states rights argument at the time of the civil war, the lose of their labor force was a much, much bigger factor in deciding to secede after Abraham Lincoln was elected (on a ticket which specifically promised to do something about slavery).

Many southern state governments even sent people who basically acted as secession ambassadors to the other states, and tried to get them to leave the union. The principle argument these guy would use was the lose of slavery. Great book about this, rooted heavily in primary sources.

The states rights argument existed sure, but much of the prominence of that argument arose after the war, as historians of the "Lost Cause" mindset tried to romanticize the war for the South. From this tradition we get things like "The War of Northern Aggression", the South's noble lose, the South's heroic generals, the barbarism of the Union armies, and of course, states rights being a principal driver for secession.

u/mudsill · 1 pointr/AskHistorians

There was a pretty popular strain of opinion among Southern Whigs like Robert E. Lee that to modern readers sounds sorta like antislavery sentiment, but it actually wasn't. It was more like "Eh, it seems like a really bad institution, but what are ya gonna do?" This letter gets cited a lot by defenders of Lee, but if you read the whole thing, you'll notice he's actually angrier at abolitionists than he is at the slaveholders themselves, because he saw abolitionists as troublemakers and slavery as something that would be done away with when God willed it. He went on to inherit a couple hundred slaves from his in-laws, and tried to sue the state of Virginia to remove the manumission clause from the will. Where this idea came from that Lee never owned slaves and actively campaigned against slavery came from, I don't know.

At the start of the war, I think it's fair to say that being ardently pro-Confederate and anti-slavery wasn't as popular an opinion as Lost Cause people like to say it was. The reasoning behind secession gets pretty clear when you read what secessionists said to each other while they were lobbying other states to secede, like in this book here.

At the time the civil war started, slavery was the largest sector of the American economy, except for farmland and housing--worth more than all the factories and railroads in the country combined. The economic livelihood of the country, and South especially, was built on slavery, so I think it's really hard to separate it from the Confederate cause itself. People only really started to try to do that after slavery was abolished and everybody more or less agreed it was a bad idea.