The Road to Disunion

Résumé du livre

William Freehling offers a sweeping political and social history of the antebellum South from 1776 to 1861. All the dramatic events leading to secession are here, and Freehling vividly recounts each crisis, illuminating the many complex issues and sketching colorful portraits of the major figures involved. It is "indisputable," he writes, that slavery was the war's main cause, and some kind of clash was probably inevitable. The movements in the 1850s to acquire new slave territories for the United States, reopen the African slave trade and re-enslave free blacks also revealed Southern disunity. Freehling offers fascinating accounts of each. But his main point is that because of opposition within the South, all failed.